Yesterday's show went well, and I nearly finished the sleeve of the Bijoux Blouse in between the waves of participants. I spent a bit less time sitting at the table while they were in sessions, because I led one of the sessions.

I enjoyed it. I always do. I think workshops have all the fun of teaching, without the responsibility of grading, meeting with students' parents, or faculty meetings.

At the end of the workshop, I asked if there were questions. "I have a comment," one of the participants said.

I was prepared for a discussion of developmentally appropriate learning, or maybe a complaint about the crowded conditions (I get that a lot, even though it is of course the participants who form the crowd), and nodded invitingly.

"You are so cool!" she said.

It was funny, because adults don't say that to each other, and we all laughed, and it was also sweet of her, and I really appreciated it and thanked her. I always get good evaluations, and I often have people say how much they enjoyed it on their way out. I have even had people come to the store and ask for the number of that excellent presenter we had at the last workshop.

I know I said I don't like to be the best in the class, but if I'm teaching it, I certainly want to be the best I possibly can be. I don't think I would enjoy doing workshops as much as I do if I weren't pretty sure I was good at it.

But this woman's comment felt like a personal compliment.

It made me think of an article I read in the Wall Street Journal last week. The first generation of kids who grew up in the praise-filled self-esteem-obssessed classroom has entered the workforce, they said. They have grown up being told how great and special they are all the time. All the kids are winners, everyone gets a certificate for something, every player gets a trophy. Teachers are routinely told to find something to praise each child for every day.

So these kids go to work and don't get praised all the time any more. They often are not shown much recognition at all, because it is not customary among grownups to express admiration every time someone merely does her job.

Some companies have, according the the WSJ, taken up where the schools left off, hiring a special person to "celebrate" people, because the rest of the workers have jobs to do for heaven's sake. But most companies continue in the usual way, giving bonuses or promotions and the occasional expression of thanks or admiration, and the new crop of workers feels insecure.

How can they tell that they're doing a good job if no one gives them a certificate or applauds them or anything?

Those of us who grew up before the self-esteem boom would be inclined to say that your sales figures, the percentage of patients who improve under your care, how often you get published -- that kind of stuff is what does it. Not being fired is a pretty good indicator that you are doing a good job, in the real world.

But if you have spent all those years being praised for your mere existence, let alone any real accomplishments, then it has to be disheartening to go into the work world, where doing well just means you get to keep your job.

The WSJ was looking at this from the employer's point of view, naturally. They reported that scores on the standard measure of narcissism have risen an average of 30% among college students since the 1980s. They are thinking about the management issues caused by this new crop of narcissists. But I think we should have some sympathy for these young workers. We did this to them, after all. There has been very little controversy over the self-esteem movement. Both parents and teachers have supported it. It is our fault as a society that these kids have grown up requiring continual, largely artificial boosting of their self-images. We are the ones who kept them from gaining satisfaction from working hard and accomplishing things.

Perhaps, when we see 20-something workers, we should give them a little praise. "My dear," we could say, "you did an awesome job of delivering that pizza!" Or "I love the way you took my blood pressure! So expert!" Maybe this would make them feel better.

Unless it made them feel that creepy old people were hitting on them. Perhaps just handing out stickers would do it. We could all carry a sheet of gold stars with us at all times, and put them on the hands of all youthful workers.

Just until they get used to the real world.

I brought home a bookshelf from the old store -- well, That Man and my sons and I did, because it's quite big.

#1 son painted the top for me. I may make a quilted panel for it... it has a company logo on it, you see. Otherwise, it is a nice bookscase, and adds something to our reading corner. The stability ball in the corner does, too, don't you think?

I have never claimed to be a decorator.

Having this new shelf up made me think that I needed shelves in the new office space. I haven't put up shelves in a while, so I went to look for information on the subject. (I have no idea, by the way, why this paragraph is in red and in a different font. Try to ignore it.)

Oddly enough, all the internet advice I found about putting up shelves was from the UK. One site said dismissively that "to put up a shelf in an American house it seems you just need a screwdriver and a spirit level." Unofrtunately, they did not elucidate the simple American method.

It is different in England. There, they require more stuff.

Tools you will need:

Bradawl

masonry drill bit

pencil

power drill

screwdriver and screws

shelves, track and brackets

spirit level

tape measure

wall plugs (masonry walls only)

Perhaps you, like me, do not know what some of these things are. You can watch this video, which features a fellow with a really cute accent (Cockney, maybe? He says "barfroom") who shows things and tells you their names.

He is doing something really complicated, though. I think I will go to the hardware store and find an American who knows the screwdriver method.

Not today, though. Today I have a conference to get to.

Yesterday was a day of old problems and new adventures.

Small problems. Small adventures.

One problem that is certainly getting old is my upper-respiratory distress. (Why is it always upper respiratory? Where is the lower respiratory system?) I did go see a medical professional, finally, who put me wise to my error: when you get a cold, you should not discontinue your allergy medication in order to take cold medicine. Cold medicine doesn't treat your cold, but just makes you feel a little better. Especially the multi-symptom stuff that I was taking. That just makes you feel a little bit better, well enough to go ahead and work instead of resting, while your allergies remain entirely untreated. They join the virus and gang up on the poor old upper respiratory system.

I am now taking my allergy medicine and a decongestant, and should be fine any day now. Actually, I feel a lot better, though I still sound like Tallulah Bankhead, or possibly Ernest Borgnine. I have a workshop to do tomorrow, with singing, so I am hoping for a speedy recovery.

Another small old problem is also connected with the workshop, because it is in another county, and there are three distinct stretches of scary road between here and there. That is not enough to keep me from doing it, but it is enough to keep me from sleeping well. I am going to see whether I can carpool with The Empress, since she and That Man are planning to attend.

The mail brought another old problem. #1 son's FAFSA came back again. It was an actual error on his part the first time, but this time it was about our name. We have a difficult, foreign family name. It has only nine letters, and many people from my husband's country have twice that many, or more, but the fact is that not a year goes by that we do not have some trouble with the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the ACT people, or the medical insurance people, because we have this difficult name. We carefully replaced the "U" they had put in with the correct "M" and sent it back again, ignoring the suggestion to contact the Social Security Administration.

But the mail also brought new adventures. A new camera, for one thing. It has no viewfinder, but the boys tell me it is cooler than the old one which disappeared into the ether. I must learn to use it before tomorrow so I can photograph the conference.

And the stuff for my foray into bingo. I have never played bingo, but I incautiously agreed to take a table for a breast cancer awareness bingo event being held at a historic church in our county.

This church was built by our Italian community. These people were tricked by misleading advertisements into coming way the heck over here and replacing sharecroppers in the delta region of our state. The former slaves who became sharecroppers couldn't help but notice that sharecropping was a whole lot like slavery, except that there was no responsibility on the part of the landowners to care for sharecroppers, and they didn't stick with it. So the owners advertised for immigrants, and got a passel of Italians.

They didn't like sharecropping either. Their priest traveled around until he found our region, which is lovely and hilly and reminded them of their native Italy -- at least in comparison with the Mississippi river delta where they were suffering at the time.

So they came up here in a body and established a nice town which still stands, filled with the best Italian restaurants you would ever care to meet.

They had their difficulties, though. At one point in their history, a vigilante group went to burn down their church, and the story is that their priest stood on the steps with a gun and explained that he was a man of peace, but that he did know how to use a gun. The gang left, and this church is now the site of the charity bingo do for which I am supposed to round up a table of players.

Partygirl said she would come, so that is a start.

My boys say that, if I am going to do handbells and bingo, I am clearly now Really Old. So be it.

I also had an invitation to do a six-week class on hymns. I've done this before, but it will be a new setting, so it qualifies as a bit of a new adventure. If you have ever read my Advent calendar of music, then you know that I am both knowledgeable and enthusiastic on the subject, and that is half of a successful class, I think. I started my teaching life with remedial English and study skills, so really any subject is a step up.

Here is the table runner, at its current state of progress, and with it a couple of tomato plants that The Empress brought. They are new-to-us, heirloom varieties of tomatoes, which may not really count as an adventure, but it might.

It is too early to plant tomatoes, really, but there they are. I put them on the porch to harden off and will plant them tomorrow.  Maybe they are the ones who will have an adventure.

I have also made some progress on the Bijoux Blouse.

The sleeve for this pattern is picked up directly from the shoulder and knitted down. This is my favorite way to do a sleeve, because it is the hardest to mess up and and the easiest to fix if you don't like the way it turns out. It does however mean that you have a great huge piece of knitting rather than a little separate sleeve.

This will not keep me from taking it with me to tomorrow's conference.

Today I will be up at the new store.

This means getting properly dressed, and resisting the temptation to do a whole lot of work at home before I go up there.

That is another old problem. If I continue working ten hours a day, I will not get my encyclopedia entry done by the deadline, nor will I have a sewn FO every week, and it will be too hot to wear the Bijoux Blouse before it gets finished.

Speaking of doing things badly, I tried my hand at the bell choir yesterday.

Bell choir practice begins around 6:00, and I have always been at the store until at least 6:00 before. Now, I start early in the morning and finish when my boys get home from school, so I made dinner early and sallied over to the church to see how much fun it might be.

I should say that there is a grave need for bell ringers at the church. I like listening to bell choirs, but it is not something I have ever actually wanted to learn to do. Still, if I can do it, I will. I don't intend to teach Sunday School next year, so this can take the place of that service.

Handbells are not like any other instrument (I could be wrong there. It might be like playing the triangle). You have one or two notes to play. So, rather than playing the different notes as they appear in the music, you watch the music till your note comes up and ring it. So, if you had the beginning note for "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," you would play it three times at the beginning and then be quiet until it came back again during the "merrily"s.

Pitch is not an issue.

Counting is.

Playing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" would be a sensible thing to do on a first venture into bell-ringing. What I did was to play B6 and C7 in "Variations on Kingsfold."

The director gave me some gloves and showed me how to make a circle in the air with the bell. I was able to get some feeble sound more than half the time. Then he asked me whether I could read the whole treble clef.

"You know how badly I read music," I reminded him. But I didn't get what he was asking.

Once we started playing, I saw what he meant. My notes were way above the staff. I can recognize something like a C or an A in the staff every time, but the bells I had were up in the imaginary, invisible part of the staff where, as an alto, I simply never go.

I intend to circle all my notes. I was able to foresee the B6 in Kingsfold, actually, much of the time, by mentally singing the piece and ringing the B6 at the point where I would have sung a B. However, that "variations" part means that you cannot rely on knowing the basic melody.

In fact, I got lost repeatedly, finding myself for example in measure 49 when I should have been in 45. Part of this is that, as a singer, I am accustomed to ignoring the bottom staff. That is the piano or whatever, and we get to the end of our part in the treble clef and turn the page and there is our next bit. With the bells, that bottom staff tolls for thee. Or, rather, I was supposed to toll for it.

There is also the whole instrumentalness of the thing. As instruments go, bells are easy, though the director was showing me some fancy stuff I can work up to -- using the Doppler effect to advantage, flashy damping, stuff I obviously can't be expected to do until I can get the blasted thing to make a sound every time I make a circle in the air.

But when your voice is your instrument, there is no time lag between when you envision the sound, as it were, and when you produce it. With the bell, if you don't have your hands in the right spot, you can be just that quarter beat late that makes all the difference, just because of the time it takes to get to the right place. In fact, I spent the rehearsal playing some of the time (because the bell didn't always actually ring just because I moved my arm), at approximately the right time, and occasionally in the wrong place altogether.

"Do you work on Saturdays?" the director asked me. This Saturday, yes, I said; I am doing a workshop.

"You wouldn't allow me to play these in public anyway," I pointed out. "In three or four months, maybe."

"Next Sunday," he said.

I have brought the music home for circling purposes. How can one practice one's music at home, though, with handbells? I don't have any bells at home, of course, but I am thinking that I could just sing the notes (in my own octave, of course) or perhaps tap on a glass with a spoon or something. Do I sit in silence imagining the music until my note is up? That is what you do when you play with a bell choir, after all. Do I play the treble on the piano (as if I could) and shriek "Bong!" each time one of my notes comes up?

Often, in listening to amateur bell choirs, I have thought that they sound better when you don't know the piece. When there is a familiar or a predictable melody, your mind is sort of making a channel for the tune to glide through, and you notice when they are off a little bit. A total cacophony sounds pretty in bells, though, so if you don't know the tune, you can enjoy just about everything.

It all adds to the elasticity of the brain.

"It's been nice having you around," said my son.

I haven't even made cookies for them every day, and they still think it's nice that I am there when they get home from school. I like that.

I got to go to #2 son's gymnastics class yesterday. I have never been able to watch the Tuesday class, since I have been at the store at the time. The Saturday class is all floor work, but the Tuesday class also uses horses and uneven parallel bars and stuff. There is an observation room for parents, and people invariably ask "Which one is yours?"

I no longer ask this, because then they will of course have to ask me. Then I say, "the boy in the red shirt" or whatever it might be that day, and there is the moment of silence while they are being all impressed and then they say, "Oh, he's really good!"

If I were the first to ask "Which one is yours?" it would seem that I was inaugurating the exchange in order to brag.

It isn't that good to be the best in your group. To me, that means that it is time to move to another group. One of the parents last night said essentially that: that is was a shame there wasn't a more competitive class for him.

Then this morning I was chivvying #1 son about his scholarships. He had not even applied for the basic state one, since he assumed that he would not be good enough. I went to the website and found that his ACT scores and GPA were well within the range. He was amazed. This is a scholarship designed to encourage good students to stay in our state for college, something our older two girls did not do. Something, in fact, that a lot of the good students here do not do. This kid doesn't think of himself as a good student. He is not the best in his group.

I don't like to be the best in a group. If I am, then it seems as though I should not be in that group. I don't like to be the worst, either. I like to be in the middle.

What about you?

I am reading Gladys Mitchell's classic mystery, Death at the Opera. The opera in question is Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, The Mikado. Click on that link and you will find midis of all the music, complete librettos so that you can sing along, on-screen puzzles, plot summaries, and all kinds of great stuff.

I love The Mikado. Some day, I would like to sing Katisha in a production in which Chanthaboune sings Yum-Yum.

By a happy coincidence,  I found a DVD copy of Eric Idle's production of The Mikado, which is my favorite version (excepting live productions, which are always better, by definition). I own this on VHS, but of course I have no way to view it. I have tried in the past to buy it on DVD, and had given up on ever finding it in that form. I was in the local Hastings yesterday, following through on #2 son's request that I rent Zelda for him, and happened upon this treasure.

I rented it, and walked away thinking that I might need to beg the rental place to sell it to me, or, if they would not, then to "lose" it so that they would have to. Then it struck me that the existence of that single DVD implied that the piece was now widely available in DVD form. Sure enough, a quick check confirmed this. I had given up too soon in my search for it.

This is the thing about electronic storage of information. The trouble is not in storing the information safely, but in getting the information out of storage when you need it. We can still read a book from centuries ago, if it has been stored correctly, but my 2002 VHS tape is sealed like a tomb and can never be watched again -- unless I carry it with me, hoping to find myself in the home of someone who still has a VHS machine.

I was thinking about this issue in relation to electronic books.

I am reading this month's book club book , Mrs. Dalloway, electronically. This is Virginia Woolf's 1924 opus, in an Australian e-book. There is something wonderful about being in America, reading an Australian electronic storage of a work by a British novelist of the last century.

I don't read e-books. I have never read an e-book. I have no desire to read e-books. I am one of the legions of people who like the physical experience of reading physical books. If you ask us -- and even, sometimes, if you don't ask us -- we will tell you how we don't like e-books, or even the idea of e-books. If we have to read them on a computer, then we are giving up the comfort of reading in an armchair or under a tree. If we read them on little portable devices, we find the screens too small and the device unsuited to reading. We just like paper, that's all.

Someone, and it might have been joeandrieu, was claiming recently that it is not that we don't like to read onscreen, because we do that all the time. It is that the content of books is generally not suited to the way we read screens. Novelists don't write for the screen. That is the problem, not our dislike of reading on screens. Someone else -- and I think it was andrew-plus-numbers -- said that physical books are just old-fashioned and we should get over ourselves.

I'll let you know what I think of reading Mrs. Dalloway on a screen, and then we can decide whether it is the screen or Virginia Woolf who gets the credit or the blame for the level of satisfaction. Or it may just be me. We'll see. Either way, can the existence of this e-book on the web guarantee it readability in the future to the extent that its existence as a physical book did in the past? When our current e-book reading devices are on the junk heap because machinery just doesn't last very long, will it be the group mind of the web or the semi-permanence of paper that will keep Woolf available to us?

In any case, today I have to do some repetitive tasks, and  I intend to do them while watching The Mikado. I am looking forward to it.

I've just barely begun the quilting of the table runner. Normally, I'd outline the pinwheel here, but instead I am using a swirly stencil from Voices of the Past called "Harriet Tubman." The imprecision of my triangles might be well served by this decision.

I am still showing you scanned images instead of photos because my camera is still missing.

On Friday evening, I walked into the house carrying my purse and the camera. I came in from the garage through the laundry room to the kitchen, where I stopped to talk to my husband.

Knowing that I would be leaving the house for work on Saturday at 6:30, he had decided to do the grocery shopping. He had made a list and everything, but had come home with only eggs.

I spent a while commiserating with him on his shopping issues and deciding what to do about dinner. I took the shopping list and the grocery money and tucked it into my purse. The boys persuaded us to allow them to call the local pizza place, and I cleared up a bit in the living room, taking some papers into the back bedroom/office space and putting them into the file drawer.

It seems likely that I visited the bathroom at some point, but by the time the pizza came, we had the TV on and were settled in for a lazy evening.

It was after eating pizza that I went to get my camera to put the photos into the computer -- and did not find it. My purse was on the kitchen counter where I had left it, but the camera was not with it.

Sherlock Holmes and Jane Marple would know at this point exactly where that camera was.

It seems to me that the tidying of the living room is the point at which I am most likely to have absent-mindedly put the camera in the wrong place. Lostarts mentioned in the comments a colleague who tidies things away and then can't recall where she has put anything, and that can happen when you're tired or distracted by conversation while tidying.

But I have a place where I normally put the camera, and it seems as though I would probably have absentmindedly put it there, not in some other spot. I use the camera a lot. I like to put pictures here, of course, and I have children of whom I naturally like to take pictures, but I also use it for work. I think that I will have to buy a new one pretty quickly if I cannot find the old one.

If you have read the narrative above and thought, "Of course! That must be where the camera is!" then please let me know.

This is supposed to be a day off for me. I am supposed to try to rest and get better, perhaps to see the doctor. I really need to go to the grocery, to catch up on my housework, to pay my bills, and to get the writing assignments done. It also seems likely that I will need to drive to the new store to pick up my paycheck, and my husband is taking the day off. So it should end up being sort of like a Saturday.

The conference was pleasant, though it made for a long work day, I had pretty good numbers, and  I got about 5" of the sleeve done, so it was a successful day all around. I have reached the point at which it feels as though I will never get over this cold, but will be permanently sniffling and croaking and flopping down on the couch whenever I can. It may be that the cold has segued into allergies.

Anyway, when I got home last night, I was seized with a mad craft whim, and I went with it.

My camera is still missing, so I have merely scanned a bit of this bag for you. That may be a good thing, since seeing the entire gloriosity of this bag all at once might be overwhelming.

This was inspired by a project in The Impatient Beader Gets Inspired, though the project in that book was a little more outre than this.

This is a little toile tote bag. I sewed feather trim (various feathers attached to a ribbon -- I got this at Hobby Lobby) to the edge. I wanted the peacock feather kind with several inches of peacock feathers dripping down from the ribbon, but oddly enough I couldn't find any.

Then I made some beads by decoupaging plain wooden tiles with images from old sheet music. I sanded the edges and put a gloss finish on them, and then sewed them on top of the feather trim.

The example in the book had glitter and beads, too. I may still add some. After all, there is already no situation for which this bag could be considered appropriate. What sort of outfit would a person wear with this bag? The combination of the bucolic historical figures with the sheet music images from the 20th century (and don't miss the enormous difference in scale) and the completely irrelevant feathers makes it almost certain that nothing will ever go with this bag. A black dress, maybe.

I don't care. I love the craziness of it. If I find that the level of craziness is such that I can never use it for anything at all, I will remove the trims and put them onto a little black velvet evening bag instead. Not that my life calls for much in the way of black velvet evening bags, admittedly.

Still, I can always put my knitting in it. It is just the right size for the baby sweater which I am not making any progress on.

I am also not making any progress on my writing projects, both of which have deadlines approaching, and I am also not making much progress on my goals for the year, which keep getting interrupted by excessive interestingness in my life. The Empress has suggested that I should go see a doctor, just in case my lingering illness could actually be treated in some way. I may do that, and see if I can get back to my regularly-scheduled life.

If not, I do now have a crazy bag to carry.

I was at the new store yesterday for the second time.

Any time you are at a new job site, there are little things to negotiate. Perhaps you like progressive jazz and the other person in the space does not. Maybe one person likes a colder temperature than the other. It is easy to express these differences in a pleasant, self-deprecating way. You can do a little "It's not you; it's me" and work things out.

In this particular case, though, these straightforward courtesies will not work.

I tried to think of ways to say what I needed to say.

"Everyone has different levels of tolerance for untidiness...."
"I'm sorry, but I just can't work in this..."
"Would you mind if I just tidied up a little here?"

Impossible. The truth is, we make tidiness into a sort of moral issue for women. Saying, "I can't work in this mess" is the equivalent of saying, "You slut!"

The other workers have just complained under their breaths and said nothing. I can see why. Even just cleaning up for people carries an implication of criticism. They feel that they have to join in, or apologize, or perhaps say that they were just about to do that but haven't had time. The cleaner-up feels caught and the messy one feels resentful.

Fortunately, the culprit -- no, no, I mean, the person with a higher tolerance for mess -- left early yesterday. I cleaned up. I won't be back till next Friday, and by then things will have settled down. And possibly messed up again. We'll see.

I have to confess that I took a couple of pictures. I was going to post them, since one of the things we do on blogs is tell our side of the story in confidence that our readers will probably validate our decisions, accept our version of things, and generally go along with us. You would have been appalled, and would have agreed with me that I had to do something about it.

My camera has mysteriously disappeared. This may be God's way of pointing out that, in order for this to be an  honest post, I would have to show you pictures of areas of my life that are currently messy -- my car, my pantry, and my sewing table would do for starters.

However, that means that I am heading off to today's conference with no camera, which is unfortunate. I like to post these things on the store blog.

The other thing that happened yesterday is that a giant corporation called us -- having found us on the internet -- with a 16K order. There is many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, and we are not counting our chickens before they hatch, but it makes me feel that my work has not been in vain. If they come through with this, I will shop with them at least once, in a celebratory fashion.

It is hard to know what today's conference will be like, but I am anticipating that there will be quite a bit of down time while people are in sessions, so I am taking the Bijoux blouse along. I have completed the front and back, done the shoulder seams, and finished the neckband. I also picked up the stitches for the first sleeve, so I will be working on that sleeve in the interstices of the day.

I believe I like the neck band. I was not sure about it, but it is growing on me.

Enjoy your weekend!

I know it sounds as though I am working all the time, and there is some truth to that -- I am working tomorrow as well -- but I did get a little bit of crafting done yesterday: the back of the Provencal table runner. Here it is pictured with the front, as a reminder.

Just in case my table runner has not been in the forefront of your mind all week.

The red one is the front. Now, the thing is that the design here is from a Thimbleberries book (Quilting for the Harvest), and it is very distinctly an American style. It is even an American use of color. I like it, but it doesn't showcase the French-style fabrics the way a French-style quilt would.

French quilting is generally whole-cloth, and occasionally uses banding. So, since I did not have enough of any of the fabrics to do a whole-cloth backing, I did a banded one for the back.

Quilters are wondering what's going on here. We are talking about the back of the quilt, right?

The back of a quilt is normally muslin, like this old quilt.

Occasionally a coordinating print, like this rather newer one.

 But with table runners, I am always tempted to make them reversible.

A bed quilt is not likely to be reversed, after all. The back needs to look nice, for when you turn it down or just for the self-respect of the quilter, but you would have no reason to want to make it reversible. If you are going to go to all the trouble to make a whole nother quilt top, you should get a whole nother quilt for the trouble.

Table runners are not like that. I have said before that they are the scarves of the quilting world, and I stand by that: they are relatively quick, inexpensive, and simple. And mine tend to be seasonal, so I only use them for a few weeks and then they spend the rest of the year packed away. Why not make them reversible and extend their usefulness?

I did that with this one.

This is my Thanksgiving table runner, with a bit of rudimentary piecing on the back in vegetable prints, which I like to use in the summer.

But it also shows the reason that you can't generally make quilts reversible: the quilting interferes.

I couldn't do proper quilting of the vegetable side without messing up the Thanksgiving side.

So making your table runner reversible means that your quilting will have to be planned with exceptional cleverness and subtlelty to complement both sides.

The runner at the right is one I made for #1 daughter. It was wet when I took the picture, but perhaps you can still see that it has a plain central panel with elaborate hand quilting. The back is solid mauve -- there is one triangle of that shade in the upper right hand corner.  #1 daughter told me recently that she uses the back because she prefers it to the pieced side. So I guess that is a reversible one.

So anyway, I am trying the reversible bit again. I will plan the quilting of the pieced front so that it will look nice on the banded back. This will add an extra challenge to the thing.

Traditional French quilting tends toward close rows of quilting in semi-circular and diamond patterns. Since they don't have a history of piecing, they naturally do not have much focus on bringing out the piecing, the way we do with our patchwork quilts.

I am not going for authenticity here, fortunately. I will probably end up with a hybrid.