My quilting has taken a back seat since August 13 when I left here to go to Johnson City, TN to visit my mom for the night, then on to Marietta, GA to stay with our oldest daughter and her family. They were expecting their 3rd child on August 16 and needed some help getting ready and someone to stay with the older two while they were at the hospital. Lillian arrives Saturday afternoon just a few minutes before I got to the hospital. I would have loved to be there for the arrival, but was staying with the siblings. Our middle daughter and her husband came up to help with the kids, but I didn't leave quite soon enough after they got there. I did get to hold Lillian a few minutes after I got there and later that afternoon this picture was taken of me with the three siblings. 
If you look closely you can see that Jack and Reba were just as interested in Mom's crackers as in Lillian! After Lillian and her mom came home from the hospital my son and his son, Atticus, came from Athens, GA to visit - here are cousins Atticus and Jack in the Disneyland t-shirts we bought them 
. Reba wanted me to take pictures of her too, so here is one of the best ones - 
.
I had time for dinner at a cute little restaurant, The Fickle Pickle in Roswell, with my nephew, his wife and their new baby, Sofie. Here they are with the quilt I had just given them for her - 
Yes, Sofie has red hair - hopefully it will be as beautiful as her mom's!
I did get a little quilting done while I was in GA. I have started a quilt for Lillian - 
I have eight more stars to piece and the outside border to finish piecing. Those stars are hard for me to get just right, so I have taken a little break from it and have been working on my Grandmother's Flower Garden. I now have 25 out of probably 91 flowers - 
with this on our bed I have a better idea of how far I have to go! I am sure after this weekend I will be getting back to Lillian's quilt, but this weekend we are going to DC to see 2 Braves' games, then back home Sunday night and the probably to Richmond for the last Richmond Braves' game Monday afternoon. I see more GFG flowers being made on these trips!
My Guild, Rockbridge Pieceworkers Quilt Guild, has a quilt show as part of the Rockbridge Regional Fair in July. I joined the guild in August 2006, but was not ready to put anything in last year's show. This year I put two of my quilts in the show - the T-shirt quilt 
and the Butterflies and Hydrangeas quilt 
. Neither of them won a prize, but it was neat to see them displayed in a public place. The quilting group that I lead at our local Senior Center also put a quilt in the show that several of us worked on, so that was neat for those ladies to see their handiwork on display. 
For me the best part of the quilt show was that our youngest daughter entered 5 of her quilted wallhangings in the show. I am showing them here with their labels so you can see what she said about each one. She is in her second year of working on organic farms in the Columbia County, New York area. "Flame," 
"Chocolate," 
"Bodo," 
"Wiltsie Bridge," 
and "El Corazon." 
She has painted on some of them, and I think just did a terrific job on them. She has an art background, but has only been quilting for a couple of years. Allie just recently finished a quilt for the daughter of her current employers that they commissioned her to make for their daughter's wedding. Here is a picture of her and my hubby with that quilt -
She designed the quilt herself, cut out all those orange flowers from some batik fabric and machine appliqued them on, machine quilted the quilt and included some botanical designs in the quilting and has a quote from Khalil Gibran quilted in cursive writing around the border - 
Quite an amazing job I thought! The couple did not see the quilt until the reception, where it was hanging up for all to see.
It's not that I haven't been quilting, although summer and summer trips have intervened in that a bit. Since my last posting, we went to Cincinnati for a weekend to see the Atlanta Braves play the Reds, one of our daughters and her husband visited for a weekend, we went to Anaheim for a library conference and stayed to be tourists for a few days, we had a week in Hatteras Village on the Outer Banks, and we went to Richmond to see the Richmond Braves play. Next week I will go to Atlanta for the arrival of #4 grandbaby - my oldest daughter's 3rd baby is expected to be delivered on Sat, August 16, unless she decides to arrive earlier. In between these trips I have been doing some quilting. The only one that I have finished is a rag quilt for my second great-niece, but I don't want to show it until I have given it to her, which will happen sometime while I am in Atlanta. I have finished all but about 6 blocks of the Orange Crush Quilt, and have started putting the rows together. Here is a possible arrangement for it - 
and a picture of the one corner that I have sewn together - 
I'm thinking that for the border I want to use a narrow strip of the black and then a wider border of the green, with a few of the leftover blocks centered as shown on each side of the quilt. However, since this is not for anyone but us, it is now on the back burner with several other quilts.At our July guild meeting we had a workshop on the New Orleans Puzzle Quilt. Here is what I did during the workshop 
- this is 1/2 of it. It is also now on that same burner since it is for us too. We had to sew all of our strips together for this project before arriving at the meeting so that we could get this much done during the workshop. It can be finished to have all these points and used as a table-topper or wall-hanging, or could be finished by filling in around the corners with trapezoid-shaped pieces to square it off. I'm thinking wall-hanging, but we'll see.Since we are having a new granddaugher soon I am working on a qult for her now. Her parents have requested something with red, purple and black - and nothing babyish. After much searching online I found a fabric that has all of that in it and have now added considerably to my stash in those colors. I am using a Fons and Porter Love of Quilting pattern, July-August issue - "Glory Days" - but using lots more fabrics. Here is what I have done so far on it, photographed on the usual blue carpet. 
I think I will not use the goldy cream that is the center of one of the stars -- it goes with the focus fabric, but doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the quilt. Those 9-patches are easier to make than the stars -- can you tell?? Our guild had a quilt show last month - I'll talk about that in my next post. And I will try to make that soon - at least before I head out to Atlanta on Wednesday afternoon. I have to plan my computer time more carefully now since we use the computer to watch and/or listen to the Braves on MLB.com - and we watch every game they play!
I received a message from Blogger recently that my blog had been identified as possibly being a spam blog! I had to request a review of my blog in the next 20 days or my blog would be removed, and until that review had been completed I would not be able to post to my blog. I requested the review right away, but have not heard back from Blogger. I am testing to see if I can now post again.
