Good morning, friends! I made it! I turned in my illustrations (sans cover) yesterday evening, and I feel like I’ve completed the Marathon des Sables through the Sahara Desert. A 6-day, 160-mile marathon is something I doubt I’ll ever be able to do since I can barely jog three miles, but I’m going to venture that the sense of relief and accomplishment I’m enjoying is no less than an ultra marathoner’s.
The sewing area has been sorely neglected these last few days, so I’ve got zilch completed projects to share with you. But, as promised, I’m continuing with my de-stashing and have some fabric to give away.
This mushroom fabric is so darling, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but it hasn’t inspired me to use it for any patterns. It’s a Jay McCarroll for Free Spirit fabric with a lovely neutral grey background and almost neon green shrooms.
The green diamonds are crisp and modern and wholly versatile. The selvage tells me that it’s “Summer House” by Lily Ashbury for Moda.
I seem to only get fabric in 1.5 yard cuts, and that’s what these two are. They’re both quilting cotton, but could be used for apparel too.
Okay. I’m trying to think of a question but my brain is tofu at this moment, and the only query that popped into my head is about serendipity: “What’s the weirdest/best coincidence that’s happened in your life?” I have so many, but one of the most memorable is that when I lived in San Francisco in my twenties, I rented this sweet studio apartment in Russian Hill. It was a charming Edwardian building and it was every bit my dream apartment. After a year and a half of living there, I bumped into a high school friend on my street one day. She was a year ahead of me and we weren’t super close, but we had been gymnastics teammates (a mercifully short but ludicrously embarrassing phase in my high school career), and practicing in leotards together forges a special bond. Running into her alone would have been an amazing coincidence, but it turned out that she’d been my downstairs neighbor in the same building for 18 months, and we had no clue! We hung out together a lot more after that, but weird, right?
To enter the giveaway, please answer the question, and I will leave the giveaway open until Thursday, June 5th and announce the winner the next day. International entries are welcome and good luck!! I’m off to recuperate from and celebrate my major book milestone…
So happy that you finished your illustrations!!!!
Years ago I entered a newspaper drawing to win a TV and then forgot all about it. A month or so later our TV went on the fritz making voices sound garbled. Low and behold the newspaper called and said we won the TV! Awesome timing huh?!
Good job meeting such an important deadline! That must be such a relief!
For the giveaway question I have a similar type of story but with my husband. We had all of these people in common from the time we were quite young, but we didn’t manage to meet each other for a decade! We lived in the same neighborhood briefly, I had a cousin of his in my class for a few years. My first boyfriend was his best friend but he went to school in another city so I never met him. The ex-boyfriend started dating someone who I had a good friend in common with so when my husband -to-be moved back he spent time with that group as well. I was of course going to school in another city at the time and didn’t meet him for another year lol. But a decade later we finally managed to run into each other, and after sorting out the part where he thought I was dating my (female) best friend, we’ve been together ever since. And having your first boyfriend stand for your husband at your wedding makes for a good story 😉
Excellent! you have finished and submitted the illustrations. Congratulations! you must feel wonderful!!
It is really interesting seeing these fabrics and your colour choices. I am Chinese Canadian and in the end, I find i feel best wearing red or black. How typical! Of late, I have noticed that this red wearing as a neutral, so to speak, does not extend to other Asians.
Weirdest coincidence? My man has double jointed thumbs and blood type AB rh positive, as do I. We both legally changed our names too, but this was before we met.
I’m not sure if it’s a good coincidence, but it did make me a little more comfortable to know that a doctor I needed to visit where I live now did his residency at a practice that I had previously used and trusted near my home town – several hundred miles away. It was definitely a small world moment. 🙂 Thanks for the chance to win. Those little mushrooms are adorable.
Hi I go to your website everyday to admire your art and sewing. I love it. Last year I moved from Los Angeles to a suburb of Nashville. I left behind good friends and was thinking that I had to reinvent my life once again. While I was shopping for my grandchildren I saw a lady working in a store that looked my friend in California. I had lost contact with her for about 4 years and did not know that she had moved a few miles from my new home.
OK, (I love the fabrics!) my serendipity moment happened when I was living in Mexico working at an orphanage. A group came to help out from California and I was chatting with their director. He asked the usual, “where are you from” which I typically answered, “near Seattle” (because Ferndale is not well known). To which he said, “no, where?” so I said, “near Bellingham” (next closest major city). To which he said, “no, where?” so I answered, “Ferndale”… then he said, “what church?” Really like he knows my church?… so I said, Good News Fellowship and he said, “Oh, so you know Neal Cox.” Just matter of factly like that. It’s a small church, of course I knew this person and went to school with their kids! What a random serendipitous moment. Made me feel much closer to all the people I missed back home! 🙂
When in a small town in Peru with my cousin, she saw someone on a town square that she was going to school with here in the States. Random!
ending up at a college that i NEVER intended on going to in a million years and meeting my husband on the track team there. we dated all four years of school and got married pretty quickly after i graduated. 10 years and 2 kids later can’t really picture that not happening! not even sure if that is a coincidence but other than the fact that i truly did not want to attend that college when it was first presented to me as an option 🙂
Mostly just wanted to comment to say CONGRATULATIONS (yes, I’m yelling!) for meeting your deadline and submitting your drawings! What an awesome, end-of-exam type feeling! So happy for you:)
As for coincidences in my life, the one that popped into my head was when I was a teenager in highschool trying to find my way to a downtown office for a summer job. Completely unfamiliar with the downtown area, and having managed to get myself very lost, I eventually just broke down and called the interviewer from a pay phone (before the era of cell phones!). As I was describing my predicament, she interrupted me to describe EXACTLY what I was wearing. Turns out she was looking out her office window at me talking on the pay phone:) Guess I wasn’t so far off after all:)
Congratulations on reaching an important deadline!
I really like the mushroom fabric and here is my moment of strange coincidence. I ran into my Pune (hometown neighbour) at the Gap store near NYU when I lived in New York. It was strange to say the least–this is a person who was more my parents friend, but he just happened to be in NY for work, and then happened to be in Gap at the same moment that I walked in there after a day of teaching and classes at NYU. needless to say, we were both very very surprised.
Bump into a girl, I went to school with up the 8th grade in College. Just see her that one time.
That is an odd coincidence, an an odd (but good) question. When I was in high school, my parents let a kid live with us for three weeks of his Senior year. His parents had moved, but wanted him to finish school here. I didn’t really know him. 16 years after that, I walked into a meeting at work (I had been at the company 8 years) to meet the new Business Analyst on our team and it was him. So weird.
Congratulations on completing the marathon! Can’t wait to see the results!
I don’t normally enter competitions, but this is totally built for me.
So: I met my husband through work. We were working as a team (I was his assistant) for the first time and hadn’t really met before, aside from being introduced once or twice. The job called for us to share an apartment in another city for three weeks. A bit nerve-wracking for so many reasons, right?
The first few days went well, we were polite and considerate to each other, and it became less awkward. Then weird things started to happen, like we’d bring home exactly the same food for dinner, grab the same wine, listen to the same music.
As we got to know each other, we discovered we grew up in the same area. Strike that, grew up one street apart, went to the same primary school (but years apart), he shares a birthday with my dad… it goes on, but it’ll make it sound like I made it up!
Even after all that, it took another 3 years or so before we got together.
way to make your deadline! congratulations. love your style~
a couple of months ago there was a short tv spot on my husband with a quick cameo from me and our little boy. later that day i got an email from my first high school friend saying she saw me on tv and couldn’t believe that he was my husband as she has been teaching his work for a few years in her high school art history classes.
Congratulations! That’s an amazing accomplishment, you must be elated.
Soon after we started dating, my husband and I realized that we had both been to the same Pete Seeger concert when we were young. (As it turns out, it was very well attended and probably half of our city had been there as well, but at the time it felt like a very odd coincidence – and one that made me think he was probably worth getting to know better).
Thanks for the giveaway! I especially love the green fabric.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!! :o)
When we decided to pursue an international adoption, we chose China because my sister had spent most of her adult life there and my niece and nephew were born there as well. When we were matched with our son, he was from one of the cities my sister actually had lived in – of all the cities in China…!?! We believe that God is providential in our lives and love that our son’s aunt and uncle can tell him about his first home in a way we will never be able to. :o)
I once ran into an old friend in a rest stop hundreds of miles away from her home. I had moved away a few years before and it took a minute to recognize her, but it was really fun to catch up for a few minutes.
Congratulations Sanae – what a great achievement. Can’t wait to see your book!
Years ago while living with my father in South Africa I had a strange dream in which my dad told me that another man – a writer whose novel I had seen many years earlier in a Melbourne bookshop – was my biological father. I told my dad about the dream and he assured me that he himself was most definitely my real dad (not that I had doubts – we look very much alike). When I next spoke to my mother, who was still living in Melbourne, I mentioned the dream. A few months later I got a phone call from her, desperate to know the details of my dream. Turns out she had met the writer at a singles event and was dating him! They are now married, making him my step-father. How bizarre is that??!
Great job on finishinf the drawings. It must be a great sigh of relief!
I met a new co-worker and we started talking about our engineering sororities (to make things less confusing, hers is Sorority A, mine is Sorority B). Turns out she was in Sorority A, the “other” engineering sorority I almost joined when I was in college. I had debated about joining it and wasn’t sure at the time. I later found out she knew the founder of Sorority A for my school since she came out to visit her sorority too. It makes me wish I hadn’t join Sorority B so we could have been “sisters”. After all those years of knowing my co-worker, she is like a “sister” to me, regardless of our previous lives in the enginering sororities.
Congratulations! What a great feeling that must be.
My biggest coincidence: living overseas on a small island,, my sister and I arranged to meet back in Australia, for a long weekend. She and her husband were staying with old friends. I had to cancel because of work. Fast forward six months and I’m telling my sister about this guy my friends are trying to set me up with, on the island. Turns out he was a friend of her friends… And we would have met if I had gone on that holiday six months earlier. (Not that it mattered: the set up went ahead, we got married, and we laugh about the near miss/meet!)
Thank you for the chance to win and for a gorgeous blog that inspires me.
wish i could think of an interesting one, but the best that comes to mind is that my father in law and I have the same dentist. What makes it odd is that he lives in NJ and I’m in Connecticut- about 150 miles away. The dentist splits his time between the two offices.
Hey, congratulations! what a great achievement!
My weirdest/best coincidence is probably seeing my ex-boyfriend, who is english, at my graduation in France, 5 years after we split up. We are now married and parents of twin girls!
I used to live in Düsseldorf (Germany) as a literature student. There I started listening to Robert Schumann’s string quartets, I don’t remember how I came to it but I really couldn’t listen to anything else (even if it wasn’t my cup of tea, I rather listen to rock music). I listened to Schumann on the bus, walking, in my room, everywhere. It was the perfect soundtrack for that city and the feelings of loneliness and excitement evoked by a new life in a different country. Then one day, I think about two months after my arrival in Düsseldorf, I discovered that Schumann used to live in the building in front of my apartment, in the Bilker Street. Every morning I used to go out and look at his former home and I didn’t know it. I didn’t even know that he resided in Düsseldorf for some years. I don’t know what happened, it was something more than serendipity. It was magic!
My cousin lived in a tiny town in Idaho. He was good friends with a guy who was going to attend my same college in California. We met a few days before our freshman year started and have been together ever since! Best coincidence of my life, although when love is involved I like to call it fate! I adore that mushroom fabric!
Lovely fabric, would live to get creative with it! My coincidence was going on holiday with my husband (then boyfriend) in Greece, bumping into a friend and her partner, and finding out we had been staying in the same accommodation. A lovely surprise.
Well done on your achievements!
The weirdest coincidence my husband and I had… we both went to uni in Australia at the same time and have heaps of the same freinds (nothing special there!). Fast forward 15 years on, we are on a holiday in Singapore, and in a huge bookstore, run into one of our friends who studied in Australia with us but lives in Malaysia. 3 country gap narrowed into 1 coincidental second.
I was overseas once, on my way home for a family funeral, so I was really sad and out of sorts. And it looked like I might not make a flight. A gentleman noticed I was somewhat anxious and asked if everything was OK. I burst into tears and the poor man had a blubbery twenty something on his hands. We got to talking, and he mentioned he was on his way back to Oregon, where my in-laws live. I asked him where he lived and he said, “Oh it’s a tiny town I’m sure you’ve never heard of.” Turns out he was from Alsea, OR, indeed a tiny town where my husband’s beloved (and somewhat eccentric) grandmother lived. It was kind of comforting to meet this nice man who had a connection to a family member in a random Central American airport. He actually offered to give me his seat on the plane if it looked like I was going to be bumped and miss my connection, a huge reminder that they are very kind people in this world who will help a stranger.
Congratulations on finishing your illustrations.
How’s this for a coincidence. I wrote something in a comment two days ago and now I find it’s disappeared (never published?! Luckily I came back just before your competition closes to read some more comments and spotted mine wasn’t here!
I love that mushroom print! So cute! Um, a serendipitous moment… So I live in DC and was at a meeting with a person I’d never met before. He eventually realized I was from Australia and then learned I was from Tasmania. He said he knew one person from there, and that she played the harp. Turns out, she was an acquaintance of mine who I used to compete against in singing competitions!
Those fabrics are absolutely gorgeous! The weirdest coincidence would have to be running into family friends all the way across the world while on vacation in Italy one summer!