Hardware on the quilt

Like I said, I have been in a mood to follow up on some ideas I've had. Not saying they are necessarily good ideas. The little geometric piece I have been fooling with is nearly quilted and it occurred to me that it might be a candidate for some embellishment. Something simple and textural. I'm still not all the way to gobs of sparkly stuff sewn on my quilts.

This past week I have been driving 30 miles each day to training for a job. The training has been in the little town of Woodburn, south of Portland. One day when I went out to scout out some lunch I saw an old-fashioned Hardware store. I am inordinately fond of hardware stores, so I checked it out, thinking I'd take a look at brass washers for my little quilt. I found brass washers as well as copper ones, which seemed like a real find to me. And I must mention that this was a hardware store where all the nuts and bolts and screws and washers were in little drawers, not packaged up in plastic, so you could buy as many or as few of anything as you wanted. It also had the requisite skinny, wizened and quite grumpy old clerk. This place was the real deal.

So I have been playing with ways to embellish this piece. Here, washers only.

These are not sewn on. I'm still moving things around. The washers don't seem like enough, so I got out a bag of wooden beads and used a few of them, combined with washers. (The color is not good in these photos—sorry)

How about randomness over geometry?

I'm still thinking about this. I think maybe I need to be more intentional with the embellishment. Maybe I will hate it, then I can pick them all off. I dunno.

Now about the job—
Retirement has been nice these last couple of years, but dang! the economy tanked and our retirement assets took a big hit. We need to work for awhile. I applied to work for the 2010 Census, took the test and got a call that they wanted to hire me. I spent last week in training and at the end of the week about 2/3 of the training class started working. The rest of us were told we are "in the pool" and to go home and wait to be called. So I am in wait mode. I hate wait mode. I want to know what is happening and when it is happening. But I am waiting. I think it will be an interesting job and pretty flexible. I will be doing "quality control" which means I will check a sample of the work done by the first round of enumerators who are now going around and verifying all the addresses. This is in preparation for the real count that will take place next year. Has someone from the Census come to your house yet? They haven't come to mine, as far as I know.

My Mom worked for the Census one year. It must have been 1980. She found it pretty interesting. The 2010 Census is the first one that will use gps technology and be done mostly on computing devices. That was part of my training last week. I sure hope I actually get to do this and am not stuck in wait mode indefinitely.