It's taken me a while, but at long last, I've taken the Christmas quilts down. With such gorgeous weather, what better to display than "My New Zealand Bird Quilt", made back in I'm very proud of this one, especially as it is hand appliqued and hand quilted, and was designed by NZ designer Mary Fletcher. I'll let you into a little secret. The design had a creepy crawly weta together with the iconic tuatara (lizard) block, but there was no way I was going to have one of those on my quilt!
New Zealand Birds
Of course, the quilt ladder needed changing too. On the top is the Tee Shirt quilt I made for Robin's 60th birthday. He passed away in late November and this quilt was on display during his memorial service, and I decided I will leave it out on permanent display on top of the ladder. On rung two and four is my own work, and hanging on rung three is a row by row quilt made for me some years ago for a big birthday. It's good to ring the changes and get to see some quilts which have been hidden away for a while.
Quilt ladder, made by Robin
So what else have I been up to? I went and filled my car up, not such a big deal for most of you, but Robin used to do this for me. A couple of weeks ago my friend Dot came along to the petrol station at the supermarket with me, to run through all the steps I needed to take. The first one was to pull up at the pump on the side where the filling cap was! Then she showed me what I needed to do, read the instructions which guided the customer through, and how to enter the discount code from the supermarket into the machine. And most important to remember, my little car takes diesel, not petrol. So now I can be trusted to do this job for myself!
I took myself to the movies today, to see "A Complete Unknown", which tells the story of 19 year old Bob Dylan arriving in New York with his guitar. I'm not really a Bob Dylan fan, but this film was very interesting and I found out such a lot about his early song writing life, and some of his really early songs are still so well known today. The film touched on the Kennedy, Cuba, Khrushchev, and the Cuba blockade. Even down here in far away New Zealand, we feared for a nuclear war, and held our collective breaths, as did the rest of the world. I was 17 at the time, working for an insurance company in Wellington, the capitol city of New Zealand, and remember attending a lunch time church service held to pray for world peace. Scary times indeed.
Another part of the film that I particularly remember was when "Dylan went Electric". In 1965 he teamed up with different band members and started recording and performing with electric instruments. The folk music community and audiences were appalled, accused him of turning his back on the genre, booed on stage and pelted him and his band mates with bottles and cans! My favourite Bob Dylan song was not written till 1975 so didn't appear in this film. It is "Shelter from the Storm" full of dark lyrics of love and loss. I hear it occasionly on the radio station.
Another part of the film which
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