Snip, Snip, Snip - and some family time

The frayed edge quilt for Lily has just come out of the dryer after two rounds of washing and drying to make sure it is nice and fluffy.  All it needs now is the label and I am waiting confirmation on her full name before printing it on the label material. Here it is when I was still snipping.   I had hoped to get it finished by Friday so I could deliver it to the grandparents yesterday but that didn't happen. We'll see them again Wednesday so I'll deliver it then. While I was making this one I kept thinking that I wanted to make a big one for us. I have a lot of the squares cut for one similar to this one  that I made for the most cold-natured of our daughters and her hubby 2 years ago. In fact, since I started this blog entry I have laid out the front of a slightly smaller one for us. The big challenge will be what to put on the back of ours since I have run out of some of the fabrics I used on the front.  In fact, with two of the diagonal lines I alternated two similar fabrics on the front. Can you tell which ones they are?  This is the top part of the quilt   and here is the bottom part of it - my table is in the way of putting it all together in one place.   This one is on my "design floor" since my "design bed" in the guest room still has the orange crush quilt on it and the design wall I plan to hang up has the quilt from a retreat I went to in November still on it. How many more spaces can I find to lay out quilts on before I finish up some of them? Well, the plan is to work on this frayed edge quilt this week, then finish the top of the orange crush the next week. As long as I have it finished in time for the Bonnie Hunter workshop I'm taking with my old guild in Virginia of February 11 and 12 I'll be fine. 


As I look at the pictures above, I see that I have a couple of blocks out of place - why is it that you can see errors in a picture easier than you can see it just looking at it?


My oldest daughter has started working on her first quilt and we are planning to get together to sew on Thursday.  She is an attorney who works from home on a contract basis with other attorneys. The work is not as steady as working in a firm, which she did for several years, but her time is much more flexible, and allows her to volunteer in her son's kindergarten class. Her two younger ones go to day-care, so we should have some uninterrupted time to sew, then time to visit with them when they come home from school. Sounds like great fun to me. If I can get at least some of my rows of this quilt sewn together by then I could begin sewing the rows to each other while I am there. Always helps to have a goal, even if sometimes you don't reach it.


We were with this daughter and her family Friday night and Saturday morning. It takes a little more than an hour on a good traffic day to get from our house to theirs on the north side of Atlanta. My hubby and my daughter and all of her family participated in the Polar Bear Run (5K for Dave and Becky, 2K for her husband and son, cub runs for the little girls) Saturday morning at a church near her house. It was the first time our family had done anything like that with 3 generations participating - we hope it won't be the last!


After the run we came back down to our county to go to our nephew's wrestling match. He is a high school senior, and we have been attending several of his matches. We are all hoping he makes it to the state championships.


Friday I was able to help out the daughter who lives about 10 minutes from us. Their heat went out Thursday night, and I was able to go over to the house to let in the repairman on Friday so they didn't have to take off from work. Then that afternoon I picked up their 18-month old from her babysitter and met her mom at the doctor's office for her well-baby check-up so she didn't have to try to leave early from her teaching job to get to the appointment on time.


I am SO glad that we are able to do all these things for and with our family down here!

A Helpful Hubby

I just posted the text below on Quiltville Chat but decided after doing it that it deserved a wider readership - so here it is.

After reading recently the laments of Bonnie Hunter and others about the lack of help from hubbies during the holidays I just had to write to speak up for the other side. Yesterday my DH took off 1/2 day from work, which he rarely does, so that we could go to the tree farm we've gone to most of the last 20 years and cut our tree. Since the farm is out of town, we combined it with a trip to get one of cars its 120,000 mile check-up. The car part of the trip did not turn out as planned - something about gaskets - and may end up costing us as much at $1500 and they are keeping the car over the weekend. They gave us a loaner though and we decided to proceed with the other part of the trip. We got the tree, didn't mess up the loaner getting it home, put it up and decorated it last night. He cut the tree, put it in the stand, carried up the boxes of decorations from the basement, unfurled the lights while I placed them on the tree, put as many ornaments on the tree as I did while we both hummed sang along to some of our Mannheim Steamroller Christmas albums, and swept up afterwards. We put up a tree every year even though our 4 kids are all grown and gone from home - and we go to GA where most of them are every year for a week or so at Christmas. Soon he will help me select a photo for our Christmas cards and help write the Christmas letter.Then together we will sign the cards and put the labels and stamps on them.To make this a quilty post, I will also say that he takes great interest in what I am quiting on, and will help with fabric selections for the ones I make specifically for us. Oh, and he also helps with the dishes every night, vacuums every weekend and will even squirt cleaning stuff in the bathroom bowls without my asking. I think I made a terrific choice almost 34 years ago when we met and married - and I think I'll keep him around!!