New Orleans House Project

Saturday, August 29, 2015

RSC 15: Goodbye to August

I'm happy to see the end of August approaching!  The days are getting shorter, the shadows are changing and the outdoor temps are actually even cooling down (a little).  After August ends, we'll be another month closer to the end of hurricane season and American football season is right around the corner. 

I'm also happy the incessant media focus on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina will end soon.  It's great to highlight the positive things that have happened in South Louisiana since the failure of the levees after the hurricane, but the constant bombardment of horrific images is just too painful, even at this distance of time and healing.  I turned to quilting as my therapy for coping after the floods and I'm thankful for the solace it provided.  In fact, I'd say the aftermath of the flooding was a rebirth of quilting focus for me and quilting therapy has become ever-important to me over the past 10 years.

Inspired by all the colorful houses of New Orleans, I made these Happy, Scrappy House blocks as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge in 2013.  While driving around town this week, I was struck by inspiration for assembling these blocks into a quilt.  I hope to focus on that this week while the inspiration is hot! 

I also focused on one of this year's ongoing RSC projects:  4" Sawtooth Stars.  I found enough scraps to make gray & black stars to add to the collection.

And in case you missed it, August 26th was National Dog Day - a social media invention if there ever was one!  We appreciate our four-legged kids every day, but they tolerated our cell phone picture snapping on Wednesday and even gave us a few smiles.  The dogs in the front of the photo, Bailey & McKenzie, live with us; Jozy (in the rear) visits with us each August while his human is away for work.  Jozy & McKenzie are from the same litter.  

And now I've wandered on enough, so I'm heading over to the Rainbow Scrap Challenge link-up to see what colorful stuff everyone else has been up to this week.