When did you feel the shift into fall this year?

Was it the first 65 degree morning, when you had to dig around the closet for a sweater? Or when you realized it was dark at 8 p.m.? Or when the okra plants started to look droopy and it wasn’t because they were parched?

Fall has been creeping up on me this year. Avery’s birthday is in early September, and it never feels like fall when we’re celebrating his solar return, but by the end of September, I’ve undeniably started switching gears.

One hallmark of this transition — even though it’s still searingly hot in the afternoons right now and there’s (still) no rain in start — is that I start to think about quilting again.

The last weekend in September was the Austin Area Quilt Guild’s QuiltFest, which takes place every other year. I met up with my friend, Denise Gamino, another former Statesman writer whose byline you might remember reading looking forward to all those years ago.

Denise and I worked in the features section together from 2008 to 2014, when she retired. She’s a freelancer now, too, so I ran into her at a recent editorial meeting for the Bluebonnet Electric Co-op magazine. We decided we had to get together and that the quilt show would be a perfect excuse.

Denise writes about her quilting adventures, sometimes, including that time a few years ago when she came upon a quilt that she’d finished (and had given away) for sale at a vintage shop in Smithville.

“As I looked closer, my own uneven hand stitching winked back,” she wrote about that moment of discovery back in 2016.

We met up on Friday at the Palmer Events Center to look for those winking, blinking, sinking, life-giving stitches.