I took off for Spring Break early.  My colleague and friend Judy is covering my class and after class on Monday, we high-tailed it out of town.  When you see the above photo, you should probably know exactly where we are.  Yep.  San Francisco.  And yep, it’s raining.

So, like any self-respecting quilter, I tracked down a fabric store.  Actually, I grew up in this area and have come to Britex fabrics many many times.  I needed some replacement buttons for my raincoat (check), picked up another color way of the typewriter fabric, and also bought a 1/2 yard of fabric from Guatemala, which I was assured that when washed, would shrink and bleed.  But while I can get just about any quilting fabric online, I wouldn’t be able to get Guatemalan fabric, or so I reasoned.

I spent the rest of the day with my brother, going to lunch at Cafe Claude, then to Japantown, an mini-indoor mall where I hunted down small Japanese plastic figurines (weird, I know) and that cool decorative sticker tape that I read about on one of my favorite blogs: How About Orange.  You pull it along like those hand-held adhesive tapes, but instead of glue, it lays down a line of flowers.  Or hearts.  Or whatever, and the cartridges are refillable.

For those of you who want some, the shop keeper said he did mail order.  It’s from MaiDo, in Japantown, and the phone number is either 415-567-8901 or 415-567-7073.  Try using the name “Deco Rush Pens.”  How much?  $5.95 each, which is high if you think you could probably buy them in Japan for three bucks, but then there’s the airfare and the hotel and meals cost to factor in.  So maybe under six bucks is fine to have a whole lot of fun decorating your paper.

Here’s a few shots of San Francisco’s Union Square.  In the rain.

A change is as good as a rest, my mother always says, and this change is a nice one.  While I don’t have anything necessarily quilty on this post, I must admit that sometimes you just need a change to make you think about your work, your craft, again.  Like those berries above.  Plummy blue, pinky-purple, yellow-green.  Those colors, found here in nature, might be the beginnings for an interesting quilt scheme, veering away from any ombo I might usually try.  And when it’s raining, I’m forced to rest, or to try indoors things, or what else?  To try something new.