Beatrice's Alphabet

Since I am rather quilt deprived at the moment, I'm going to show you a wonderful alphabet quilt made by Beatrice Marotte of France. Now usually I badger my quilting correspondents to start a blog, since blogs are wonderful and we should all have one. But this time, I slyly asked to post it in my blog so that I would have something fun for you all to look at instead of another pic of my empty apartment.
She did such a great job. I love the D in particular. The novelty prints look wonderful tucked into the letters, but don't distract from them.
Beatrice explained: "this is my first essay with your tutorial. Le quilt est pour la salle de classe de mon mari, instituteur avec de jeunes enfants. J'en ferai un autre pour moi avec des lettres plus bancales!!!"
She's helping me to learn French. I can actually puzzle most of the first French sentence out. This quilt is for the classroom of her "mari" at the school for young children. And okay, I get lost on the second sentence. Something something for me with the letters plus something.
I think I will get much better at this once I actually have a dictionary.
Anyway, I'm excited to "know" another person living in France. This makes three. (Hi, Clare, hi Paula!) Beatrice, thank you for letting me post this pic and I encourage you to get a blog!
The internet certainly makes moving to a new country a much less frightful experience. For instance, I already know about Le Rouvray, the quilt shop near the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Several people have asked what our timeline is. We expect to be in the Washington DC area for about two months and then travel to Paris around Thanksgiving (November 20-ish). Nothing is written in stone and can certainly change, but this is the guestimation we're working with.
It's certainly been quiet here. On Friday afternoon my sweetie napped and read for four hours laying on the sofa with two sleeping little cats on top of him. He wouldn't move and by the time they got up he was all stiff and sore. We call that "trapped by love" around here.
I pulled out Cranky Witch - my freehand fan quilting project - and worked on it yesterday while my sweetie cleaned and organized. We have another huge load of stuff for the charity shop, including the American tv and vcr that we didn't use the whole time we were here. Expect they'd just take up space in Paris too, since their television operates on yet another system and even our multi-system tv won't work there. (We weren't complete idiots for bringing our tv here in the first place: we thought we'd watch AFN - Armed Forces Network - which broadcasts an American signal, but it came in really lousy so we gave up on it.)
We were worried that we were going to go overweight so we pulled stuff out of the "take" pile and threw it into the charity pile with abandon. I've had that pizza cooking stone for at least seven years and have used it only a handful of times, none of them while we were here. Time to go, deadweight.
Speaking of time to go, I've got errands to run. See ya later.