First Quilt This Year

I spent most of the weekend completing Storm Warning, my first quilt this year.  Finished size is 17x26 inches.  This is one of the Famous Four local quilts in the works.

Today my plan is to do more monoprinting...I'm really glad I've given myself weeks or more to do a process or technique, because here it is a week after I started and I haven't done anything at all since then!  Life continuously gets in the way.

I listed a few new items -- featuring North Coast sunsets -- in my Zazzle Shop over the weekend.  Have a look here. 

A personal project I'm taking on this year is teaching myself to speak Italian.  I've always been interested in words, in general -- one of my favorite books is Roget's Thesaurus -- so I'm taking on this new challenge with gusto. 

At first I tried using one of those highly-touted computer/CD language programs but didn't like it at all.  Virtually all my time was spent mouse clicking on one thing or another and listening to unreal voices repeating the same thing over and over again.

Then I found a wonderful language book at Amazon that I'm enjoying a lot, and I bought it used, to boot (no pun intended -- Boot, Italy!). 

I learn from books, from seeing something written on the page.  I also don't like learning online, I'll print out most everything I intend to read and study because the tactile sense of something written on paper seems to work better with my brain than merely seeing something on the screen.

And after a couple of small Italian dictionaries didn't have many of the words I wanted translated, I invested in a REAL Italian/English dictionary.  I've been making good use of it.

Have a good one.  I hope to be back again before the week's out.