Holiday Booty Swap arrives in Australia

Kate posted a message on the previous entry below, that she has indeed received the quilt. Yeah!!!

Holiday Booty Swap

"A Mid-Winters Night Dream" this is the swap I made that is off to Australia. Measuring about 25 by 18 inches, it is machine appliqued and quilted and the reindeer are thread painted.

The beautiful quilt I recieved from Anjea in Texas, can be viewed here on her blog. Quilted Epee: Qults, Fencing and...Flamingos?

So What's On Your Camera?

So what's on your camera? Here's what I found on mine...4 weeks ago we visited the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Below are bronze statues of the "Pennsylvania Delegation" to the signing of the Constitution. This room has life size bronze statues of all the signers.



Independence Hall

The Independence Visitors Center, behind that is where the Liberty Bell is.


State Flags.


The delicious cake I baked for Danielle's birthday, we like to recycle candles...

And now to why I really uploaded my photos. I am participating in a holiday quilt swap, and wanted to share the progress. I am going to thread paint the reindeer, and applique the other sections. This is one of the reindeer, just the under sewing. It is a sandwich of 2 pieces of water soluble stabilizer, with a piece of small weave tulle in the middle.

I am auditioning fabric for the background. I really love the snowflakes and wind as well as the stars with the swirls and in the corner is a black background batik with splashes of color. I like the cloud fabric better, so I think the gray fabric is winning, it produces a better contrast. Anyway isn't the winter sky gray most of the time?

Simple Needs is having a give-away. The deaadline is November 7, stop by and leave a comment on the October 27th, post. Also visit Calamity Jane's Cottage and choose your package for her giveaway. (All winners are chosen at random.)

5 Friends...VOTE

Wake Me Up...

lyrics by Green Day

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends


Like my mother's come to pass
Seven years has gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends


Here comes the rain again
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again
Becoming who we are


As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when September ends


Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends


Ring out the bells again
Like we did when spring began
Wake me up when September ends


Here comes the rain again
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again

Becoming who we are
As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when September ends


Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends


Like my mother's come to pass
Twenty years has gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends


Wake me up when September ends
Wake me up when September ends


In loving Memory of my mom,


Joan Adam
October 11, 1931-September 12, 2008

Give Away

Another blog give away. This is another great one!! Dena at the Sugar Shop is giving away a gift certificate to Over the Rainbow fabric shop. Stop by and leave a message.

Stop and Smell the Flowers

This absolutely stunning , beautiful quilt arrived in my mailbox today from Margaret Gunn in Maine from the Miniature Booty Swap. Thanks A million!!!!
This is the little treasure I made and it is going in the mail today. The stars are all 3-inch pieced blocks.
I embroidered the label, incorporating it as the quilt back. Hope she likes it.

Another Blog Give Away

Quilting with Debi is celebrating her 200th post with a giveaway, just post a message and your in the contest, advertise it on your blog and get and extra 5 chances.

Blog Give Away

Calamity Jane's Cottage is giving away an adorable Halloween purse, just leave a comment, get your name in twice by posting it your blog.

Under Construction

Mini Booty Swap under construction...The star blocks are 3 inch squares.

Come Sail Away...

Last week, the whole family was in Pensacola, Florida for a week long sailing regatta. The format of the racing is the fleet is divided into 4 groups, A B C D. A round robin is sailed for the first 3 races, with each group sailing each other once (ex. A vs. B, C vs. D). Each group races twice on Mon, once on Tue., and then the cut is made, just less than half the numbers of entrants. In this regatta, the top 29 sail in the Championship Division, and 30 were in the Presidents division. 4 more races are sailed after the cut. Dan sailed with Ben and Danielle. Luke sailed on boat # 1, Beth and I were on a spectator boat everyday. The spectator boat was a J30 named HOOT. Team Red... Luke is the person in the middle. Below is HOOT. I am standing by the mast, Beth is on the bow.
Dan won race 2, division 2. This was the first time he won a race before the “cut” at a Nationals, and they had 3 top 10 finishes.
Finishing first!!! Team Red also won the Dave Valla Memorial trophy awarded to highest finishing boat with all family members. They finished the regatta in 15th place.

The Quilt Show - Mary Manahan

My friend Mary Manahan will be exhibiting a retrospective of her work at the Queenstowns Art Gallery in Hopewell, NJ. Be sure to stop by and visit if you are in the area, it will be fabulous!

Figs © Mary Manahan 2007

September 13, 2008 - November 1, 2008

The Queenstown Gallery
24 West Broad Street
Hopewell, NJ 08525

Opening Reception Saturday September 13th 5:30 - 8:00
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday 9:30 - 5:30
Saturday 10:00 - 4:00

For More Information: 609.466.0817

The Quilt Show - These quilts done by Mary Manahan are not your grandmothers patchwork quilts of yesteryear, instead they are all very vibrant in color, texture and design. The artist makes use of many different kinds of fabrics from standard cotton to silks. She dies and paints some of the fabrics in order to get the colors and styles that she wants for the images that she is designing and each one is done with both sewing by had as well as some machine work. From a distance you might think that you are looking at a paining while viewing Mary’s quilts.

Etiquette

Please leave a comment, even if you are anonymous.

So here’s the background:

We belong to an informal sailing club with interests in promoting both racing and cruising. The club is based at a state park, there is no club house or building to gather its members, and “pop-up” tents are often used at specific events. It is an all volunteer organization, with elected officers, each with his/hers own responsibilities.

At a recent club event, which as it turned out, was the biggest in club history, we could tell by the number of members who signed up. It was decided to contact to the local newspapers to let them know. They came with a reported and photographer. This was great promotion for the club.

As with many events involving food, a deadline was set for people to sign up by to insure the appropriate amount of food to order from the caterer. As usual, there were many who sign up after the deadline, resulting in having to change the food order a few times.

There were also 2 big party tents that had to be washed and set up ahead of time for the event dinner to be held under. There was a race committee and awards were purchased for the event.

The situation:

After dinner, now this is a very informal picnic, the club Commodore stood on a picnic table to hail the crowds attention: he 1) introduced himself, 2) mentioned it was the biggest event in club history, that the newspaper was there with a photographer, 3) thanked the officer responsible for arranging the event dinner and a round of applause was given, (no one else was thanked) 4) passed the “floor” over to the officer presenting the awards.

What is wrong with this picture???

Later that evening, the officer in charge of the dinner resigned their position, stating it was improper of the Commodore to introduce himself before thanking them for the job they did, stating it was not proper etiquette, they felt his thank you was “an after-thought” and felt that their efforts are not appreciated enough.

Now granted, this is an all volunteer club, but how high on a pedestal should ones efforts be place?

My "New" Sewing Table

In my attempt to improve my free motion skills, I realized my sewing table needed to either be changed, as buy a new one, or adjust an existing one. So here's the project... below is an old photo of the wood top table my embroidery machine sat on. My Bernina is on a folding office table. I swapped the items on the wood table to that of the folding table, with the folding table now in the space the wood table was. Using my Sew Steady Table as template, we measured the area to cut.
With a jigsaw, Dan cut the table, following the curved corners of the from the template.
The photo below is what the underside of the table looks like. Using 3-inch L brackets, the cut out section was lowered to the height of the sewing surface on the machine. A perfect fit!

On the Marty watch...

Marty Reasoner is now an Atlanta Thrasher. Marty has been in the NHL over 9 years and has played for St. Louis, Edmonton , and Boston.

(Photo captured from the Thrashers web site and is here without permission from it's owner. If the owner would like it removed I will gladly do so.)

Tri-ing Day

Sunday, July 13...here we are showing our body marks. They wrote our number on both arms, both hands and our ages on our right calf with an R on the left , for Relay, with a permanent black marker.Here we are before the race start. Each wearing our "own hat", Danielle was doing the bike leg, Beth the swim, and I am running.
After the race, all finishers receive medals. I ran my fastest 5k so far, 37:56, Danielle's bike time for 17 miles was 1:00.27, and Beth's swim time for 700 yards was 10:25. We would have finished 8th of the 14 relays.

Fire

Yesterday afternoon, we heard an explosion and saw plumes of black smoke at our house which turned out to be an exploding propane tank that heated the adult pool of the swim club we used to belong to, the previous 18 years. Danielle is a lifeguard there, thankfully she had the day off. No was injured in the 2 alarm fire.

The building on the right, behind the 4 lane adult pool, is the one that burned.

Sail Sisters

This past weekend was the Thistle Great Lakes Championship held at the Seneca Yacht Club in Geneva, NY. Dan sailed with Ben and Beth in this regatta. This is not our boat, just a random photo I took of the boats sailing downwind.
The photo below is a mark rounding, there were 63 boats at this regatta.
There has been longstanding shenanigans at regattas between Dan and his friend Bill that has been going on for well over 25 years. With stunts such as putting a boat in the swimming pool overnight, tossing a few spare items of hardware in the bottom of the boat to make you worry if something broke, moving port-a-johns, plastic wrapping a boat, the list goes on and it is truly just for fun. Well we did not camp at the regatta, so to protect the boat, Dan pad locked the cover to the boat trailer as well as strung a bike lock through the wheels so the boat trailer could not be moved. As the news spread of what he did, one thing we did not count on, was Bill put a lock on top of our locks. It was truly very funny.
Guilty....
On Sunday Carol Soderlund invited me and my friend Delia to her house and we had a personal quilt show of her many masterpieces as well as a house and studio tour. Carol's husband sails Thistles too. Carol does not race, but told us the boat is really hers because it was picked it up on a Mothers Day. After the racing was over my brother and his wife who live in Rochester, drove to Geneva to have lunch and visit with us at the club.

Two Men and a Tent

Two men, Dan & Jim, were on mission to repair the center hole at the top of a party tent where one of the main support poles is placed. Here's their dilemma. How do they sew it with that volume of canvas? (Not on my machine!)First they placed it over the gurney, but couldn't figure out how that would work...then they placed it over the trash cans, thinking one of them would get inside the can and the other outside so they could pass the needle back and forth. Neither wanted to get in the can...They thought about draping it over the boats, where one of them would be under the the canvas...again, neither wanted to be in that position either. Then came the car idea, drive it to the back yard, open the windows, drape tent over car with sewing area positioned over the open window, one sits in the drivers seat, the other stands outside, passing the needle back and forth to sew the tent. Hmmm............

New Blogger Page Element

Blogger has a new page element under layout. Its a blogroll of your favorite blogs. I copied, pasted the URLs of Blogs I read to see how this works. You can see on the side bar it tells you the last update. I didn't delete the original list, I want to check it out for awhile. It is set to make the most recently updated blog top on the list., the other option is alphabetical.

The Rose

Sun painting project Two. I free motioned the outlines and veins of the leaves as well as the shape of the rose, added diagonal background lines then framed it a few strips from a recently purchased jelly roll. It's clickable fo a detailed view.

I like this so much I added it to my Blog Header!

Sun Painting part Two

I want to improve on my free motion quilting skills, so I've been using these little sun images to play around with. I saw on Sue Reno's blog she used a plate of glass over the object. Granted she is using cyanotypes and heliographic prints where mine is Setacolor paint. I used coins to hold down the leaves, bad idea, after the fabric was dry, you can see all the round coin shapes on the leaf images.

PS...I forgot to mention Grandma is back home now. Dan and I went to visit her a few weekends ago, she has a dog, (it was Marty's) J.J. to keep her company. They are so cute together, J.J is very attached to her.

My First 5k

Well I did it, and I wasn't last to finish! My time was 39:43, (real time was 39:28, it took us 15 seconds to cross the start line) which was great for me. My goal was to run it under 40 minutes. I have run the same course before always around 43-45 minutes. So this was awesome.This is the dam...the race started at Sailors Point, crossed the dam to Galena Village, then back. This link is a pdf map of the lake.

At the lake...Just before the start...Crossing the dam the first time...Sprinting to the finish...like the cute running skirt?At the finish line.