I’ve been working on Judy Laquidara’s Quilt for an Hour quilt, Shine on Bayou Cane.  I thought this would be a great gift, but the greedy part of me wants to keep everything for myself.  Solution?  Make two.  Well, I will get two done, but I’m not saying when.  (By the way, the block is straight.  It’s my photography that’s crooked.  Really.)

I’m not done making my quarter-square blocks, but I got tired of just looking at “components” and wanted to see some finished product.  So I put one block together.  I like it!!!  My star fabrics are primarily from a 32-fabric pack of fat eighths, so it will be plenty scrappy.  In Judy’s instructions, she has you making two blocks alike, 15 times, for a total of 30 blocks.  Stay with me — that’s all the harder the math is going to get.  So I am making 30 different blocks, two each.  Divided into two quilts.  This way, each quilt will have 30 different stars in it.  Sounds good on paper.

I have too many other irons in the fire right now, so this project is going to get set aside for a few days, but I’m hoping to finish up pretty quickly.  Thank you, Judy, for another rewarding project. 

Sue

A year ago son Tony and new daughter-in-law Lynn were married!  Wow.  We were all so busy last fall with all the preparations.  They had a wonderful October day for the wedding, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have Lynn in our family.  Here is a little photo collage to commemorate their 1st Anniversary (you can click on the photo once, maybe twice if there’s still a + sign, to enlarge the photo).

A year goes by so quickly.  Then it’s ten years, suddenly twenty, thirty, etc., etc.  So I guess the lesson today is to enjoy every single day with the love of your life.  Even the ordinary days.  Maybe ESPECIALLY the ordinary days.

Love you guys,

Mom

(p.s.:  I forget that not everybody was at the wedding!  DH Jim got to walk Lynn down the aisle as her family is all in China, and they were unable to come here.  To celebrate both cultures, we had a Chinese meal for the rehearsal dinner (first picture), and American food for the reception dinner.  Lynn’s brides’ maids wore qipao (CHEE-pow) dresses, which were custom made in China.  Lynn also wore a qipao for the rehearsal dinner.  I passed on the opportunity to wear one.  The idea of custom-fit shiny fabric on a body shaped like a sausage didn’t sound very pleasing to the eye.  They are just adorable though on the young women!)

Wednesday we took a bus trip (through the senior group at church) to the German-settled community of New Ulm (about 2 hours southwest of Minneapolis).  What a perfect time of year for a visit!  They had already celebrated Oktoberfest the previous two weeks, so we had a perfectly lovely (and not too crowded) day for a visit.

 Starting at the top left is a photo of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity off in the distance.  The cornerstone was laid in 1866.  A close-up photo of the cathedral is right below, lower left.  Following along the bottom is a tree in all its fall glory.  Sorry, I’m not good with tree names, but by its color, could it be a maple (Doug, are you reading me)?  And the photo to the right of the tree is of a path down the hill along the Way of the Cross.  Each of these small buildings is a station of the cross.  It is a lovely walk, and at this point we were on a hill overlooking the town.  Really beautiful.  The path is lined with pavers now, but was originally a dirt path.  And we “topped off” our tour of New Ulm with a stop at Schell’s Brewery!  (Did I mention this is a German town???)  The most fascinating (to me, anyway) part of the brewery tour was the peacocks and hens that roamed the property.  And isn’t this guy inspiration for a quilt!  Just look at those greens and blues.

While I was browsing around the web this morning, I happened on Mary’s site.  She is using this fun collage feature of Picasa 3.  It was easy to install and get started.  What a neat way to display pictures!  You’ll have to check out Mary’s site as well (she’s a quilter in neighboring Minneapolis), and she has some lovely fall pictures of the Minneapolis close-to-downtown area.  Thank you for the inspiration, Mary!

And don’t you think this collage format would be wonderful for a Christmas card picture, or how about for a postcard?  Oh, the possibilities…

Sue

I know I’ve been delinquent lately in updating my blog, but the next couple of weeks will be busy, so I can’t promise I’ll be any better!  Wednesday (yesterday) we went on a bus tour to New Ulm, Minnesota.  It was a wonderful fall day, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the sights.  I will be posting pictures when I sort through them and try to narrow them down to a very few.

So on to a bit of progress in the quilting part of my life.  Judy Laquidara has posted Block 6 of her Star BOM, and tonight seemed like a good time to jump right in and get it done.  This block went together as easy as could be.  *whew*  But I think I was a little more watchful on my measurements.  It doesn’t take much to throw the whole block off.

The colors are much more accurate in the “group photo”.  It must be the light, but sometimes I just can’t get the colors to look like they’re supposed to!  Anyway, I’m loving every single block so far.  The background fabric is somewhere between old gold and brown paper bag color.  I want the stars to all be a variety of jewel tones, with dark green sprinkled throughout.  I’ve really enjoyed checking out the progress of the other bloggers who are doing these blocks.  Everybody’s is so unique, we should have a show (even if it’s just a virtual one) of all the quilts when they’re finished!

Sue

The fall colors are so pretty this year, although they are starting to fade with the rain we’ve had off and on this week.  I love the look of leaves with the sun coming through them from the back.  Somehow the pictures never quite look as good as I think they should, but I did like this one.

Sunsets are another subject matter I struggle with, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.  That’s the beauty of the digital camera — shoot, shoot, shoot, followed by delete, delete, delete.  This is from our deck across our small pond.

For this photo, I zoomed in on the “hottest” part of the sunset.  The color was so incredible on this day.  Looking at these pictures, I can almost feel the heat!

Here is DH Jim.  Last year he made a Murphy bed for our guest room/excercise room.  I wanted to put a queen-sized bed in there, but then the exercise equipment would have to go.  Since the guest bed is probably only used a couple of times during the year, this was a great solution.  And didn’t he do a nice job?  (The pattern for the quilt on the bed is “Mama’s Scrap Quilt” by Tara Lynn Darr.  It’s such a happy quilt, I always smile when I see it. 

And this is me!  I love this picture.  Years ago I used to dress up as a witch to answer the door on Halloween.  (Where we live now, NOBODY comes to the door except my friend Jean and her family.)  Every year my witch disguise (yes, this is a disguise — it isn’t natural) got weirder and more disgusting looking.  It was wonderful!  I’ve told my DH that this is my favorite picture of me and I would like it displayed at my funeral.  He said no.  Some people just have no class.

Sue

I feel so doubly honored this morning.  Sandi A at A Legacy of Stitches sent me an e-mail this morning informing me that I am one of her five picks for a Kreativ Blogger award!  Thank you, Sandi!  As Sandi mentioned on her blog this morning, our paths have crossed several times before, so she is one of the few bloggers I “know” that I have met in person.   She is a delightfully creative lady, and she is as generous a person as you will find anywhere!  And be sure and check out her blog.  It’s fun to read about small-town living in the picturesque town of Henderson, MN, as Sandi has a way with words and includes lots of great photos.

And as if that isn’t enough, Sandi also named me as her Blog Pick of the Week!  Oh, my gosh, I’m waiting for Bert Parks to step out of the closet with my tiara!

Thanks again, Sandi, for the honors.  They mean even more, coming from such a special lady!

Sue

Actually, my whole life is a work in progress, but here are some quilty things that are getting my attention lately.  Judy Laquidara’s latest Quilt for an Hour (QFAH) is a star quilt with an interestingly shaded background called Shine on Bayou Cane.  It will really make the stars *pop*.  The idea is that you get her instructions for each day, it should only take about an hour (unless you’re slow like me), and then you post your progress, hopefully each day so you stay caught up!  So for Monday and Tuesday of this week, here are my 120 half-square triangle-blocks, composed of my two background fabrics.  I also included in the photo 32 fat eighths in Civil War reproduction prints that I had squirreled away for a rainy day (and it IS raining today).  If need be, I will break into my fat quarter collection of Civil War fabrics.  And my colors photographed pretty accurately, for a change.

Another fun project is Judy Laquidara’s Star BOM.  We are up to Block #5!  Here is block 5, along with a photo of blocks 1-5.  These will finish at 12″ each, so they are good-sized blocks.  The Star BOM is another example of Judy taking familiar blocks and shaking things up by making the background, the borders, and the settings more interesting.  She also seems to favor nearly solid fabrics.  I’ve always been drawn to prints with maybe a couple of nearly solids, so this has been a new direction for me, and I’m enjoying it!

Here are a couple of table runners that are awaiting binding.  The one on the left is an Anka’s Treasures pinwheel pattern included in the pattern Little Charmers III, designed to use charm packs.  (Eileen, I think you were looking for the name of that pattern?)  And the one on the right is from a Terry Atkinson book, Lessons from Mama.  (Although I’ve never met Terry, I know she’s a local pattern designer.  Her patterns are always easy to follow.)  For a fall theme, I used an Indian corn fabric for the center of the stripe, which you can see better if you click on the photo for an enlarged view (you might even be able to click twice to enlarge it twice).

While I had a neutral backing fabric on the longarm, I floated the two table runners plus this sweet Mary Engelbreit panel.  (Mary also needs a hanging sleeve and binding.)  Panels are such a great “cheat”.  I have a place by the front door for panels of this size, and I would like to be able to change them out at least once a month, so I have a few to go.  It’s fun to look for them for different seasons/holidays/moods.

So that’s it for now! 

Sue

Okay, we really aren’t that cold in Minnesota (yet), but the nights have definitely turned chilly.  Last night I put an extra quilt on the bed.  Normally I love the coolness of the sheets as I slide into bed, but last night it was just too darned cold!  Ahh, the joys of being a quilter.  Another layer on the bed was no problem. 

This is one of my favorite photos out my kitchen window (where the hummingbird was, a few posts back).  We see all sorts of birds in this crab tree, but not this snowy/icy day late in December 2006.  Which leads me to the real subject of this post.  We don’t stay in Minnesota for the entire winter.  It’s a wonderfully diverse state, with fun, caring people, great art and cultural events.  It just gets too cold.  And now that we don’t have “regular day jobs”, we can do something about it.  We will eventually pack a bag and spend a little time in Texas.

We didn’t ever plan that Texas would be our winter getaway, but our first retired winter we spent some time in Port Aransas on Mustang Island (close to Corpus Christi).  Even though DH and I have been City Folks our entire adult lives, we both started out on farms, nowhere even close to a city.  Small-town farm kids.  And Port Aransas has a homey, small-town feel to it — at least in the winter when there are mostly Northerners in all those condos.  (Spring break is another story.)  I have a sewing machine I leave down there, along with all the other necessary sewing items, but what I really love to do in Texas is bird watch.  Me, a bird watcher?  I was surprised too!  It turns out that the coast of Texas, and particularly the barrier islands, is a major migratory path for all kinds of birds.  Some of my favorite pictures:  (okay, all my pictures are my “favorites”; if they weren’t, they would be deleted by now)

Forster’s Terns.  Aren’t they funny?  But they make such a cute couple. 

I love this guy.  He’s a Cinnamon Teal.  And there’s no question about how he got his name, although he also looks like the rich red-brown of cocoa powder, the expensive kind.

This pair of Northern Shovelers was doing some kind of a dance (probably of the mating variety).  Very graceful looking, don’t you think? 

And of all my favorite pictures, this is one of my favorite-est!  A pair of Black-Bellied Whistling Ducks.  I love their pink legs.  I must have taken 50 pictures of this pair, and they posed and posed for me.  Some day I will do a photo album of just the whistling ducks.

There is a frost advisory out tonight for part of northern Minnesota.  Our forecast low for tonight is 37 degrees, with a high of 59 predicted for tomorrow.  We are definitely in October, and this shift in weather has made me start looking forward to our migration south, just like our feathered friends.  We Midwesterners will be traveling south, mostly in pairs, and we’ll try to not leave a mess along the way like these birds do!

–Sue

(By the way, they don’t call us Snowbirds in Texas; we’re Winter Texans.)

Our Quilting Mini-Camp was a big success and tons of fun. I have to admit that I didn’t take a single photo. I should have, but the days just flew by. There were 14 of us on Tuesday, and 12 on Thursday. We sewed in the morning, had a sit-down lunch all at the same table (my dining room table has HUGE leaves), did a little clean-up, then back to work for more fun and sewing.

The “admission” each day was to bring a fat quarter. Betty also donated a beautiful basket to put the FQs in, and we drew names to determine the winner. Jan won Tuesday’s basket of FQs. Tuesday morning I demonstrated making a handbag out of a placemat. I used that purse to place Thursday’s FQs into, and when I have a chance I will take a photo of the purse and insert it into this post so there’s SOMETHING to look at! Betty won Thursday’s FQs & purse.

We had hand-stitchers and machine-sewers, all working like crazy, but still having fun. We have such a great group, it was a joy to spend some extra time together. I gave them each a little gift bag with a breakfast bar, a bit of chocolate, a Busy as a Bee fat quarter, and my favorite item from Ikea: a stackable mug. (Some day I will have to blog about Ikea. I love that store. I don’t buy much beyond frying pans, hangers, and mugs, but it’s a great store.)

Thursday afternoon I loaded some cheater fabric on the longarm, and those who were interested could take “Elvis” for a spin. I did this once before when some ladies were visiting, and I used the interestly quilted end result for a doggie blanket for my Grandpuppy Tucson. This one I will bind up for my new Grandpuppy Milo. (Dave, send me a pic of Tucson and I’ll post him.) I haven’t met Milo yet (or Tucson yet, for that matter, but Tucson lives in Virginia), so I’ll have to get a picture of Milo and Grandkitty TJ also.

Two days of sewing sounds like such a long time, but it literally flew by. Food: Thursday we had soup and salad. I made Sabina’s Cheesy Potato Soup, and the recipe can be found at the Recipes tab at the top of this page. Thursday I made my friend Carol’s Chicken Salad (slightly modified), a fruit bowl, and roll. I will post the Chicken Salad October 1st as October’s new recipe. It was fabulous, if I say so myself. And I guess I just did!

Sue

I really wanted to do some kind of retreat or quilt show outing this fall.  I nearly went to the ND quilt show in Fargo, but things just didn’t work out.  I finally decided to have a “sort of” retreat at my house, and invite all the women in our Wednesday DayStitchers group.  So we start tomorrow, all day; of course, on Wednesday we go back to our regular afternoon quilting group; then about a dozen or so of us back at my house Thursday, all day.  How fun will that be?  Well, I’ll know tomorrow.

The “price” of admission is one fat quarter per day, and they will go to one of the day’s participants (by a drawing at the end of the day).  I seeded the bowl with a few starter FQ’s:

I’ve been busy removing some furniture, moving the rest around, borrowing tables (thanks, Betty!) and an iron, and probably something else I haven’t even thought of yet.  I am expecting about 14 quilters tomorrow, and so I’m getting stations set up for the ones that are bringing their sewing machines — 14 of them!  Part of us will be upstairs, part downstairs, but we will be meeting up midday in the dining room (after we clear the sewing stuff off the table) for some lunch.  I’m going to make my mother-in-law’s Cheesy Potato Soup, a tossed salad, and some nice crusty bread.  I’ll also have my sister-in-law Jeanne’s Dump Cake (MUCH better than it sounds) for dessert.

My husband is out of town for a funeral, and he may be a little disoriented when he comes back to the new furniture configuration:

There are several sewing stations that don’t appear in the pictures.  I also need to get the pressing stations set up, and the exercise room place we store our exercise equipment will be set up with table and chairs for a little magazine and book viewing.  I still have lots to do.  You will notice I’m not posting a photo of my sewing room yet!  So back to work I go.  We will have a great two days sewing up a storm!  Wish you could all be here, but I definitely don’t have enough chairs!

Sue