A Breath of Spring

Well, it's as close to a feeling of spring as we've come for a long time anyway. Are you ready for this? Ta-dah! We had a temperature in the mid-40s today. Now I know many of you would say that such a reading in your part of the country is in the downright chilly category. But you have to realize that for us living just a hop, skip and a jump away from Santa Claus Land, it is really warm. I can hardly believe how much of our snow melted. Areas in our yard and drive that have been inches thick of solid ice for the past many moons morphed into mush today. My husband could hardly control himself. He manhandled the coil of hose out of the garage, hooked it up to the outside spigot and washed the truck!

On my way to recycling this morning, as I was driving through town, I saw a guy coming out of the grocery store and all he was wearing was a gray, short sleeved t-shirt. (Well, I mean that was all he was wearing 'on top', of course.) True, he may have been 1) delirious because of experiencing a temperature above freezing for the first time in 5 months, 2) rushing things just a bit, or 3) off his medication. But then it could have just been a case of rebellious thinking, 'I'm tired of wearing that blasted heavy parka, and I'm not gonna do it anymore.' More power to him. I'm sure he had ripples of goose bumps all over his body to keep him warm.

In celebration of this day's breath of spring and hope of flowers to come, I thought I'd share this quilted piece. It's not new but rather one I made when my quilt group had a challenge where all of us were to make a piece incorporating curves . . . a little challenging (hmmm, is that why they call it a 'challenge'?) when working with fabric which is usually happier to be stitched together with straight seams.

I'm truly not a flower fabric kinda gal but for some reason chose to use several floral prints this time.

Here's a close-up so you can actually see the flowers.

Can true spring and the hardiest of spring flowers be far away when the snow level is visibly decreasing and we're sorely tempted to take the grippers off the bottom of our Sorels?