スパイダー...

A bit of trivia.  The English language has one alphabet with 26 letters.  Japanese on the other hand has 3 alphabets - hiragana, katakana, and kanji.  The first two each have 46 symbols while there are more than 6,000 kanji symbols (although many of them are archaic).   In addition, Japanese also has a romanization system where words are written in the latin alphabet.  Confused yet?

Another bit of trivia.  I studied Japanese for 3 years in college.  I also studied Spanish for 6 years in middle and high school.  So when I couldn't think of a word in Japanese, I found myself automatically substituting it's Spanish equivalent.  You can imagine the reactions I got from my professors.

But for all that studying, I still had to use the Google Translator to find the word for 'spider' in Japanese.  It's スパイダー or 'supaida' for those who can't read hiragana...

It's the new name for the quilt formerly known as 'Spider Web'.  I've just finished it and it's hanging on the wall.  As you can guess, I named it because it uses the basic spider web block and the outside border is an oriental print.  I could have called it 'Spider Web Quilt' in Japanese but the translation wasn't as pretty as just the one word.

I quilted it using a variety of threads: Aurifil 50 wt for the back and outer border, YLI 100 wt. silk thread for the inside border and invisible thread for the center.  I also used the Golden Threads paper to mark and quilt the center and the blue water-soluble marking pen for the inner border.  (You can see the blue circles above that disappear when wet.)

I spent a good bit of time planning out the quilting on this one and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

It's my 8th quilt finish for the year and the first one that I'm keeping.  I think most quilters are like that; you're always making quilts and giving them away.  As a matter of fact, I'm going out tomorrow with a friend to pick out fabric for her king sized quilt.  The pattern is fairly easy, but quilting a king size quilt is rather daunting...

You may have noticed a difference in my pictures lately.  My new camera takes much clearer pictures than my old one.  A good example is the post I did for Gabriel's birthday.  It's obvious which pictures are taken with the new and old cameras.  I also took these pictures of Jack and Gabriel recently and I'm amazed at how crisp they are...

Jack

Gabriel with her ball

Until later...

May the Lord smile on you.

Numbers 6:25 NLT