Finished a top

This one has been a BoB for a long time. I finally mustered the wherewithal to pull it together. I will do a pieced backing and it will be a nice twin bed cover. I won't call it a finish until it is quilted.

Paper
I am starting a new project and a journal is required. We live in a world where this conjures a maze of choices. Does one use a looseleaf binder? A scrap book with lovely ten inch square pages ? Watercolor paper? Moleskin? Lines or unlined? Small or big? Digital?(God forbid- but anything in a pinch)(auto correct can be a plus)(although it did just change the word auto to soot).
To the uninitiated this question may smack of self absorption. It may be thought that the author must have bigger problems. Surely there are more important subjects upon which to ponder. And surely right now there are, but I am choosing to indulge in this most enjoyable persuit.
For those of us who do know the benefits of hot pressed v. Cold pressed, flax v. linen, hand made or mass produced, it is serous business. For we know that paper can indeed inform the process.
Legal pad or drawing pad, sturdy enough for water media and collage? or sufficiently elegant for the delicate scratch of a glass pen dipped in brown ink? These are the questions that are occupying my mind this morning as I am hurtling through space on a Saturday morning in car number #### on the Long Island Railroad.
As I write this I am reminded that we are indeed blessed with multitudinous abundance. Jane Austen wrote her manuscripts first from left to right and then from top to bottom in between the horizontal letters to preserve precious paper. Solzhenitsyn memorized thousands of pages in his head while in a Russian prison camp before being able to commit them to paper upon his release.
And so it is with gratitude and with those writers and others in my thoughts that I embark on this most luxuriant and yet not frivolous journey- to find the next blank book in which to collect my thoughts and perhaps to capture some poetry on the fly.
Or maybe I can just look on my desk ( those who know me are snickering by now ) and find that it is already there.

Filene's

Suzy sent a hundred dollars
with which to buy the items on the list they sent from the school where I was sent to escape her sister.

To be plucked from the ever increasing velocity of her maelstrom to land on the solid granite of Vermont's most ancient guardian mountains was the gift of salvation, a chance for sanity.
Sanctuary.
Until it wasn't.

Betsy, the youngest of the three sisters only six years my senior and also my other aunt,
who lived in Boston in 1969 with her lover Tim - their apartment
so close to Fenway that they could hear the fans cheering wildly
if the wind was blowing in the right direction-
took me to Filene's Basement where we swept through the bins of
seconds and thirds and bought me my first ever set of sheets.
They were avocado green and floral and polyester. My father and his wife had the same pattern on the bed in their guest room. I reckon they are there still.
We bought a lime green cardboard footlocker to carry my new belongings- and I kept that footlocker through that school and the next and through college. For many years to follow everything that I owned could be stuffed into that ugly green thing.

I never did have all of the things in that long list. I also never had the lace up boots that I coveted or warm mittens-until the ones that Rebecca knit for me (and thus instilling in me a life long love of knitting ) - or new underwear from elitist department stores, like the other denizens of the boarding schools where I more or less attended, but I was damn proud of that set of new sheets, and the purple towels that I would hang on my cement dorm room walls just to have a splash of color.
And I will always recall fondly that day in Filene's Basement when Betsy and I pawed through the bins in Filene's basement gleefully spending Suzy's hundred dollars.