Sewing Day

I was going to post last night, but I was too exhausted. It was a very full day, we had a sewing day with a machine sewing group of friends, and what a wonderful day it was. One of our friends in the group is still working, so we must be content for the time being to meet when her work schedule permits it. Retirement is in the near future for her, and I'm so glad about that!


As you can see, Diana has a wonderful big open area for us to sew (and that doesn't even count her big quilting studio).

Kimm was working on a very pretty charming Valentine table runner.



And Diana and Carol were both working on a little tote bag for notions, makeup, or whatever.



Diana was our over-achiever and actually got TWO done!


And Carol's little tote is very lovely too. Carol is about the only quilter I know who can honestly claim "No UFO's"!!!


At the end of that wonderful day, I had a meeting of our Quiltfest Planning Committee. Quiltfest is our big annual quilt show, and the planning of it is a major endeavor. Our chairperson is doing a wonderful job, and makes working together on it a pleasure! That's a rare gift, and we're very lucky to have her! We weren't able to hold it in our usual library meeting room, so Joy, the owner of one of our best local quilt shops was gracious enough to let us hold it in the classroom area of her shop. Oh darn... so hard to be in such an environment! ;-)

And speaking of Joy, I would like to make an observation. Yesterday (between the friends' sewing day, and the evening Quiltfest meeting), I was in her quilt shop. I observed her with a customer, using sign language. I was flabbergasted because she did it so naturally and with such apparent ability! When I questioned an employee about it, I found that she had only learned it very recently. And she had done so because of a desire to help one specific customer who was deaf. This customer had a desire to take quilting classes and the operation of her new Elissimo. Now that is service above and beyond the call of duty, wouldn't you say?

A Bit of Gardening

A little departure from sewing for a spell here. We spent the weekend working outside, and although I could hear the S.M.s crying from the house, I forced myself to turn a deaf ear. Because the plant babies had been doing their little plant screams for weeks now. It was sort of easy to ignore them, because our bodies hadn't exactly been cooperating (plantar fasciitis in my heel for me, and DH has really bad knees). But it was to the point where we couldn't ignore them any longer. So we gathered our gloves and tools, and pulled out the Y&G tractor and trailer, and hit it. Once we got going, just like so many things, we thoroughly enjoyed the task. The days were beautiful and warm, and it just felt good to dig our hands in the soil again (except for when I jammed a bad sliver under a fingernail... which seems an annual inevitability for me... but I do hate wearing gloves and they're off more than they're on!!)

We replaced 10 arborvitae which didn't make it through the winter. And we added some forsythia, burning bush, and weigela. Now that's done.

New Weigela...

If anybody knows anyything about weigela, I'd appreciate input. I had always thought it was for warmer climate zones, but the tag said Zone 4. We're on the borderline between 3 and 4. Perhaps this is just a hardier species of Weigela???

My favorite tulips...



The round bed...



Cleaning up Hostas' Haven and their 'friends'...









Whether we'll plant a full sized vegetable garden this year remains to be seen. I guess not doing so presents just as big of a problem, a big blank patch of ground for the weeds to 'play in'. And there's nothing like fresh veggies... Perhaps we'll employ our neighborhood youth some more this summer.

More of Sisters' Retreat

I just got some more pictures of our retreat, sent to me by my sister Peggy. Nancy and Peggy both are becoming quite the shutterbugs. So here are a few more...

In an earlier post, I talked about my brother's S.O. getting a new Babylock while here from Bismarck's FIRST and FINEST Babylock dealer (Bismarck Sewing & Quilting)! :-)



Did I mention she really really loves it?



Just taking a moment to relax...



Aren't we cute???



More Friends & Family Time



Are we missing someone(s)???




I also mentioned we celebrated our granddaughter Darian's 15th birthday while they were here. This is our son Kyle, Darian's father.



I have absolutely no explanation for this one.... create your own caption! ;-)



Last one... thanks Dennis, for being so patient with all the silliness!



(Since these were Peggy's pictures, that's why there are no pics of her among them. Hopefully I'll get Nancy's, and we'll see more 'Peggy action' then!)

This Tri's For Chris

Last night I finished my 7th DJ triangle, and as I did so, I became introspective. Without the patient tutoring and encouragement of Chris, someone who has become a very dear friend, I would never have known how to even tackle this triangle, let alone have it come out looking halfway decent. And I now have developed a love for hand piecing that I would never have discovered had it not been for her. That is a priceless gift!!! Thank you Chris!



And there's a bit of an irony here as well. I met Chris a couple of years ago when she taught a hand-piecing workshop at our guild. I loved the class, and I even did one more pieced block after the class. But then I went back to my Grandmother's Flower Garden, and never did any more hand piecing other than that kind. I kind of forgot about it, I guess. But Chris came back into my life about a year ago, and sice that time I've developed a true friend, AND a new skill that gives me so much pleasure.

I just hope I don't become a hand-piecer to the total exclusion of machine, because I already had more fabric than I could sew up in my lifetime even by machine, plus a growing assortment of sewing machines. Aaaaah well, there are certainly worse fates, eh?

Dear Jane Skipping Along

I just got my 3 baby Dear Janes pressed this morning that I completed during my Sisters' Retreat. We did so much gabbing and laughing, that this is about all I got done, but it's 3 more blocks towards completion anyway! :)

A-4 - Courtney's Stethoscope



A-10 - Which Points West?



H-4 - Abbey's Eyes

Sisters' Retreat

Sorry, I've been away from my blog for a bit... I was busy getting ready for my Sisters' Retreat. But it has now come....



.... and gone.



It was such a WONDERFUL time. I had two of my sisters, Nancy and Peggy, and my brother's significant other, Deb, here for about half a week.

We laughed, and sewed, and shopped, and laughed some more.

We laughed until our throats hurt and our voices croaked. We gave our local economy a shot in the arm, including the purchase of a Babylock by Deb. We even got tatoos... LOL



I gave a little class on hand piecing,which hopefully didn't bore them too badly. If it did, they coped well and were good sports!!! :) And we had lots of discussion about Dear Jane, as Deb is also going to be creating her own, in civil war themed fabric I believe, right Deb?

Deb settling in, getting ready for business with Baby Grace, her new Babylock.



And Peggy....



And Nancy....



Dennis to lend a hand in supervising operations...



Then a few friends dropped in to sew with us for a while.



Deb had a great idea for everyone to bring a grab bag. At the beginning of the retreat, each person got a bag by random drawing. Nancy had a clever idea for the method of drawing to choose the bags to start out with. Instead of drawing names or numbers, we drew words on a piece of paper: cutting, piecing, borders, and binding. The order of initially choosing a bag was in the order of the quilting process (ie: Nancy got to draw first since she drew the word 'cutting'). Then throughout the days, people could sneak and switch bags, whenever they could get away with it, until the final predetermined hour. At that time, whatever bag you had in your possession was the bag you ended up with for good. What a great idea, and we had lots of fun with it!

During the days of our reteat, my granddaughter Darian turned 15 (how can that be????) As some of you will know, in the Latino culture, the 15th birthday is a very special birthday for a young lady coming of age. It's called Quinceñera. So while living in Tucson, I had picked up a darling little figurine of a beautiful Latino girl with a banner across her torso with the word "Quinceñera". I have held it for two years in waiting for this birthday. (It was just a novelty, she's not hispanic, eventhough she could pass for it in this picture with her beautiful, very dark hair.) :-)
I also want to make very clear that the bottle in front of her, which looks like a beer bottle, is actually root beer!!!

We all worked on separate projects, other than our piecing class. And it was so fun to fondle and drool over all the beautiful fabrics. I'll close this post with a picture of one of Nancy's card trick blocks.

Leanna's Barely 'Passable' Project

Today our S.I.S. group met at Jean's home. Leanna was working on a project where you insert filler, in this case a strand of yarn, into a bias strip such as a stem. At some point, I desired to see it closer, and asked if it was 'passable'. Well it certainly was, ...and then some! :)

Alice is understandably very excited about 2 coming great-grandchildren and had a grouping of adorable wall hangings to show us, along with a very cuddly blanket (with minkee, no less). We all thought working with minkee was above and beyond the call of duty! The ladies are left to right: Jean, Leanna, and Alice.


She also did a beautiful embroidery of a mother with a child, and framed it. Isn't it gorgeous?


Jean is working on her beautiful appliqué hearts. You can definitely see where Chris' appliqué lessons for us has paid off. Same goes for Alice's work on her Tisket-a-Tasket appliques! The mug in the foreground is tea, not beer... :)


Here we had an extremely rare moment of silence! Ripley's, where are you?
Chris was off to visit her adorable little grandbaby Saige, (and BTW, Saige's parents as well). :)

Triangle TS-1 - Spanish Moss

This will be a super short one, as I'm literally falling asleep. I just finished my latest triangle, but not without mishap. I just could NOT stay awake, try as I might. I really wish I had scanned a shot of the seam allowance a bit ago to show where one of the errant stitches landed when I continued to sew as I fell asleep. This was not just nodding off, I flat out fell asleep! I had to follow the thread from the needle to find where it got off to. Pretty funny....

(Oh, this is being hand pieced, thank heavens... could have been disastrous otherwise. Having said that, I have fallen asleep at the sewing machine a time or two as well.)



Can anyone tell me where to find the names of the triangles? My DJ book doesn't show them, and I can only get them from the TOW (Triangle of the Week) page on the DJ site if it's been selected as the current TOW, or earlier this year. But this one was a substitute, not the recommended one for the week, so it isn't listed.

One More Block, J-2 - Picture Perfect

It's 3:00a.m., and I just finished Baby Jane, J-2, Picture Perfect.
I don't care who ya are, that baby is sweet! :) (And it was time for a simpler one after triangle LS8.)

Coming Back to Spring Again...

Here we are, the start of yet another week. Wish we could just grab time by the tail and slow it down sometimes, eh? The snow I was whining about at the end of last week is totally gone, and the flowers seem not to have gotten smacked badly at all. I do have a large oleander in a huge pot, and I haven't looked closely at that yet, but from a distance it appears to be ok. It's too big to be hauling it in and out with every turn.

I'm having so much fun looking beyond the map on my homepage and seeing the list of actual locations of some of you checking out my blog. It encourages me to keep adding at least a little something to try to keep interest going. Hang in there, because I am having a Sisters' Retreat here, starting this weekend, so the time I'm going to have to be on here is going to be somewhat curtailed this week. And the same for responding to comments. I promise it's a temporary lull, and will try to come back stronger than ever next week. I have so much to learn about how to 'blog', and want to keep working on it.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to this Sisters' Retreat!!! I'll be sure to post some pictures (maybe not until afterwards).

I finished another DJ triangle last night, so I'll put it up here, but with reservations. It's LS8, Northern Lights. The appliqued elipses leave a LOT to be desired. In fact, I'm going to have to eventually pull these off and redo them. I can't live with this one. (Sorry Crispy, as my tutor/mentor, this is not a reflection on you... I need to sit in the corner with a dunce cap, and practice, practice, practice!!!)

D-1 Allison's Guiding Light

And one last thing, here's the latest little baby Jane I finished last night (D-1, Allison's Guiding Light).Oops, I see I need to do a little 'fixing' with the pressing job, and excuse the little stray threads. Isn't it funny how some of these blips don't even show up until you see them blown up on the web!? In an earlier life, I would have fixed it, rescanned it, and edited the post. However, I'm finding that if I don't let go of these little OCS quirks, I'm not getting any sewing time in... and with that, I'm going to hike myself off to the quilting studio!

Where'd Spring Go?/A Newbie Quilter?/Crispy Quilts

Was it just yesterday I posted a picture of my beautiful purple miniature irises in bloom? Here's what greeted me when I looked out the patio door this morning. I didn't go out for a better picture than this... it was too dang cold! At least we didn't get the 6" of snow forecasted, and it's almost entirely melted by now.

My very good friend Sylvia took some precious vacation time to come to my house and sew with me yesterday afternoon. She finished this table topper that we started earlier when she took an entire day of vacation. This is her very first project ever... pretty good for a newbie, huh!???


I also want to give a shout out for a really nice blog. It is that of my very good friend, Chris (Crispy) in my S.I.S. group (Sisters in Stitches). She's the one that got me going on this blog in the first place. She's also the one that introduced me to my Dear Jane journey. When I saw her finished DJ top, I knew I had to have one... and I also knew the only way I was ever going to have one was to make it myself... Duh!!! Anyway, check out her wonderful blog at Crispy Quilts... and be sure to take a peek at Crispy’s Dear Jane, and tell her I sent you.

Quilt Inspiration: Crazy about Jane

I just visited a site that has some fantastic examples of different quilters' interpretations of Dear Jane, along with a bit of background for those of you not familiar with the 1863 Dear Jane quilt which has created such a following. It's really worth a look! Quilt Inspiration: Crazy about Jane

Spring is Riz

Today is gloomy and overcast, but there is hope. Little green babies are poking their noses out, and some have their whole heads out. And the trees are making leaves. Oh, and Mr. & Mrs. Robin are getting ready to make baby robins too... their nest is done under our deck, same as every year. My absolute most favorite time of year is spring when the gardens come back to life. (Pay no attention to the dead foliage from last year... Dear Jane has been a bit of a distraction so far this spring, and gardening hasn't come fully to the top of the priority heap just yet...)

Now that we've established that spring is coming, let me tell you that we have 6" of potential snowfall predicted for today and tonight here in the northern climes. (OK, you southern friends, you can gloat a bit!) :)

Makiah to the Rescue

Hang in there friends. I'm trying to get more organized so I can post a bit more regularly. I'll get there....

Towards that end, today I hired a remarkably mature little neighbor girl, Makiah, to come and help me clean wooden blinds. Then we did an experimental test run to see how it might work utilizing her to help me organize and put my quilting studio back together, folding fabric and what not. Looks promising so far... so we'll be diving into that together in the near future. What a pleasure to have her around.

Oh, this post looks so lonely without a picture, so I'll just throw in my latest little Baby Jane block I finished last night, M-6, Simplicity.