Weekly update: part 3, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the studio

"I've got rhubarb if you'd like some," W.D. posted on Facebook.  I went to her house and came home with this. 

A half hour later it was cut, bagged, and frozen. (Though today I made a rhubarb-strawberry pie. I found a bag of sliced strawberries at the back of the freezer dated June 30. Time to use them!)

Dicentra (bleeding heart) 

Hardy perennials and wildflowers are the mainstays of our garden.  I appreciate flowers more than I like cultivating them.

The vegetable patch will be tilled this coming week.  We are late but we are hopeful.

Aresaema triphyllum (Jack in the Pulpit) 

Papaver (poppy)

 In the studio:  it was time to make something just for the sake of it. Quilts without destinations or deadlines go together so easily!  This began with a dusty-pink 1990's print. There was just enough of it for the inner squares.  A second pink yielded enough for the outer squares with a half-dozen squares left over.  A third pink (with blue paisleys) is used in the setting triangles. There's a FQ-plus left of that.  The blue border is of a similar age.    The 3.5" nine-patches are from the Block Swappers.  Alas, participation in the group dwindled and it was closed last month.  I still have several hundred nine-patches on hand.

I've used this setting before:
here and here.

Weekly link ups:
Oh Scrap!
Monday Making
Design Wall Monday
Moving It Forward

Weekly update: part 2, OMG for May

I achieved the four parts of my stated One Monthly Goal for May.  Here is the finish link up

Part 1:  two tote bags for the Rotary golf outing raffle

Part 2:  a mug rug for a colleague who's retiring (and another for a friend who graduated from college)

Part 3:  three mug rugs for fellow Buduget & Finance committee members

Part 4:  a tote bag for the Budget & Finance committee chair

Thanks once again to Patty for sponsoring One Monthly Goal. It helps me focus and achieve!

Weekly update: part 1, the wedding

The Castle

Beautiful:  the day, the setting, and especially the couple.

The big event of the week was my niece's wedding.  It was held at Stronghold Camp & Retreat Center in Oregon, Illinois. That's about 100 miles from home.   Amelia went to camp there 20 years ago and fell in love with the Castle. (It was built in the late 1920's by the publisher of the Chicago Daily News as a weekend getaway. The Blackhawk Presbytery acquired it in the early 1960s.  They have a variety of accommodations for summer camp and for year-round retreats.)

It was a small wedding (the groom's side had more family members). 

Left: my nephew (25) and my sister (mother of the bride).



Ms. A wore a 1940's-era lace dress. She donned the vintage mink stole for the reception. (They are WWII reenactors, both history buffs.)


 Bohemian Wedding Wheels is the quilt I made for them.  

Weekly update: winnings, THE wedding, and OMG part D

It was cool but sunny on Friday for the Rotary Golf Outing at Shepherd's Crook in Zion. This is our club's major money-maker.  We hope to net over $25,000 to fund international and local projects. (We award $12,000 each in college scholarships to Zion-Benton Township H.S. graduates --  $144,000 so far.)

We are among the major sponsors (and we also get a hole sponsorship sign).  I donated a quilt to the live auction and two tote bags with books to the bucket raffle.  The woman who got the quilt has been the successful bidder in previous years. I posted a picture of the two tote bags last week.

I won the heads-or-tails coin toss -- $70!  That paid for the raffle tickets I bought ($60) with some left over.  I also won a basket with 10 Kaffe fat quarters, an Ott Light, and a rotary cutter.  (I actually needed a rotary cutter and of course I won't turn down fabric, especially Kaffe.)








On Saturday Stevens and I made a quick trip to Sheboygan, WI, for the Rotary District 6440 Awards Luncheon.  (Left at 9 a.m., got home at 4 p.m.) The Green Bag Project sponsored by our club won the annual Community Service Award.

But that was after The Big Event of the weekend.

I don't usually quilt at 5:30 on Saturday morning, but that's what I was doing while (whilst) watching the royal wedding. Wasn't it wonderful?  (And Bishop Curry's rousing sermon on the redemptive power of love was surely unlike any other preaching in St. George's Chapel at Windsor!)







I finished the project you see in the wedding-watch photo. It is Part D of my May One Monthly Goal -- a tote bag for the chair of the P.E.O. committee that I serve on.   P.E.O.'s flower is the marguerite, or daisy. The daisies are made from the same pattern as the mug rugs I wrote about last week.  There are three daisies on the other side and one daisy on the inside pocket -- seven daisies for P.E.O.'s seven founders.

All the tote bags I've made lately have been narrow and tall.  I need to make them wider and shorter. (Note to self!)

I'm ready to start something new.  Hmm.....

I'm linking up with other bloggers:
Oh, Scrap!
Moving it Forward
 Monday Making
Design Wall Monday

Weekly update: parts A, B, and C

I have three of the four parts of my One Monthly Goal completed.

A -- Two tote bags for the Rotary Golf outing on May 18

B -- A mug rug for a colleague who is retiring (luncheon May 17)  (And while I was at it I made one for a friend who's graduating from Gateway Technical College this coming Tuesday.) 

C -- Three mug rugs for P.E.O. committee members with whom I've served this past year
(presentation June 1).  (Daisies are the P.E.O. flower.)

I am narrowing down ideas for D, a tote bag for the P.E.O. committee chair.

I made a Chinese Puzzle block in pink for the May Rainbow Scrap Challenge .  It joins the January-April blocks on the design wall.

This month's Block Lotto is a rail fence variation (6-1/2") with white/green/blue. I made 8 blocks.

June is my month as the Block Lotto designer.  I have chosen the block, written the instructions, and made samples.  You'll have to wait until June 1 to see what it is!

Weekly linkups:
Design Wall Monday
Monday Making
Oh, Scrap!
 Moving It Forward
and Rainbow Scrap Challenge

P.S.  My sister and I with our mother on her last Mother's Day, 2001.

Weekly update: round robin results and a tote bag

"It's All About the Habit" was Sharon Evans' presentation at Wednesday's NLCQG meeting.

 She wore a nun's habit as a costume and set out Ten Commandments for good quilting habits.  The delivery was light-hearted, the advice serious. Great fun!

(And, by the way, Sharon has made SIX Dear Janes, each in a different genre and colorway. Wow.  Karen McTavish quilted them. Wow again.)












The guild round robin came full circle. We got our own starter blocks back.    I had forgotten what I wrote in the design notes, but it turned out that I suggested a rectangular setting. I asked for only batiks and that each round use some of the background from the initial block. I'm delighted with the results!

[That final border is made out of 1-1/4" squares.]







Here are the other round robin flimsies.

# # # # #

In my studio: I finished quilting Batik Chain (here's the flimsy).

I used a panel of batik hexie rosettes for the first of two tote bags for the Rotary Golf Outing.  (Photo in last week's post.)  The seams that joined the rosettes weren't very secure so I  zigzagged over each of them.    (The zigzagging took two hours: one panel for Father Brown and the second for Death in Paradise, two of our Saturday PBS programs.)

I call it a design element

A hexie trims the inner pocket 

Here's the initial fabric selection for the second Golf Outing tote. The event is Friday, May 18. I have other projects with due dates so I need to get cracking.

Monday link ups:
Design Wall Monday
Monday Making
Oh Scrap!
Moving It Forward

A centennial birthday

My father was born May 5, 1918.  His father was in the Army medical corps, stationed in New York, and they moved back to Chicago (Oak Park) when the war ended.

The family lived in Oak Park until 1928 when they moved to southern California. Dad graduated from South Pasadena High School in 1936.  He attended UCLA from 1936-1938. He transferred to Purdue because it offered a railway engineering concentration. He graduated in 1941 and moved to Pittsburgh to work for the Westinghouse Air Brake Company.

Mutual friends introduced Dave and Marion. They were married December 14, 1946. In early 1947 WABCO transferred Dave to the Chicago office. ("Temporarily," Marion always said, laughing. They lived in Chicagoland thereafter.)
























Dave was renowned as an expert on railway air brakes. (That may seem an obscure topic, but you certainly want railway trains to stop safely!) He wrote many technical papers and several books. He was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a life member of the Air Brake Association. 

He retired from WABCO at age 65 (1983) and spent the next ten years as a braking systems consultant. 

He was interested in many subjects -- natural history, archaeology, Biblical studies.   He was an accomplished draftsman and artist. His line drawings and lettering illustrated his presentations (and, later, the scrapbooks from their travels).   He and Marion attended many ASME annual meetings and other railway-related conferences. In 1988 he was invited to teach at a technical college in Lucknow, India. Of course Marion went with him for the five-week course!  They traveled to many other places with ACE Tours and Elderhostel (now Road Scholar).   

His mobility declined in his later years and he read stacks of mysteries from the library. He died on January 5, 2002. He got up from lunch at his favorite eatery (Wagner's Tavern) and his heart gave out.  But today's the day to remember and celebrate all the aspects of a rich life! 

Happy birthday, Dave!

April stash report and May goals

Finally, warm weather!

I remember making May baskets. Ours featured dandelions because those were readily available.

Fabric IN, April:  59-1/8, $159  (avg. $2.69/yd)
         OUT, April: 44-3/4
Fabric IN, January-April: 78-1/8, $179 (avg. $2.29/yd)
         OUT, January-April:  270-3/4
Net decrease:  192-5/8

The April purchases (23-3/8) were at the Quilt Festival. I also got 28 yards from the giveaway table at the April guild meeting.

I did well with a four-part list for the April One Monthly Goal. I have a similar list for May:
(a)   two tote bags for the Rotary golf outing (May 18)
(b)   a tote bag for the outgoing chair of the P.E.O. budget & finance committee
(c)   three mug rugs for the other members of the budget & finance committee
(d)   a mug rug for a library colleague who's retiring (luncheon is May 17)
The P.E.O. gifts will be presented at the state convention June 1.

The OMG link up has been a great incentive to concentrate on specific projects.
 Click here  for other OMG aspirations.

She likes it!  Outgoing Zion Woman's Club president Regina with the wallhanging I made to commemorate her term, presented at the luncheon meeting today.

I picked up my new red specs today. The 11-year-old pair they replace will get new lenses with prisms to wear for night driving. (I replace my contact lenses more frequently.)