Well, here at the studio in Kansas, summer has officially begun – with a crazy-cold and rainy weekend. I even had the heat on yesterday!

Not summer-summer, mind you, as in the season, which commences on the summer solstice some time around the third week of June. I mean the summer that (since my childhood, anyway) always seemed to kick off with Memorial Day weekend. That’s when school was officially out back in the day. I know it doesn’t happen that way anymore – school terms often extend well into June now – but when I was growing up so many eons ago, that blissful no-school season of summer was sandwiched with anticipated regularity between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Between those two holiday weekends, we enjoyed glorious days of kid-freedom. Blueberry picking in the woods is what I remember in summer. Strawberry picking in fields. Walking to the library, stopping at a small gas station called Richardson’s on MA-111 in Massachusetts, to buy penny candy on the way home, driving poor Mr. and Mrs. Richardson nuts while we labored over the grave selection of a dime’s worth (or a quarter, if we were rich!) of candy. (Sixlets, anyone?)

Life is not quite as simple now. Now, I have to figure out how things are going to progress against a series of deadline during these summer months, so that we accomplish everything we need to accomplish at Needle ‘n Thread.

But at the same time, I think it is important to have some R & R at some point during summer, and to go along with that, I usually have a project in mind.