Long Time Since I've Posted

I doubt anyone is even checking my blog these days because it has been so long since I posted anything. I have been doing some quilting, but I'll have to admit much of my time between November and February was been spent online house-hunting. My husband announced his retirement in January. He is a librarian at Washington and Lee University and will be retiring at the end of June. This has been in the works for awhile, though pretty much in secret. We plan to move to McDonough, GA, where one of our daughters and her family live. That means we will also be much closer to my daughter and her family in Marietta, GA, and to my son and his family in Athens, GA. We were in GA for Thanksgiving and Christmas and looked at houses both trips. After Christmas we even went with a real estate agent to see 9 different houses. We were back there in February, looked at about 9 more houses, and a few days later made an offer on our favorite one that we looked at for the first time in December. The owners accepted our first offer, and we closed on the house April 30. We've already moved some stuff in, and will be taking more there in a couple of weeks, and will officially move in June 26. Exciting times, and sad too, because we are moving from a town we've lived in, except for 2 years, since 1983.

Quilting-wise, I have finished the hand-quilting on Reilly's quilt and gave it to her in February. Here I am marking some of the designs I handquilted on it. Here you can see some of the hand quilting and here is a close-up of one of the corners of it. and Miss Reilly in her crib on her new quilt.

My Christmas projects included another tablerunner, so I was able to give each of our 3 GA kids a tablerunner. Then I made 8 napkins to go with each of the 3 tablerunners. Here is the latest runner and napkins - I also made bags with ties attached for each of the grandkids for Christmas. The boys' bags with drawstrings are in the front, and the 3 girls' ones are in the back with ribbons that can be tied into bows stitched to the bags.

For Easter I made each of them an Easter basket, similar to the ones I made for our girls when they were little, probably 25 years or so ago. This one is Reilly's and this one is for Atticus. Here are Reba, Jack and Lillian with their baskets. Reba's is the same fabric as Reilly's, but purple, Jack's is the same fabric as Atticus' but green and yellow, and Lillian's is a red print. Reba stuffed hers full with more eggs.

One of our recent guild workshops was called "Nickelmania" - here is the beginning of my version of that idea. I doubt that it will be any more finished by the time I move, but I will have a room just for quilting in my new house so hope to get back into serious quilting then.

For 3 years now I have contributed a few blocks to the quilts that a group of library-related quilters make to be raffled or auctioned at the American Library Association meeting. Here are the blocks for this year's quilts. This one is Carol Doak's Connecticut Star, and these are 3 Wonky Log Cabin blocks. You can see that these quilts will be quite different! The third quilt for the raffle is a bookcase - a pattern that I definitely want to do sometime.

My main goal quilt-wise before I leave here is to finish my second comfort quilt. It was started in July of last year when we had a workshop to get some more started. This is the front and the back of it. Just need to pin-baste it and quilt it. I will be doing it on my machine - probably just some diagonal lines in each section. VesuviusMama will recognize some of the backing fabrics! And she will be surprised that I have actually posted on my blog after all this time.