New Year's Eve

A brand-new quilt to warm me in our sudden wintry weather.  It is made of a big array of fabrics, many of them supplied to me by my excellent quilting colleagues in the Point Roberts Quilt Group.  The fabrics include cottons, velvet, velveteen, raw silk, necktie silk, linen, wool, voile, flannel, satin, taffeta, rayon, and corduroy.  Machine-pieced, hand-embroidered along all the seams, hand-quilted next to all the seams.  This is my idea of what 19th Century crazy quilters would have done if they'd lived in the 21st Century with the vast array of fabrics that we have access to nowadays.

Also a gift for New Years Eve, the two best movies I've seen this year: 'The Footnote' (an Israeli film about fathers and sons and the ways they compete-among many other subjects'', and "A Separation,' an Iranian film about the complexities of being Iranian in the current climate.  And the two best books I've read this year: both by British novelist, Hilary Mantel, and both winners of the Booker Prize (2011, 2012): 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies."  I waited about a year to read the earlier one because I'm not usually a big fan of historical novels.  But these just have the form of historical novels: they are as contemporary as they could be.  Read them and learn what the residents of the D.C. Corridor know and we out here don't.

And may we all look forward to a good new year, although all of us are bound to be disappointed now and then.  But spring will come and be heartbreakingly beautiful and summer will come and we will be surprised once again that every day in July and August is sunny and warm.  Why does that happen every year?  How fortunate we are to live in a place that is spectacularly welcoming most of the year.  And in the cold, grey times, we can have a red quilt to keep us in brightness and warmth.