No, not behind bars 🙂 but travelling in the US for the last month on a long awaited reunion with our offsprings there in New Jersey, Maryland and Missouri. In that time had very little access to a computer, and found that using just my phone, my Instagram account @schwabealison was perfect for frequent posts recording what I was seeing and enjoying between and as part of wonderful family visit moments.

In Forked River and wherever we went in that coastal part of NJ, the Fall colours were glorious, and many of the restaurants we visited for seafood were close to or overlooking the water. We enjoyed a couple of good traditional diners, too.

Everywhere we went, the Halloween decorations were impressive –

I also did a little solo jaunt down to Atlanta GA to spend a couple of nights with Stitch Club friend, beader and stitcher, Barbara Rucket. She and her husband Alan were very hospitable, and on the full day I was there Barbara took me me to a design museum, and to a wonderful fabric shop, like an Aladdin’s cave. We also each managed to buy a pair of shoes from the shop right next door to where we had lunch! Barbara has a lovely studio workroom and we had a lovely show and tell session, naturally. There are signs of her creativity all around the home, and I photographed several things that really took my attention:

These two divine artworks behind glass (hence the reflections) grabbed my attention, and no wonder -they’re composed of primal shapes, plus glitter and wandering threads. The prominent Atlanta artist Lucinda Carlstrom who I looked up online, has a clear connection to traditional patchwork and quilting. I think the patchwork effect of the main cream area is machine pieced fine high silk fibre paper which she began discovering in Japan nearly 40 years ago. Her website is worth a read – we apparently met at Quilt National 2009, and I do remember her beautiful quilt. The basic square shapes, a square within a square, the red and metallic shininess…