Playing with color and texture

I love to play with colors.  I drew endlessly when I was a kid (getting in trouble once for drawing on my brothers face with colors that would not come off), learned to use oil paints as a teen, falling in love with the concept of adding dimension to color (laying it on thick, spiky, smooth, thinned out with turpentine so it becomes a wash).

Wearing my "working world" hat, I color-coded all my files, partly because that's just the way my brain sees things best, partly because it was fun and I could.

Now that I'm retired from that working world, I finally have enough time (ok, not enough, but more) to play with colors and textures.  I do that through gardening and quilting.  I have to say that I'm not a "coloring-inside-the-lines" kind of person.  I don't enjoy following the patterns of others in quilting as much as I enjoy designing my own.

I don't want someone else to design my flowerbeds, my gardens, our landscape - I want to play with it myself.  The great news is that now I have time to not only dream and plan, but to execute at least some of those dreams and plans.

I am retired from being an information professional, but am just beginning my new life as Master Gardener and master quilter; I have a badge that says I've earned the right to the former title, and am hoping to earn the latter title sometime in the next 20-30 years, now that I have time to work on it.