November letter

 

Hello Crescent Quilters,

I love to bring you happy, cheerful letters. The truth is, this month I feel quite somber. That's life though. Ups and downs. Without feeling sadness and pain, we would not appreciate joy and happiness when we have it. I lost my beloved dog to liver cancer on November 1st. This has left a huge void in my household. We enjoyed having her for almost 12 years.

 I know there are other members of our group that are dealing with painful loss of a loved one, or illness. My thoughts have been with those of you who I know have been going through this.

 I'm sure most of you may be feeling frustrated and tired of Covid 19 restrictions. This is hard to get through, but somehow we will.

I have tried to focus on doing some things that I love such as quilting, to make myself feel better. When I quilt, I am forced to just think about the moment and what I am doing. I try to just focus on cutting the right measurements and sewing the pieces together correctly. I temporarily forget about the things that I have been feeling troubled about. I told you last month that I had enrolled in a quilt pattern writing  course. It has turned out to be quite intense. I have been watching the lessons, but falling behind on the homework. I have been playing around with a computer program that is new to me. It is called Gravit. It is a free program that can be used to design anything. It is sort of like Adobe. It takes quite a bit of playing around with it to learn it. The instructor is a young women who is a complete computer whiz, and she makes it look very easy. The other program that I have been playing with is called Pattern Jam. It is free as well, and it is just for playing around with designing quilts. This is much more basic. You have to use quilt blocks that are provided in the program. You cannot design your own blocks in Quilt Jam, but it is quite fun to play with. You can choose from many different fabrics to place into your design.I am including a video on the basics of pattern jam in case you would like to try it out. One thing the video does not mention is that you can turn blocks around by hovering over the block until you see a circular shaped arrow on it and then clicking on it. Once you save your design, the program will generate fabric requirements for you. 

Using Pattern Jam I have been playing around with some designs that could be used for community quilts. Pattern Jam saves them as PDF files. I cannot include PDF files on the blogger format that I use for this newsletter, so I will send out a few designs in a separate email soon. With Pattern Jam, I cannot write up instructions and add them on the page that gets automatically generated with the program, but it is a good starting point. Be sure to check out this months Community Quilts section of the newsletter for many great options that Donna has provided for making quilts with rectangles.

Well, I think that's about all I'm going to talk about for this month. I look forward to better times ahead. I know they will come.

Hang in there everyone. We are all in this together! Try to stay healthy!

Gloria