I blogged the first stage of this work last week, and this is how it is proceeding.
Already, other ideas are coming into my mind and I think I will need to put a few of them on paper. Back around 1992 opffspring #1 gave me a blank paged journal which I have used intermittently to sketch ideas into – not really an organised journal , more just pencil sketches of ideas, diagrams really. The other thing that goes on some of those the pages is lists – sometimes titles that I think of as I’m going alongwith the quilting, or different tchnical possibilities to tackle the same idea. Also, now that these pencil diagram/ideas go back so far, I sometimes look back and see something with a fresh eye. Sometimes ideas have led to particular works and I have gone in and written the name of the quilt and the date on it in that case.

Despite a good burst of progress this afternoon, I was not able to finish the stitchery but could do so tomorrow.

What is helping it move right along is listening to “Emma” by Jane Austen, read by Prunella Scales with her wonderful voice and sense of appropriate expression. It is many years since I read the book or saw a movie version, and I have found this recorded book totally absorbing, and rather reminiscent of the style of my two maiden aunts’ lives. Emma’s father’s obsessions about health issues, the weather and in fact any activity that might have any bearing at all on on his state of health (always precarious/delicate, at that ) is a male version of my late aunt, J. Her sister, M, who remains alive, is not likely to read that comment, and if she does, not being a lover of good literature, she won’t understand the allusion anyway.