KILLER HOBBIES

Summertime and the living is easy. Here in Northern California, summer is more a state of mind than one of weather. Our weather is stays within the same range most of the time. For someone like me, raised in NY, it always feels like September around here. The nuances are lost on me.

You might think that folks don't quilt in the summer. When I moved to California fourteen years ago, I expected that people wouldn't quilt. The weather is always nice, rain is hardly an issue and there are wonderful things to do.

I was wrong. Quilting has nothing to do with temperature or precipitation. We quilt because we love the feel of fabric running through our fingers. We like the sound our sewing machine makes as it grabs the next seam. Cutting our stash into usuable pieces gives us great joy.

Modern conveniences such as air conditioning and fans, not to mention super duper sewing machines, have taken the seasonality out of quilting. We can make the biggest, heaviest, quilt imaginable on the hottest day of the year.

And we do.