Surprise! I’m alive!

I’m going to write about something completely unrelated to the Test Your Skills Sampler.  Yes, I’ll get back to it. It will be finished, eventually. I just don’t love it right now, and because I felt guilty about not finishing it I haven’t been writing about anything else, either. Time for that to stop.

Thing 1: Nails

No, this will not morph into a nail polish blog, but I have fallen in love with nail polish and I had to share a recent manicure. I change it once or twice a week, and I always hand paint or draw it myself. I can’t take a decent photo of my own hands to save my life, plus – wow – my hands need some TLC now that I see the extreme close ups. And the designs look kind of smeary, but I promise, if you saw them for real you’d be blown away.

Thing 2: Mom’s Quilt

Check out these pics of a quilt Mom made for a 50th anniversary gift. The block is commonly known as Bear’s Paw but is also known as the Hand of Friendship. It started out as one thing, then morphed into another when I made a mistake in the calculations. Here’s the original EQ7 illustration:

And here’s the final quilt.

Thing 3: Sharon’s Quilt
My cousin Sharon has recently been reinfected by the quilting bug. Here’s a semi-recent finish, shared at a Stitch & Bitch from a few months ago:

Thing 4: Victoria & Albert
This just popped up on my Pinterest page. Have you seen the Victoria & Albert Museum website? There’s all sorts of stuff, but what caught my eye was this Patchwork Pattern Maker. Upload a photo, adjust a few settings, and it creates a design of squares and half square triangles for you to turn into a quilt! Here’s a photo of some flowers I took years ago with my very first digital camera (it used a floppy disk as “film”):

And digitized, here’s the quilt:

View it from a distance, and you can definitely see the pattern:

Side by side:

Cool stuff, huh?