It's a glorious Spring day outside, even though we officially have one and a half weeks of winter left.  It does this every year and, while I'm sad to see the end of my favourite season, the soft yellow sunshine and the birds and flowers make me happy too.  Spring is lovely, even if we only get 2 or 3 weeks of it.

I've been having a lot of trouble with my hands lately, I've had to ration the amount of time I spend doing anything.  They hurt all the time, but I simply can't sit around and do nothing, so I spin for a little while, sew for half an hour, so the dishes, work on the computer in small increments.  I'm trying to knit slowly, type slowly, not lift anything too heavy; in short, I'm trying to be mindful of how I use my hands, what seems to damage them the most, how I can modify movements to prevent more pain.  I'd like to say I'm enjoying being mindful, but I'm not; I want to race off and achieve things, like I always have done.  Which probably is why I have the problem in the first place.

In the last couple of weeks I worked on a Trip Around The World quilt, from 2"strips.

The die cut strips were wonderful to work with, and I think I'll invest in a couple more sizes.  It was so simple to cut all the strips I needed, and then some.  I'll be working with this lot for quite a while.  I can see that an electric cutter would be even better for my hands, so that will go on the Great Christmas Wish List 2016.  Not going to happen this year....

 However, I wasn't happy with the centre of the quilt, from that single line of pinky-orange. I built the quarter on the right first, to get the colours I wanted, and it was fine except for the bottom left bit.

 I lived with it for a few days, but in the end I unpulled the bits that were worrying me and replaced them with a sequence I liked.  It's not a big difference in the photo, but the original light fabrics on either side of the pink squares were just toooo light.  So my Inner Goldilocks kept sampling different things until it was juuust right.

So now, many strips later, I have three quarters in place, and I'm getting together the pieces for the last quarter.  The border is probably going to give me fits when I come to it, but I'll worry about that when I get there.

So many strips left over!!  This is a good thing I think......

Hmm, I do like all those saturated colours on the background of blue;

maybe I should hunt out my blue background UFO and get it finished, before I start another project?