Scents and Sense

For those of you who remember my quilt, Ladies of the Night, its inspiration plant is now in full bloom. I bought this plant last year at the Biltmore House and brought it back to Charleston in the fall. This picture was taken at night because I was so enveloped by its scent as I came back from my evening walk that I actually stopped and took a good look at the number of blooms. Time for the camera. It smells kind of like a gardenia, only more subtle and only at night--which makes it more unique. I lay on my back to take this picture of the single bloom. I bought a different variety here in Charleston and, although the plant is very large, nary a bloom has yet to appear.
Others of you may remember that my hard drive crashed a few weeks ago. That meant that, although I have hard copies of my patterns, I will have to retype all of them (andTHIS time, save them to a disk). It also means that I will have to redraw all of the graphics. Previously, I was using the drawing portion of Microsoft Word--which was somewhat cumbersome; so I decided--after reading some blogs etc, from other quilters--that this time I would use Corel Draw. Well, my rebate check arrived and part of it went right out the door to Amazon.com for the software. And NOW, enters the learning curve . . . I consider myself fairly literate with this type of thing, but it's defintely going to take more than a day or two to learn how to do all that I want. Things don't EXACTLY work like the book indicates they should or the book leaves out a somewhat critical step, but I'll get there. I did make this checkboard drawing this morning and it was about 15 times faster and easier than doing it in Word--so I'm hopeful. I'm thinking that I might try to find Corel Draw For Dummies though.