What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

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I finished quilting the second version of Twinkle.  

I spoke to the driver of one of the trucks hauling rocks for the shoreline stabilization project. He said the quarry is in Waterloo, Wisconsin.  Rocks for inshore are trucked in. Rocks for the offshore reefs are trucked to the Port of Milwaukee and sent by barge, a trip that can take six hours.  Because the weather has been so mild they've been able to get weeks ahead of schedule.  

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 The fifth installment of Barb M's estate sale was Tuesday afternoon.  (See here, here, here, and here for the previous sales.)  A quick recap:  Barb passed away in 2018 and left a LOT of sewing stuff -- machines, thread, notions, patterns, kits, and FABRIC.  Barb's husband and family finally needed closure but couldn't deal with it all.  

Enter Paula who enlisted a group of her friends.  Since September they've had monthly sales, the first in Paula's garage and the others in a hotel meeting room.  It took until December to get everything out of the house ...

I was going to post on Wednesday. I was going to post on Friday.  But things happen.

To make a long story short, I've been figuring out how to adapt the household layout to S's limited mobility and particularly to his advancing dementia.  He wrenched his knee last week so going down to the basement family ...

Here are my Bramble Blooms blossoms.  They're fused (Heat 'n' Bond Light) and sewn with a narrow zigzag stitch.

The weekend began and ended with concerts.   The Box Band played a lively set of bluegrass, folk, and country at our church on Friday evening.  The Kontras Quartet performed Haydn and Prokofieff at the season opening of the Lake County Community Concert Assn.  on Sunday afternoon.

A friend tipped me off to an estate sale on the west side of town (a street I didn't know existed).  She said there was a lot of sewing stuff.   I went mid-morning Saturday when everything was half off.  I bypassed the upstairs and garage and went to the finished basement which had ...

The back used up some long-in-the-stash fabrics.

There was an estate sale in town this weekend.  The website photos showed sewing machines, notions, patterns, and a lot of fabric. I went on Friday (opening day) to get an idea.  Apparently the woman made clothing ...

On the way back from a lake shore walk we saw two cranes at the edge of a pond in the park.  I was able to get pretty close to them.

This weekend there was an estate sale about three blocks away.   I had walked past the house often but I didn't know the people who lived there.  (I looked them up: he died in 2012 and she died earlier this year.) I went on Saturday when  everything was 50% off.

There were ...

On Friday I picked up Erika and we drove to Nordstrom's at Woodfield Mall to have lunch with six other AAUW friends from the northern suburbs.  It was SO wonderful to see everyone in person!!   (We've met at Nordstrom's cafe a couple of times before. I don ...

(The gold berries were on a tree. I don't know the species.)

Less than a mile to the north ...

When I posted the photo of 50 red/white Ohio Stars earlier this week I warned you that I was thinking about settings.  

Here's the result!   The sashing is not a repro but it was the right tone.  Deb Tucker's Square Squared ruler made easy work of the cornerstones. (I tried the Square-in-a-Square ruler, and even went to a class for it, but it was awkward to use. I like Deb's ruler better.) 

I have 20 white-corner Ohio Stars ready for the next project. 

Autumn is in the air.  A squirrel left this black walnut at our back door which opens onto the garage. The closest black walnut tree is at the far end of the across-the-street neighbors' yard. 

The smoke from the western wildfires affected the sunrise over Lake Michigan.  (I was never outside at the right time to catch the fire-reddened sunset.) 

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It's Labor Day weekend already? Where has the summer gone? 

 xx In the  ravine on Sunday afternoon:  lobelia.

xx I went to two estate sales on Friday.  It turned out that I know the families of both from church.  I remember Judy talking at coffee hour about cleaning out her mother's  house which had been the family home for more than 60 years.  Mom didn't throw anything out and bought (and bought) from the TV shopping sites.  

This was a week of virtual conventions.  I confess that I let most of the hours of programming pass me by -- Rotary, American Library Association -- just too much to keep track of.  I did manage to participate in two ALA committee meetings.  I tuned into the message from the outgoing and incoming presidents of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, as well as the AAUW-IL year-end wrap up.  Meanwhile, Facebook had an Alpha Gam Stay at Home Convention. It was great fun to connect with so many sisters. I haven't been to an Alpha Gamma Delta convention since ...

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."  That's a brief version of Isaac Newton's third law.  I learned this week that it applies to quilting -- at least to my stash.

The guild had the annual Raffle Mania at this week's meeting. That's an opportunity for members to fling no-longer-loved quilt-related stuff and, perhaps, get some new-to-them stuff in return.  It's a bucket raffle where each item has a paper bag where you put tickets for what you'd like to win. If you really want it, put in many tickets.  Members get ...

So, for reasons still fuzzy to me, I thought I could actually do the 31 Days Writing Challenge while in the throes of setting up an estate sale.

Silly me.

What was I thinking?

Since I’m not in the habit of beating myself up (OK, I am, but not today), I’m choosing to not feel badly about my little failure. In fact, I feel more like this…

Even though I didn’t manage to eloquently chronicle the inside baseball of estate sales for the last 20-some-odd days like I had hoped, I can at least share what I ...