Row Robins

I don't know what possessed me, it must have been a weak moment, when I agreed to participate in a row robin with some of the people that attend the AZ retreat. It must have been something about pushing myself a little in my quilting, but I feel totally out of my league.


This first picture is top to bottom, mine and Pat's rows. I had the silk screened squares and Pat added to them while I bound a quilt for her. She also wanted to keep me participating and I was uninspired and threatening to drop out.




These next rows belong, top to bottom, to Ami, Chris, and Kim. When we were discussing these rows everyone was talking about keeping it simple--as their lives were very busy. Simple?? I don't think so!




And last but definitely not least are, top to bottom, Judy's and Ellen's row. I got the honor of being first to work on Ellen's row. I've already started, and yeah, I'm keeping it simple!

Treasures unearthed!

The back entry and existing bathroom are finally finished and DH didn't take long to start on the living room. It featured a gawdawful shag carpet in reds, brown, and orange. When we lived in Colorado, our house came with a similar shag with green, brown, dark yellow. I called it my dead lawn carpet. This one looked like a lawn on fire. I'm sure things lived in there and when I vacuumed clouds of dust would emanate! Vacuuming always created more dust in our already dusty house. Pulling up the carpet revealed a layer of dirt, actual dirt, beneath the pad resting on several layers of old linoleum in an array of patterns. There are holes in the floor boards cleverly patched with flatened tin, but below the floorboards there were some treasures to be found.
He discovered four marbles, which I'll add to my marble collection, a knife, a glass chip in a green turquoise color, and a horse, which I'm thinking of incorporating in landscape "quilt" (I use the term loosely) which will cover our bedroom window blocker. I have a beautiful Ball jar full of marbles that came from a long ago auction, and I periodically add new finds to it. Also under the floorboards there was a mouse nest, though this house has been the least mouse infested place we've lived in. Field mice are a fact of life in the country, and I think they are rather cute until the take up residence in my cupboards! I also spied an intact, perfectly clean mouse skull. It's truly remarkable, but I'm having trouble getting a picture of it.

After my birds mobile, I must have still been in the mood to make three dimensional things because instead of working on my convergence quilt, I made a couple of sock creatures. They will await final adoption when just the right foster parent comes along!

It's a gloomy day, and now the wind has started again. There are signs of spring, and I'm ready for relief from the wind, but it's not going to happen today.

Where does the time go?

Boy my days just get away from me, one after the other until it's been weeks since I posted anything to my blog.

I made this little "mobile" (I don't know what else to call it and my husband dubbed it as such) for a long skinny wall in my bathroom, but it was too big. It fit perfectly on this little strip of wall beside the back bathroom door, near the back entry door that we use almost exclusively. It was fun, and a good use of beads and fabric scraps.

The wind continues to blow fiercely here. Today they claimed it was just going to be "breezy" instead of windy, but now I think it's progressed to "windy" once again. There are signs of spring though, a few tulip leaves up and the irises are getting taller and greener.

Whoa,I just remembered I had muffins in the oven! Good thing they didn't burn! Of course they weren't done when the timer went off and I checked them, and I thought...just five more minutes... It's a dangerous thing to sit down in front of the computer for "just" five minutes. Guess it's back to the sewing room for National Quilting Day. I'm getting ready to load my convergence piece on the longarm. Have some ideas of what to do with it after re-discovering the work of Jane Burch Cochran.