One day last week I found myself on the beach at Carrasco, ie about 7 blocks down our street – on a windy afternoon with weak sunshine. I was not aware it had rained but clearly it had just there only a short time before I came along. The raindrops in the coarse sand produced a pattern that has me thinking … but maybe for after I finish the piece I am working on, with metallic leathers and metallic-waxcoated leathers applied as surface design onto a large piece of fabric, to then be quilted. I have had quite a few visitors this week and all have oohed and aahed encouragingly. The weather is becoming cold, rain threatening, ideal for hunkering down with a large quilt project to finish with some deadlines in view.

Saturday I had a visit from Graciela my new quilting friend who has produced bits of leather – this time she produced Inez and Soledad, two more quilters. Apart from sharing coffee and some books together we shared some freehand aka intuitive a piecing technique, and it will be interesting to see where they take this – as it has been with everyone who has leaned the simple steps. Already I could see that although she was interested it probably won’t go far in one set of hands – but I know it will in one of the others.

Editing the photo I included today was interesting – I cropped a bit and then turned it one way – it looked so very wrong and then the other way as it is now, it is just right. Seems to me it’s a light and shadow thing : but up in the northern hemisphere it would be round the right way – so would it still look wrong viewed from there ? 

Yesterday there was another gift of leather, two shopping bags of scraps, from my new quiltmaking friend here, Graciela. She called to say how much she is enjoying the book I lent her, and said some more pieces of leather would be dropped off by a family friend living nearby- my goodness these pieces of suede and leather are in almost every colour of the rainbow, including a brown slightly metallicised or pearlised piece. Since then the colours have just been going round in my head, and I simply must do something that uses some of the chartreuse piece.

I feel I am approaching a fork in the road – assembling leather applied to look like patchwork of some kind, in rather traditional colours like blues, pinks and beiges ? ; and organic shaped earthy coloured pieces to continue exploring on with the landlace or sandlace ideas.

This has always been one of my favourites in the Old City part of Montevideo. It caught my eye on my very first visit here in 1989, and I have always admired it even although until recently the exterior was rather delapidated.

Quite a few older buildings are being brought back from the brink in this area and down near the port. All of them remind the visitor and the resident of the rise and fall, several times, of wealth and importance of this city through it’s almost 500 year history. 

A closer look, where you can see fish, Neptune, the medallions above the windows which I took to be crabs, and I just managed to capture the shells at the foot of what look like waterfalls under the nameplate on the building above the main entrance.

I like this colour better than the eau-de-nil green it used to be, although that perhaps was more watery.

Although it is now a bank, the original owner of the building was the Montevideo Waterworks Co., and in keeping with this, all the external decorations are watery in theme. At first glance the external simply looks like one of the many of the other neo-classical buildings around the city, but closer examination of the various decorative features shows them all to be water-related. In a refurbishing almost complete, these features have been retained, in some cases repaired, and the whole exterior repainted.