All Hitched Up and No Place To Go

Some friends enjoyed another trail ride.

        I was supposed to go trail riding in the Bankhead National Forest one recent Saturday. I hooked up my trailer the day before, and had planned to load my tack while my horses were eating breakfast. 

However, it was pouring down rain when I got up at 5 o’clock that morning. Some weather reports indicated a 40% chance of rain throughout the day, and the one for Bankhead said 80%. I just don’t like riding in the rain. Even worse, I don’t like loading up in the rain.

So I took my cup of coffee to the front porch to watch the sunrise and contemplate my choices for the day. The festival at Homestead Hollow? Nope, not in the rain. Besides, I wanted to take my grandson there Sunday afternoon. Clean the house, or at least a portion of it? Nah, maybe I could hire someone for that.

Guess I could have worked on that quilt I started a year and a half ago. It’s the one I’m making from a blanket I bought in Guatemala. It’s not one of those beautiful handmade blankets often seen in the Indian markets. This one is polyester, with an ugly gold fringe. I bought it because it has a purple horse on it, and I had painted my room lavender. However, the blanket was much too thin to act as a quilt, so I decided to turn it into a coverlet. I removed the fringe and spent $200 on fabric for the border, backing and coordinating bedskirt and pillowcases. 

I got so far as to applying the iron-on backing to stabilize the wiggly, misshapen  blanket, then put it away. For a year.  About two weeks ago I took all the materials over to a quilt-making friend’s house, and she helped me trim and square the blanket and cut the strips for the border and backing. 

My goal is to get it ready for Pat at the Ashville House of Quilts to quilt it for me on her long-arm machine while I’m in Greece. A rainy day seems like the perfect time to sew. But guess what? The sun came out about 9:30 or 10! 

Somewhere in Bankhead Forest the Outback Riders were looking at fall foliage from the backs of their horses that Saturday. I looked at it through the sunny window above my sewing machine.

I hope those riders got soaked.