Stiges was a half hour train ride from Barcelona. It's a very nice beach town with a great promenade the whole length of the beach. No quilt shop here, but much to my happy amazement, there is a "quilted" bench every five hundred feet along the entire promenade!

Groovy fruit mosaic in front of juice store

Beautiful flowing women of Barcelona!

The Boqueria Market

Gaudy mosaic

Barcelona has been wonderful! Great people, clean, excellent metro, and perfectly hot and humid weather! Muchas Gracias Barcelona!

I am learning to blog from an iPad app, so please read the next five posts backwards!!! :)


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Here is the Happy and gracious Elsa. It was an experience most definitely worth biking for!!!!!!

Here is the back room that looks like it is a friendly place for children.

Here is a cool photo box hanging in the store.

Elsa Labors Patchwork in Barcelona was delightful. Opening at 5:00 after siesta, it quickly filled with happy ladies sharing what they had made. It was wonderful to feel that creative energy and think about all the happy sewers in Spain and perhaps even worldwide.

When I travel with my husband, it is easy to get complacent and just follow him. Now, with my teenage sons, I find that I have been following them in the metro not paying attention. Today I wanted to go to the quilt shop and surprisingly, no son would go with me. A little chicken to take the metro on my own, I biked 40 blocks!!! Only for a quilt shop!!!

A most fantastic spot! Cadaques, Spain

Castellers in Fiqueres, Spain

The view Salvador Dali had from his bedroom!

Enjoying the happy, fun, and playful work of Gaudi!




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attempting to blog from my iPad to share some shoes...Spanish women sure like their sandals!

AWARE WITH RIPPLEMAMA

Here's some of the new fabric I collected while on the road trip to Kalispell, Montana.

Thanks to Freddy Moran, I am always on the look out for balanced black and whites that don't read gray.

How about this piece in a lonestar titled "Visualize whirled peas"?!!!!

Great selvedge on this one.

This book caught my eye, especially...

these flowers.

This book also looked fun, especially this...

garden angel.

I carved out some time today to make my version. Her name is RippleMama and she spends her sublime days starting ripples of love!!! (Thank Em http://mcelebrates.blogspot.com/ for the inspiration about ripple effects) Her watering can is sprinkling a drink on heart flowers, in one hand her bag is filled with love, AND in her other hand she has the key to awareness!!!

I'll leave you with a quote from A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook by Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein:

"One of the gifts that mindfulness offers is helping you recognize that there are choices in how you respond to any stressful situation...with awareness, everyone has freedom of choice how to respond. The key is awareness."

Once aware, I am choosing to respond from a place of love!!!! How about you??

SMILING - THANKS TO A BEE

Here's a bee waving hello from our bluberry bush!!

Bees are signs of passion, joy, creativity. They point out our attention to ideas that are pollinating successfully in our lives.

Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile!

WHAT MORE COULD YOU DESIRE?

Remember the book Simple Abundance by Sara Breathnach? After having read it daily for several years, it had been collecting dust until yesterday, when I flipped it open to a random page and was treated to the following wisdom from the June 21st passage:

"As I have tried and failed and tried again, I have discovered that if we are to flourish as creative beings, if we are to grow into Wholeness, we must bloom wherever we are planted. Right now, you might not have the perfect career, home, or relationship. Few of us do. But if you have the gift of today, you've got another chance to re-create your circumstances and make them as perfect as it's possible to do with the resources you have. Today you get another chance to get it as right as you can make it. What more could you desire?"

Blooming where planted!

After the intensity of Ruth McDowell's class, it was nice to ease back into my regular routine. I  added some more Kaffe diamonds...

and a few more selvedge blocks...

and two pots for "BLOOM".

Despite making my mom several tote bags, she took this one from my youngest son and used it quite often to carry her books/work for whatever class she was currently taking at the local community college. I decided to keep the good energy and memories of her excitement about learning and repurpose the bag into... 

a cute pocket for my ipad, aptly named Einstein.

I also played in the gerber daisy - one of my all time favorite flowers - section of the grocery store's flower shop...

and noticed this beautiful hanging basket in the parking lot.

I also spent time revisiting this wonderfully insightful book and am pleased to see how it ties in to everything, of course! Shakti writes,

"At  first you may practice creative visualization at specific times and for specific goals...It becomes a continual awareness, a state of consciousness in which you know you are the constant creator in your life...The ultimate point of creative visualization - to make every moment of our lives a moment of wondrous creation, in which we are just naturally choosing the best, the most beautiful, the most fulfilling lives we can imagine...."

I continue to visualize my path...baby steps of progress with frequent breaks to see the beauty that is all around (even in parking lots!)...I trust and have faith that life is good..I am choosing to allow...allowing from a place of love!  

A RUTH MCDOWELL WORKSHOP AND MORE

And so begins a ten hour road trip...  

three friends, Sue, Susan, and me learning to accomodate each other's needs while putting our best foot forward - one quilt shop stop at a time! (This is in front of Bear Paw Quilting in Spokane, WA.)

LOTS of beautyFULL

And even some HOPE!

 not there yet...

Ahhh...two lovely calming nights at Sue's childhood house on forty acres in the wilds of Troy, Montana. Sue's charming mom graciously hosted us while we continued to nuture our ever blooming friendship.

Day three - final destination - a Ruth McDowell workshop at the most wonderful Quilt Gallery in Kalispell, Montana http://www.quiltgallery.net/

This was Sue's (left) ninth class with Ruth. http://www.ruthbmcdowell.com/ I have been in awe of Sue's masterpieces and it was time for me to step away from my typically liberal and often katywumpus style. Susan (on the right) is helping hold up Sue's project - her two children bottle feeding two cows -from last year.

Here's my project. A photo of my middle son walking along the shore of northern Lake Michigan up by Traverse City.

Tracing and sectioning

numbering

consulting with Ruth



Sue was working on her son's beloved black lab Bear

Susan was working on her beloved cat Sammy

working hard

Then you blow up your tracing to the size you want. The writing on the sides is hopefully the correct recipe to help guide the putting back together of all the pieces.

At this point I am smiling on the outside and thinking OH MY on the inside.

Susan works with Ruth

We all work with Ruth



Now my picture is traced on to freezer paper

with LOTS of different colored tick marks to help you figure out how the pieces get back together.

Here's TJ's daughter and boyfriend in a field of grapeseed.

WELL...FINALLY...ON THE THIRD DAY OF CLASS...

FABRIC!!!  Some of my own

(For the first time ever in eleven years of quilting I have pins!)

and some new. Luckily the shop provides a cart when Ruth takes me shopping! (My husband finds this the funniest part of the whole trip. "A CART?!" he says.)

Here's a very nice Canadian gal who has lived all over and taught french and critical thinking for many many years. She was juggling four photo ideas and finally settled on a trillium...or did she?

Jordan's naughty pup

Carrie played all day in the class and ran a resturant every night! This picture was taken on the Washington coast.

So very cool. Amazing really.

What I love most is how the whole trip symbolically ties into what I am working on in my life. The two days at Sue's mom's house forced me to slow down. Slowing down enabled me to begin Ruth's class with a fresh calm quiet state of mind.

Yes, Ruth, I am ready to listen. What are you saying?  

Take it one baby step at a time.

Think it through. Listen to the fabric.

If it doesn't work the first time, NO BIG DEAL! Try again. No impending doom.

Allow what is meant to happen...happen.

I trusted.

I had faith.

 I believed that the universe wanted to fill my life with good...

my boys were absolutely fine this week with their wonderful dad...

I listened to my whispers and took care of my self for the first time in a very long time...

 I nourished an old friendship and sprinkled fertilizer on a new one...

 I practiced balancing my needs and left class one day early to see U2 at Quest Field.

And guess what? I allowed more sublime moments to sneak in!