First Graduation Complete

Cool but very windy graduation......

 Very, very, very early this morning.

 She said I needed to take a "shooting for the stars" picture.

 The mortarboard picture,  

which also qualifies as "we are in a horrible drought" picture.

 The "Martin's picking me up" picture.  (And, he always tips his head back for pictures, she says.)

 Her two favorite grandmas [from church], Ms. Loreta and Ms. Joann.

 Tiny portion of the crowd.  See how blue the sky is?  It didn't last because the winds came up. Now the sky is dust colored.

 One-size-fits-all caps do not work well in high winds.

Ahh, that's better.  

Aside from the winds, it was a nice graduation.  The state attorney general, who graduated from this high school in 1972, was the speaker.  He scrapped his prepared speech and just talked to the kids.  Much nicer.

The only downside was the usual single-mother-can't-take-photos-and-be-in-them-at-the-same-time situation.  I'm thinking she's going to have to get dressed up again so we can take some together.

We took the grandmas out for brunch, and Sweet Teen is off to a round of graduation parties and a sleep-over.

I'm off to do some quilty things.

Happy quiltmaking.....

Sneak Peaks at Quiltmaking

 Last Saturday was our monthly quilt-together for our Victory Prayer Quilts group at church.  It was a busy day because it was also Prom Day for Sweet Teen.  Here's what happened on the quilting front:

 I began piecing these at our quilt group a month or two ago.  Then I couldn't remember how I had planned to set them together....So I started something new....

 These were in our fabric stash at church.  Since we are in need of more quilts with a masculine flavor, I began piecing snowballs.

 I just finished ironing this third set this morning.  I'm hoping I'll have enough of the grape leaves print for a border.

 I chose another of Judy's quilts to bring home for quilting.  I am so appreciative of the fact that she has it layered and ready for quilting.

 I also have these three pieces of batik from Kokopelli Quilts/Southwest Decoratives to use in an upcoming block exchange with my Treadle On group.  I just can't decide if they are a neutral or a focus fabric.  Maybe I'll know after they are washed. (These southwestern batiks were dyed especially for Kokopelli Quilts.  Lovely fabrics; available in more colorways than I chose.)

Sweet Teen is in Washington, DC competing with her team/representing New Mexico in the We, The People competition.  She'll also get to do some sightseeing.  So, I'm trying to concentrate on quiltmaking this weekend since there has been so little time for that.  I have a little less than four weeks until the school year is over, so I'm trying to work efficiently and not get stressed by all the end of the school year stuff special ed teachers have to do.  I'm not being terribly successful with the "Stay Calm and Carry On" aspects.  Also, we still have to make college decisions.  Quiltmaking seems like wise therapy.

Happy quiltmaking....

More Landmarks in Life

This girl dressed up for Senior Prom--held in the big city (relatively speaking) this year.  No, I didn't get to see her dressed like this--a friend's mom did take pictures.  And Sweet Teen did try to take one with her phone and send it to me--it never came, although her phone insisted hours later that it was still sending!

Next landmark--very early morning rising so she can board a plane at 5:30 a.m. to go visit a college in Mt. Vernon, Iowa--just over 1,000 miles from home.  Then later this week, barely hours after she returns from Iowa, she'll board another plane, this time for Washington, DC so her high school civics class can take part in the national We The People competition, because they won the state competition.

Of course, I'll be hoping to get some sleep to make up for the early risings!  Also hoping to finish some cutting and piecing of prayer quilts that I worked on when our church's prayer quilt ministry met Saturday morning. I'm pretty sure that in just a few months I'm going to be struggling to keep my mind off missing this girl!

Happy quiltmaking.....

What Was On the Bed - Again

Here's what was on the bed last week:

 This is a very simple Double Nine Patch--in the traditional sense of the title.  This one is set with alternating plain blocks.
Beginning quilters need to be aware that we can make really nice quilts from simple designs.  Furthermore, if we love the quilting part,  those simple quilts can become truly spectacular!

 Yes, it says it was finished in 1990....but it was begun several years earlier.

 One of the fun things about making this quilt was all the color changes in the quilting.

I also enjoyed the double diagonal lines in the background--inspired by quilting in antique quilts. 

 Also signed with a monogram...used to replace the hearts that are the other blocks.

 I also changed the color of the hand quilting thread from block to block. 

 Back then I used Mettler 100% cotton hand quilting thread.

These are a couple of vintage pillowcases with hand crocheted lace.  I found them somewhere as singles.

I'm thinking there are two main reasons for so many single pillow cases that have survived.  One is that sometimes women started making a pair and just never finished the second. The other reason is that one wore out faster than the other.  I know that on the farm, my dad's pillowcase always wore out faster than my mom's.  She said it was because  he did so much welding that there were always chemicals left in his hair, and over time they caused the fibers to deteriorate faster....I'm guessing there may well have been a lot of truth in that!

Happy quiltmaking....

She's All Grown Up....How Fleeting Are the Years!

Much too quickly, she's grown up!

 About 13 or 14 months old--dressed in the emperor's yellow...

 At three (or shortly before) in David Cleary's garden, where birds would walk right up to her.

I love this one, but in most of those against the black background her gorgeous hair and the black just melted together.

This is one of her favorites.

My baby sister, Katherine, is a photographer near Houston, TX; but that's way too far away, so we went to Portrait Innovations in Albuquerque.  We had a wonderful photographer, and we had our photographs about a half hour after her sitting.

It's hard for me not to get tearful looking at these.  I'm so grateful God matched us and that she is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.

Happy quiltmaking.....

What Was On the Bed

Time for a different quilt on the bed, so before I removed it, I took a couple pictures.....

This quilt was published (minus the borders) in a Better Homes & Gardens craft magazine of some kind in the late 70's.  Quite possibly it was one of their issues of gifts to make for Christmas.  At the time, I was teaching in an inner city school in Peoria, Illinois and having to search diligently to find fabrics that were 100% cotton.

This quilt was completely hand pieced (the old fashioned way) from 60-degree diamonds with two-inch sides. I don't think I had any knowledge of English paper piecing at the time. And, let's face it, traditional piecing was much easier for diamonds this size.

Within a couple of years I had moved to Tennessee, and while I had the templates [made from Shrinky Dink plastic], patches and some fabrics close to me, the pattern/magazine was hidden in a box somewhere.  I remember going to the library at Lee College and looking the magazine up on microfiche to see how the quilt was bordered. It turned out none of the photos showed the borders; neither were they included in the instructions.

I decided this would be my "millennium quilt,"  meaning I'd be happy to finish it by the year 2000.  When sometime in the 1980's, a group of us had founded the Cherokee Blossom Quilt Guild and affiliated ourselves with the Tennessee Valley Quilt Association, the state organization brought Ginny Beyer to Knoxville to conduct a series of workshops.  She invited us to bring quilts for which we needed borders.  Another Cherokee Blossom member and I were lucky enough to attend her workshop.

She helped me come up with a way to finish the edge of the layout with half-stars and helped me design the border that contains the triangles.  I remember working to piece this border section onto the quilt when I was sitting in the Albuquerque airport waiting for a friend to get off work when I came to interview for jobs in New Mexico.

 I quilted it on my hand quilting frame sitting in front of a bay window in the house we rented in Gallup and was quite happy when I finished it twelve years early!

Many of these fabrics were gathered from a wide variety of merchants, including Calfee's Grocery on Spring Place Road on the south side of Cleveland, TN, which had a fairly large fabric department because Mrs. Calfee liked to sew and make quilts.  (At least, that's what I was told.)  So much of the fabric has faded because the fabric companies saw no need for more than a few hours of light-fastness.  Obviously, they were clueless about how many yards of fabric could be sold to quiltmakers for stash enhancement.

I also taught classes at Chandler Fabrics, and remember when Bill Chandler came back from a large industry show remarking how so many fabric merchants were all doom and gloom and that the only happy people there were the people who owned quilt shops.  Compared to the huge numbers of fabric lines today, we were in a fabric desert back then!

Lots of memories in this quilt.

Happy quiltmaking.....

More Piracy of Blogs

Attention: rohaler, fayefuxu, and tkdot. Get my blog off your sites!


Once again many bloggers are finding strange stats on their sites indicating that their blogs are being pirated.

Here is a snapshot of my statistics:



and this:

Why people think they need to pirate stuff from our sites--especially those of us who are just teeny-tiny in terms of readership--is totally beyond my comprehension.

A word of caution--if we see these sites in our statistics, we do *not* want to go visit them.  Most often they are sleezy, spam or virus contaminated, and often pornographic! They make sure there is no way to contact them without contracting or seeing things that are definitely not things we want in our lives!

Too bad the great openness of the internet leaves us with little choice but to scream, "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

Oh, vampirestat (don't go there, either) is a "bot", and it visits almost the second I post, as do several others. And, lucky us, the filmhill bot is back too. (No, don't bother to go visit there either.)

Know that commercial that suggests, "Mom needs to step up her game"?  So does Google.

Okay, back to something fun, like quiltmaking......