Midweek: show quilts delivered + top-along finished

 Monday's mail brought the good news that two quilts I entered in the Great Wisconsin Quilt Show have been accepted.   Though there's a lot on my to-do list, there was nothing on the calendar yesterday and I drove the long way through the countryside to deliver the quilts to Nancy Zieman Sewing Studio in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.   It's a bright and cheerful quilt shop in downtown Beaver Dam.  (Nancy's Notions warehouse used to be in an industrial park on the edge of town.)  

I did not buy a thing at the shop (fortitude!).  Instead I visited Horicon Marsh.  Stevens loved going to Horicon.  (I last blogged about it in 2022, part of a quilt delivery to Beaver Dam that year.)   It covers 33,000 acres.  It's partly a national wildlife refuge  and partly a state wildlife area Last time we went to the state portion (Stevens sat in the visitor center while I walked the trail).  This time I did the national side and the private non-profit  Marsh Haven Nature Center .  Not too hot, not too humid -- a perfect day!  

Clockwise: coneflowers, floating boardwalk, bladderwort, nodding onion, tall tickseed, the marsh, purple loosestrife. Center:  tussock moth caterpillars like milkweed as much as monarchs.  

An old quilt in a display at Marsh Haven and a newer quilt on the wall at the NWR visitor center.  

I returned by the shorter route (I-41/94) and was home at 3 p.m. 

# # # # # #

In the studio:   Sheryl on Safari is finished!   "Sheryl" is the August pattern for the Running Doe Top-along.   I used brown-and-black batiks.  The pattern was designed for layer cakes (though I cut from stash) and the blocks are 9-1/2" finished. 

 

The back uses parts of batik sarongs that I acquired at estate/rummage/thrift sales. 

I watched Zero Day on Netflix and finished listening to A Cold Heart by Jonathan Kellerman.  

Linking up with Wednesday Wait Loss

P.S. Two old guys at Horicon in 2022. 

Weekly update: quilt exhibit + finishes + reading

 We escaped the tornadoes and the flooding that hit Illinois and Wisconsin last week but there was a lot of rain.  It's the third-wettest April on record.  My basement stayed dry (I had the landscapers add a bank of soil around the problem corner of the foundation) but apparently there's a roof leak.  It's always something . . . 

On Friday Leslie and I met at Concordia University in River Forest to see an exhibit of quilts by Modern Quilt Studio (=Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr).  Leslie and I met at a P.E.O. convention and we immediately hit it off.  She lives in Oak Park, adjacent to River Forest (50 miles south of where I live).  She's not a quiltmaker but she has design experience. It was interesting to have a non-quilter's reaction to the gorgeous artwork!  

We posed with our favorites.

After that we had lunch at a restaurant in Oak Park.  

Traffic on I-94 and 294 was moderate and I made good time both down and back.

# # # # # #

I spent the weekend catching up on a number of things, not the least of which was four hours creating the PowerPoint version of my New Zealand trip.  I am giving two presentations on April 28 (afternoon: AAUW travel group in person; evening;  P.E.O. by Zoom).  I'll tweak the slides in a day or two.  I admit it was fun to revisit my photos and notes.

In the studio:  three finishes!

Villa Rosa Cherrydale pattern. (#5  for the Six Quilts/Six Weeks challenge.)

The batik Trip Around the World.  My OMG for April.  

It's red/taupe/charcoal though it looks kind of red/white/blue.  

I used sheets for backings on both and the serpentine stitch to quilt both.

Barb-the-quilter did a wonderful job on the red/green nine-patch.  I bound it last evening.  This will be the AAUW holiday raffle.   I'm definitely WAY ahead of schedule.

The back is from Barb M's estate sale.  

# # # # # #

Mari and her young son Levi flee from the oppression and abuse of a rural religious cult.  They return to her parents' home on Little Great Island off the Maine coast.  Her reentry to island life is difficult. Her parents love her and Levi but both sides are stubborn. How can she make a living as an organic farmer and conservationist? The island folk are conflicted, too, between the traditional lobstering (diminishing catches due to climate change) and generation-long summer residents with developers seeking to buy family homes and farms.

A lot happens in a short time (so that the novel doesn't get toooo long). That aside, the local color is terrific and it's a great story.

Linking up with Oh Scrap!  Design Wall Monday Sew and Tell  Monday Musings  . . . and a new-to-me link up Patchwork and Quilts

Friday check in: the corollary kicks in, but there's progress

 

The 24th annual Zion-Benton Senior Resource Expo was Wednesday at the Zion Park District Leisure Center.   This year Zion Woman's Club had a table along with area agencies including libraries (Zion-Benton (mine) and Waukegan), Lake County Forest Preserves, banks, home health care, and state and county officials. 

 

# # # # # #

In the studio:   

A house is the template for the chapter highlights display at the P.E.O. state convention.  Any medium is welcome (many chapters do scrapbooking-type collages). I use fabric, of course, and here's how it turned out.  The lettering is printed on adhesive label plastic (8-1/2 x 11 sheets)  that I put on after the quilting. I can peel off the labels after the convention.

(BTW, the smile on the sun is part of the fabric. I just fussy cut it.)

The bigger P.E.O.-related quilting project is April's OMG:  a Trip Around the World to use as the backdrop for my scholarship committee table.   I found many TATW designs and different TATW assembly suggestions.  What I kept going back to was this one from a Temecula Quilts book.  I liked the colorway.   Their pattern uses 1-1/2" squares.  I need a larger quilt and decided on 4-1/2" squares.  Remember that I made 37 TATW mug rugs in batiks for this display, so the backdrop quilt will be batik.  And using stash is a given. 

You know the saying, "Measure twice, cut once."  There is a corollary!  "Design twice, cut once."  And I violated that right off the bat.   I followed the Temecula colorway with three creams, three tans, taupe, red, charcoal, blue.  I cut 4-1/2" squares in all the colors, even if they weren't exactly the contrast I wanted. 

I didn't take a photo of the array on the design wall. Suffice it to say I wasn't thrilled.

Would I have to buy more fabric?   

I went back to the stash bins.  And look what happened! 

(And now I have 150+ 4-1/2" cream, tan, taupe, and blue batik squares to use in another project.)

The column on the right is the top row.  I began laying out the squares with the middle row and ran out of room at the top.  I wasn't going to risk messing up the sequence by moving everything down.  

I got all the rows pinned right away because I didn't want any of the patches to drift.  

At the end of last evening's sewing I had 12 rows sewn.

But now it's Friday morning.  I have to get going.  I'm having a quilty adventure today.  Come back on Monday to find out more!

Linking up with  Finished or Not Friday

Weekly update: an evening out, walking again, and finishes

 

On Thursday evening the Waukegan Historical Society hosted "Extraordinary Ordinary Women" by local researcher Meg Goljenboom. Kathy rode with me and we met June and Joann there. (I knew many of the other attendees, too.)

Meg  talked about aviation industry executive Olive Ann Beech, cabaret singer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, candy maker Ora Snyder (who had more than 30 Mrs. Snyder’s Home Made Candy shops in Chicagoland), hotelier Maria Ramirez Kramer, and Mildred Johnson who founded an air express package delivery service in the 1920s.

The weather was cooperative on Friday and Saturday. I enjoyed walks at Lyons Woods Forest Preserve and the middle unit of Illinois Beach State Park. A front came through on Sunday with chilly, blustery winds so I stayed inside.

There were several Mourning Cloak butterflies along the trail. I learned that they are emerging from hibernation. Pussy willows are 'in bloom' now, too.

# # # # # #

In the studio: I got a lot of sewing accomplished! I frequently comment that quilts with no deadline and no destination come together without fuss. That was the case with the batik stars and cake stands.

I'm especially pleased with the back. I used a batik sarong that I got from a dear friend's estate as well as two other batiks.

I deliberately kept the stamped label visible.

I replenished the stock of daisy mug rugs for the ongoing P.E.O. project.

Genre switch!

I'm participating in the 19th century mini-quilt swap again this year. I pulled out a box of CW repro units/orphans/etc. I discovered the pieced stars/9-patches, all assembled. All I had to do was add borders and quilt it. Done!

# # # # # #

One book, two ways:

A while ago I found a copy of Mary Norton's 1957 middle-grade fantasy Bedknob and Broomstick at a library book sale. It finally came to the top of the stack.

It was fun to revisit the story 65 or so years after I first read it.

The movie came out when I was in college and I'd never seen it. Note that the title words are plural for the movie and singular for the book. The version I rented from Amazon included a 20-minute behind-the-scenes feature that was very interesting. A fine accompaniment for Friday evening sewing.

Linking up with Design Wall Monday Oh Scrap! Monday Musings Sew and Tell

Midweek: star and cake stand flimsy + reading

 

I chose the purple batik for the sashing almost without thinking.  I used nearly all of it (just 4-1/2" x 18" left over).  I auditioned a couple of batiks for the setting, my limitation being what I have in yardage (rather than FQs and scraps). The peach won out.  I made the float extra-large. I'm going to keep it that way and skip an outer border. 

5-3/4 yards used for the flimsy.    I still have 1-1/2" scrappy HSTs and a lot of 1-1/2" squares.

 # # # # #

An epistolary novel is one written as a series of letters.   It's one of The Page Turner 2026 prompts.   AI helpfully provides a list of them, from Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) to The Correspondent (2025).  I've read all of those so I chose something different.  

I first learned about Maine humorist John Gould when I lived in Texas (my first library job).  One of the library patrons requested his books via interlibrary loan and I read and enjoyed them. Then I married a man with deep roots in Maine, and we moved there, so John Gould was part of  the literary atmosphere.   I met him once--he, like Stevens, went to Bowdoin College.  He passed away in 2003 at the age of 95.   We acquired most of his books, some as reprints and many from used book dealers.   

The Parables of Peter Partout was published in 1964.  Our copy is a first edition.  The fictional Mr. Partout lived at Peppermint Corner in Lisbon Maine (a real place), and wrote equally fictional letters-to-the-editor with stories about his friends and neighbors that are definitely too good to be true. (Or are they?)   62 years after the compilation was published they are as funny as ever.  

Here's one of the shorter ones.  

Linking up at Wednesday Wait Loss

Friday check in: playing with batiks + reading

 

I automatically think of Winnie the Pooh on a blustery morning like today.   

It's been a week of attending to a number of things.  On Monday my sister and I met halfway between our respective homes for a little retail therapy and lunch, and I was finally able to give her gift(s) for her mid-February birthday.  Tuesday I met with the trust attorney to get the ball rolling (belatedly) to retitle Stevens' car in my name (a different process when the vehicle is inherited).  Tuesday evening AAUW met in person with a really informative program about recycling.  (Among the things we learned:  just dump paper into the bin, don't bundle it or put it in boxes or paper bags;  it's okay to rinse jars and other containers, you don't have to scrub them clean; keep lids on containers because small things (like a soda bottle cap) just fall through the sorting screens and are swept up and landfilled.)   

# # # # #  In the studio:  the mug rugs are all bound.   I put the binding trimmings in the batik scrap bin and that led to making some batik crumb blocks.   

I've been perusing both of Emily Bailey's crumb quilting books so these may be put to use in the near future.

Off and on (mostly off) I've made 4" star and 4" cake stand blocks to use up a box of 1-1/2" batik HSTs and squares. 

 I made a few more last evening and put them on the design wall. 

I'm fairly sure the blocks will be sashed partly due to all the seams that are pressed one way and the other way and partly as a way to differentiate between the stars and the cake stands.  Other than that I'm not sure where this design will end up.  It's just fun to play!

# # # # #

Recent reading:

Thomas and his mum live in an English coastal town in the late 1950's.   He's following in his grandad's career as a shrimper, doing it in the traditional way with a horse and cart. It's a hard living that's threatened by new ways.  Even as he dreams of other things (he's an aspiring folk musician) he doesn't let himself hope too much. Then an American filmmaker comes to town with cash and a flashy offer.  Thomas gets caught up--momentarily.   

Brian Underwood writes with such precision, saying just enough and not a word more.  A story that sticks.

Buckeye is as good as everyone has said.   Two families are brought together by chance and by circumstance in a city in northwestern Ohio.  Ryan's observations of human nature are great.  "'The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right? And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it a flood, and then the water recedes.'"(348)    "What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we done with it. We give it away. We want it back....Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it." (430)  "The wisdom that comes with age was needling, [Cal] found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything." (446)     

I wonder what Buckeye would be like as a movie.

Ann recommended this in a recent blog post (Fret Not Yourself). Thank you!

 Roxie Laybourne was an ornithologist at the Smithsonian who pioneered forensic techniques to indentify birds, particularly those involved with airplane crashes and human crimes.  She was independent, determined, and opinionated, both in her scientific research and as she dealt with the male-dominated world of 1950's-70's science. Chris Sweeney's writing style is very engaging.

Linking up with Finished or Not Friday Brag About Your Beauties

Thursday night check in: reader, I quilted it + the stash report

The amaryllis will bloom while I'm away so I took it (and some produce) to Mike and Jen, the neighbors who will watch the house.  Not only do they have the house key but they also have the car keys because if the house is burning the cars need to get out of the garage. 

I was determined to finish The West Wing before the trip.  I watched four episodes Wednesday night (got through Matt Santos' election) which left me with five episodes for Thursday.   All that TV time meant sewing time. 

The prompt for round 2 of SAHRR is "seeing double."  I chose Double Four Patch, deconstructed. Well, technically I just constructed it halfway.  I don't want the project to get unwieldy, since it will be a wall hanging.   I used a text print to go along with the reading theme. 

I basted the batik courthouse steps Wednesday night and, by golly, I got it quilted Thursday evening.   (The West Wing ended. Whew. 155 episodes!  That left me time to watch two episodes of All Creatures Great and Small...more catching up.)

Here it is! 

 

The top doesn't look much different, but you can (sort of) see the jade green binding.

The back is a batik sarong that I got at an estate sale for $1.00.  It had been cut in half and sewn along the long edge. The estate sale cashier considered it a tablecloth. 

I added a strip along the side to make it wide enough. 

Since I won't be acquiring or using any more fabric in January, here's the stash report.

Fabric OUT, January:  66-1/2 yards.

Fabric IN, January:  none!  

Linking up with  Finished or Not Friday.  See you in a couple of weeks!

Midweek: it's a flimsy

 

Here it is!   63" x 77".  6 yards.

..... and of course more scraps resulted.... 

The prompt for SAHRR Round 2 is "seeing double."  I'm contemplating how to interpret that for my wallhanging.  

I'm in the throes of packing. I leave for New Zealand (Road Scholar #53) on Friday.

Linking up with Wednesday Wait Loss

Friday check in: catching up, something unexpected + reading

 

It's been sunny and hot all week. We really need some rain!  But it's been great for walks:  three sections of Illinois Beach and one forest preserve. 

Here's a closeup photo of fringed gentian.  You can clearly see the fringes at the edges of the petals.  The blue is such a heavenly color!  I found several clumps at the middle unit of Illinois Beach State Park.  

 Left: blue wood aster.  Top: apple, primrose.  Center: New England aster, white heath aster.   Bottom: purple lovegrass, hairy aster. 

I saw something move in the grass.  It was a frog.

# # # # # #

In the studio:   

A new guild BOM has begun.  Here are my blocks for September and October.  The instructions call for 2 yards of background fabric.  I'm using a print left over from another BOM (the resulting quilt was finished and donated long, long ago). 
 

This is month four for the guild round robin.  Because it's a secret I can't show you more.  Two rounds after this.

And here's the unexpected -- thought about, started, and finished this week.  I wanted a lightweight fall-ish top that's a little snappier than the shirts and tees that are my standard travelwear.  I pulled out the box of garment patterns, realizing that not only have styles changed but also there's a lot less of me than the last time I sewed clothing.  Despite that I went back to a reliable design.   I first made it in 1998 (!) and again in 2006 (!) and I still wear both jackets.  

I recall that I agonized over fabric selection back then.  This time it went easily.  Eight batiks for the front and back (the back has the same arrangement) and another batik for the lining.

And it's done! 

 Here are the other two.  

  

A very unusual approach to presidential history!  Engagingly-written and very informative.  I learned a lot, from the famous (Washington, Lincoln, JFK) to the lesser-known (Franklin Pierce).    

The author points out that a lock of hair was a tangible link to a person (loved one or celebrity) before photography.   

I got the ARC (advance reader copy) at ALA Midwinter 2020 -- the irony of a travel book published in April of that year!  In 2014 Knighton dealt with a romantic breakup by visiting ALL the national parks in the U.S. and documenting them for CBS Sunday Morning.   That helped him get over his heartbreak as well as launch his subsequent career.   

His approach is thematic rather than geographical.   There's Sunrise (Acadia), Animals (Everglades, Channel Islands, Pinnacles, Death Valley), Mystery (Crater Lake, Congaree), and so on -- ending with Sunset (Grand Teton, Yellowstone).  He talks to rangers and fellow travelers. He relates historical, geological, and other interesting information.  I enjoyed the journey.

Linking up with Finished or Not Friday