I'm working on a 21^st book - and its sequel. #22. Of course I've been told to keep its specifics secret.  So I thought I'd drop clues, here in my "Corner" with every List Visit letter, like a bread crumb path to the book's official announcement in 18 -24 months. Creating a book is quite an undertaking - and to get it published, its theme has to be fresh and pretty compelling. So in this new pattern & technique book I want to explore a serious subject: Our attraction, our pull, our ardent fascination with the old Baltimores and our seriousness about building our own works of art upon their foundations.

Has our devotion to the antebellum Baltimores anything to do with the light they shed on our own lives and times?  We are seekers on two levels: 1. On one level we yearn to learn the soul-song of our needlesisters of yore; 2. On another level we cherish an honorable ambition to emulate the best of their work and more: to develop our own interpretive yet classically related style, to express ourselves fluently in this art form.

We love the stuff of the Old Ones. A wag might dub this book "In defense of Stuff." For though this new book will be pattern & lesson- filled, it will nonetheless defend stuff. For by stuff are we tangibly connected to the Old Ones. In their stuff - their patterns and symbols; their heroes and monuments; their political, religious, and personal inscriptions; and not least of all in their exuberant joy in all manner of fabrics and embellishments - In this stuff are held history and memories- to remind us of things forgotten or things hidden in plain view. 

May I leave you, dear fellow appliqué aficionadas, with the Clues listed below, until we meet again on these pages? Let's part with this summery affection, inscribed upon an old quilt:

May your life

Flow as smoothly

As the gentle stream,  

                                             Elly