Erica Spinks

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Newsletter: starting and ending

15 March 2023

Hello Creative Dabblers! February passed by with a whoosh; I didn’t mean to miss the month’s newsletter but here we are now in March. Surprising.

My new keyboard is behaving nicely. I do like a full-size keyboard with a number pad. None of those small or on-screen keypads for me. This one is connected, along with a large monitor and mouse, to my laptop. It’s comfortable and convenient yet I can still use my laptop as such if required. We have to make technology work for us and not let it dictate the terms, don’t we?

Quilts

This year, I have started a new hand-piecing project (Marguerite) to take with me to my quilt group get-togethers. You can read about my progress here. Having portable blocks is important – who wants to carry around a huge quilt each week? My years of transporting and hanging quilts are over. I never want to do that again!

UFOs. We quilters all have them, don’t we? I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about celebrating them here.

Gardens

This morning I cut a handful of dahlias from my garden. That’s cause for joy because it’s not been a great season for dahlias in my garden. We haven’t had enough sunny days to trigger the blooms over past months so the forecast hot days this week should cause them to open their buds. It’s only a month until we get our first frost so I’m hoping to see masses of flowers before they die back for winter.

There’s plenty of agonising here over which spring-flowering bulbs to buy. The catalogues have been out for a while now and bulbs are in my local nurseries. Read about my choices here.

I also wrote about clover in my garden. What’s your opinion – is it good or bad?

Writing and books

Although I’ve been steadily reading novels, I’ve only reviewed one – Holly Ringland’s The seven skins of Esther Wilding. It’s an astonishingly crafted story – a delight to read.

A book on my must-read list is Why women grow by Alice Vincent. This article by Alice explains her reason for compiling the stories of female gardeners.

What are you enjoying? Are you making quilts, nurturing your garden or reading good stories? Let me know!

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