May 14, 2017

Today is the official day that we celebrate our mothers – whether or not they are still with us. I remember my first Mother’s Day after Mum passed away; I was in Safeway and as I passed down the card aisle I realized I wouldn’t ever be buying another Mother’s Day card for Mum and I immediately burst into tears and left the store.. Diane always said that I would eventually be able to think of Mum without tears, and I reached that point a few years ago; the tears still come but not as often. Now, on Mother’s Day, I remember Mum and celebrate my daughters for the wonderful mothers they have become.

You read about these projects in several of my previous blogs. Working with zippers is always a danger zone but after three attempts (at least) on each zipper they were set. One of the bags was a real experiment (I won’t tell you which one), and I put it together at least twice. Once I had help from my friends at the bee I got it clear in my head how it should be done and was able to finish them up very quickly. Each pouch contains a fold-out bag, with handles, for shopping.

I made copious notes, with photos, should insanity prevail and I decide to make more!

February 14, 2017

This is one of the patterns that I bought in Houston, along with the stand. It is also the first of anything that I have finished from that Houston trip. It was a lot of fun to make, and easier than I expected.

Pat received this for his Valentine’s gift, but not until after I had used it at my Guild’s miniature meeting today.

Yes, I fell way behind on finishing up my annual Community Quilt. This quilt was my Leader and Ender project for 2014-2015. I used a scrappy combination of one and a half inch squares for the 16-patches. Those patches were interspersed with scrappy brick blocks.

I originally pin-basted this over the island in the kitchen but it didn’t take me long to realize that this just wasn’t going to work. I had to remove all the pins (and folks at the Guild laugh at me for the large number of pins I use), tape the backing to the floor and get on my hands and knees to re-pin.

I used my ruler templates for the free motion quilting; this was my first attempt with the simplest of rulers – the 12″ Arc. Because of the size of the panels I wasn’t able to get a good overall design going so there were a lot of knots to be tied in and buried.

At the end of the day I had to use a fabric marker to cover up some of the blemishes on the back of the quilt.