At Last! My Quilt

This quilt has been in the works for over a year, and in my head for much longer. When I started it, I named it Summer Romance I, knowing I also want to design and make a blue and white quilt that I will call Summer Romance II.

I'm now at the quilting stage--and I'd be quilting right this minute if I didn't need electricity and if we weren't having much needed thunderstorms.  (We're getting typical New Mexico three-inch rains--which means the drops of rain are falling about three inches apart.  We hope to do a bit better than that.)

You can find more posts about the making of this quilt top here and hereor just have a look at posts from July 2015.(although I'm pretty sure I started this Memorial Day weekend of 2015).

All but the white fabric in this quilt is from Eleonor Burns' Zoey line for Benartex.

 I'm quilting with several Glide threads from Fil-Tec, also known as Bobbin Central.

 I marked only the spine of all the feathers on this quilt so far.

 I made only general decisions about how I would quilt, so when I actually started, I needed a couple of homemade tools.  I used a piece of card stock to make the flowing spine above for a two inch wide border.

I cut the paper above to make a more unusual spine for the five inch borders.
I used a plastic lid to plot the spines in the outer border at the top of this post.


The main blocks of this quilt were inspired by a Blackford's Beauty quilt I saw in a magazine around 1983.  I've also seen this block called Snowflake, and someone said Bonnie Hunter has designed a quilt using this block. I didn't know that, and I don't think I'll go look at Bonnie's quilt until I'm finished.  In any case, this is now my block in a unique setting with lots of room for the quilting to shine.

I wanted to get this quilt done ages ago, and I was thinking I could finish it this weekend, but since I'm using electricity instead of a treadle to quilt this,  I have to unplug whenever there is danger of lightning in order not to risk a power surge frying my machine.

I did get to spend a lovely morning (or most of it, anyway) at Dough-Re-Mi Bakery & Cafe catching up with a friend and getting an original quilt she'd like me to quilt very soon--as soon as Summer Romance I comes off the machine.

The last time I checked, the Dog Head Fire was at 96% containment, so we no longer have to worry about that, although we continue to pray for the people who did lose homes.  Despite the devastation, there was one family church still standing although everything around it had burned. Another fire started on the other side of the mountain yesterday, about 11 miles from Tajique.

If the stormy stuff continues, I need to go work in my sewing room and, with luck, put those treadles to use!

Happy quiltmaking and knitting,

Chop, Chop, Sew

I decided today should be a quilting and pajama day.
I worked on the fruits and vegetables.  I had planned to piece at least one block each day this week, but that did not happen.

My daughter suggested years ago that since I have a difficult time enjoying a lot of the colors that make more masculine quilts that I should buy fabric with fruits and vegetable because "all men like food."

Today I reached block 12, cut some sashing, cornerstones, and borders, and have a small quilt top finished.

I pieced it on my Necchi treadle.

 I do love the gentle "music" of a treadle sewing machine, although I was listening to Frank Ticheli music for concert band.

I couldn't find a print I liked for the sashing and the border, so I pulled a black solid from my stash.  It should provide a great space for fun quilting.....whenever I manage to get to it. I need to check at church and see if we have anything in our fabric supply that would work for backing.

My favorite blocks are the carrots and onions, which is interesting because I don't usually like those colors and I usually eat them only in soup.

This evening a woman in one of our local FB groups was looking for someone to make a quilt that would be "not too expensive" and she'd buy the material.  She'll probably find someone who will volunteer. I wouldn't. I know I have at least twelve hours in this top.  I'm certain she wouldn't be willing to pay even $10 per hour. I confess I don't understand the women who sell their quiltmaking services for less than minimum wage.

Happy quiltmaking and knitting,...

NM State Fair and Methodist Pie

The New Mexico State Fair is in full swing in Albuquerque.  A couple of weekends ago, my engineer was engineering pie crusts, for pies that are being sold piece by piece at the Asbury Pie Cafe at the fairgrounds.

She was part of a large crew working in Wagner Hall at our church.

The proceeds benefit multiple charitable organizations in Central New Mexico and surpassed $1million several years ago.

Happy quilting,....

Quilt Day!

I did shovel snow yesterday.  Lots more came and lots blew away.  Here's what we are left with this morning; a lot of little freshly hatched snowflake siblings are joining this.

Still no mountains in sight.  Happy to be inside, safe, warm, and with a lot of choices for hot meals and beverages!

Albuquerque is claiming they experienced their highest single-day snowfall since records were started in 1931.  Far from our highest out here in the country (about 40 miles away), but it is plenty; however, there is more on the way.

A perfect day for quiltmaking in a nice, warm house--nice hot meals planned and probably some made-from-scratch-with-almond-milk hot chocolate to be consumed.

 More quilting to be done on a Victory Prayer Quilt for a Kansas cousin who had a heart attack and by-pass surgery a week and a half ago.

 I need to change to a Bobbin-Line thread to quilt the picture panels.

 I'm using one of the new cones of green for most of the rest of the quilting.

I've lost count of the number of prayer quilts ready for quilting (I think I'll line them up for a count this afternoon), and I'm really longing to remove a Singer 15-88 from my treadle cabinet, drop this treasure in, and try her out.  She needs a new name, and I'm open to suggestions.

For all my friends farther east wondering about what we're going to do with these storms, be aware that although they are stalled over Northern and Central New Mexico for the moment, they are not wearing themselves out, so we will probably send them east so we can be ready for the next ones.

And, I just looked out the window, and the high school senior from the farm across the road is out there shoveling for the little old ladies who live on our little street--there are some benefits to getting older!


Happy quiltmaking and knitting,

Candy for Quilters & What Mountains?!

I don't have another finished quilt, but hope to have one soon!
I do have some Candy for Quilters!

I started calling Fil-Tec Glide thread "Candy for Quilters" several years ago--because that's what it reminds me of--minus the calories of real candy, of course.

 At some point Fil-Tec started calling it "Candy for Quilters" too.  This is my latest order, which arrived Wednesday, but I didn't want to fight with the hard working local post office people and didn't have the tracking number with me, so I had to wait until I got home, just after they closed, to look it up.  I found out they had communicated "attempted delivery" to the shipper, but they hadn't really attempted delivery, because they didn't put a card in my post office box.  However, I was able to pick it up yesterday.

In addition to the 5000 meter spools, I ordered some Magna-Glide Classic bobbins, size L.  I chose colors I thought would most readily work on some awaiting quilt backs.

(I do have some crystal candy dishes/plates somewhere, but this favorite old Taylor Smith Taylor saucer is also one of my favorites.)

I do use these bobbins in my vintage sewing machines.  The magnet side goes toward the metal on the bobbin case (but probably would not have to if the bobbin threaded differently).  The magnet keeps the bobbin from spinning out of control when I'm going fast and just feeds very evenly through the machine. They've done well in my class 15 machines as well as in my machines that use a class 66 bobbin.  I haven't tried them on a Singer Featherweight because that uses class 60 bobbins, and is much too small for me to quilt on--yes, I've tried to quilt on it.  I'm sure I could set the stitch length at zero since the feed dogs don't drop.  But I'm just not a fan of tiny projects, so I've never done that.

Yes, I could wind Glide thread onto bobbins and have often done so, but the pre wound ones are wound more tightly and are ready to pop into the bobbin case.

Now for the mountains....there are none visible today!  I live on a high plateau, sometimes called the llano stacado and sometimes called the Estancia Valley.  We're about 6200 to 6400 feet in elevation and surrounded by mountains.  However, we are in the midst of our third/fourth storm this week and have thousands of feet of clouds and a bit of fog and, currently, snow.  The snow is so low that doppler radar is reporting it's not even here.  The mountains surrounding us are all hidden today. (When the mountains disappear, this little town reminds of the little town in Illinois near our family farm.) We have icy, treacherous roads, and more snow.  I got up very early, recognizing I'd need to do some shoveling.  There is a lot of ice under our snow.  I was worried about getting even to the highway, let alone 40 miles down the interstate to my school.  "Down" doesn't quite describe the commute because first we have to climb several hills (which are like mountains back east) and then descend into the city of Albuquerque. Albuquerque  posted two-hour delays for the East Mountain schools and within a couple of hours posted that they would be closed. Then the district I live in posted a school closure.
The state of New Mexico had already posted difficult driving conditions and some road closures.  The police in Albuquerque began closing streets/roads/interchanges due to ice.  Eventually Albuquerque Public Schools cancelled school for today.  Their closure then triggered the closing of a large number of private and state chartered schools as well as Central New Mexico University and the University of New Mexico.

Perfect license for quilting--except I need to do a lot of other things around the house too.  I really hope I accomplish a lot. Perfect day for a few pots of hot tea too!

May you all be warm, safe, and well-fed!

Happy quiltmaking and knitting,

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.....

Baking Fruit Pies

When I was a kid growing up on the farm, near El Paso, Illinois [not TX], it often fell to me to make the pies.

 In fact, it's safe to say that in our family, we ate more pies than cakes.  Without a doubt my grandfather and dad preferred pie to just about any other dessert, with the possible exception of ice cream.

I remember making pies several times years ago and then not bothering to do that very often because the crust, which I always considered the most work, was returned to me with just the filling eaten.  I've made a few pumpkin pies since then, but that's about it.  And frankly, as long as there were little kids in the house, I usually just baked the pumpkin custard and skipped the crust!

Sweet Teen came home a couple of weeks ago and announced that the FFA alumni were having a pie auction as  a fundraiser to benefit a local family that has experienced recent tragedy, and as an officer in the high school FFA chapter, she needed to bake a pie.  So we baked two.

We peeled lots and lots of Granny Smith apples, and the pie at the top is Sweet Teen's very first apple pie [with streusel topping].  It brought $50 at auction.

 This is the one that I expected to bring more.  It's an apple cranberry pie with an almond or hazelnut streusel topping (sorry, I've forgotten which we used).  You can see that she also made this crust a lot prettier.  It only brought it $35.  Of course, that's a lot more than any pie I've ever made!

With the leftover apples and cranberries, I made a little artisan pie and baked it in the DeMarle "hat." (I did try to secure a link to the DeMarle at Home catalog page, but was totally frustrated by trying to get it for you.  Probably something about their website not playing nicely with my browser.)  I did learn that you can buy DeMarle at Home from amazon.com--but you don't want to do that because you'll have to pay a lot more than getting the products from a representative.  (Joining the DeMarle at Home family of representatives is something I plan to do when my life changes somewhat--a great way to meet people, socialize, provide a needed product and service in a fun way, and even make some money!)

I'm thinking I'll be making more little pies since a full size pie in our current household is likely to end up in the garbage before the last piece makes it to our stomachs--not because we don't like it, but because a full size pie is just too big for us to eat in a timely manner.

(I'm thinking I probably bought that pretty red serving plate because it looked like a piece of fabric--because it certainly doesn't go with anything in our house--although it makes the pie look even more delicious.)

Happy quiltmaking....it would be a good idea to use a treadle to burn off a few of those pie calories!  Of course, I well working treadle takes almost no energy.

Parade Blues

I escaped from my workplace early so I could see Sweet Teen in the homecoming parade.

I was misinformed about the parade route--so was part of the police force, for that matter.
Missed the parade.  Missed my daughter on her float.  (Of course, the high school can post all kinds of [un]important messages to our phones and their website.  But they are incapable of posting the parade route. And a call to the city offices yielded more misinformation.)  Wonder how many other parents missed it.  I do know of at least one auntie who missed it. We had a lovely chat about the community while we were waiting for the parade.
However, here are some pictures from one of our city parks.  I love these sculptures that reflect our community's history.

 And I love this gazebo in the same park.

Makes me remember all the summer band concerts in all the town parks in the part of the country where I grew up.  Sadly, I don't think they ever have band concerts in this park.  I love the gazebo and all the reminiscences it inspires, just the same.

And I have to admit that the very best parade I ever saw anywhere took place in the Midwest decades ago when I saw a 10 or 12 year old boy marching down a street with his snare drum and most of the neighborhood kids marching along behind!