What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

This has to be my second favorite weekend of the year behind Thanksgiving!! Autumn is on the way, football season has started and the Mountain State Fair is in full swing! I get to bring out the fall quilts, change the wall hangings and get ready for the next three months of cooler weather, wearing sweaters, and seeing the leaves change to glorious color. Settle in with a cuppa for a long and picture heavy post! I hung the Welcome Pumpkin on the wall near the front door to start the change of seasons in decorating. I like these flat ...

Labor Day weekend is our local Apple Festival, the biggest event of our year. For four days, we celebrate our county’s apple orchards. North Carolina is the 7th largest producer of apples in the US, and Henderson county provides 85% of the state’s production. Downtown is closed to traffic and set up with orchard booths and vendors. Downtown merchants dress their window displays with fun apple scenes. Dozens of varieties of apples as well as treats of every kind imaginable are for sale. The orchards open in mid-summer offering additional fun to patrons such as picking apples, hayrides ...

Finally, we turn the calendar page and it seems that fall may be coming. After miserable heat in August, I am looking forward to cooler days, wearing sweaters, the colors of autumn. Arising early, I love watching the view of the mountain ridges and valleys as it changes every day. The light in the early morning this day was diffuse because of low clouds. A little shower was passing through.

All the humidity makes the flowers happy. The dahlia has given me more blooms than usual this year. I let the previous blooms go to seed and collected them last ...

I hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend. We’ve been enjoying our lovely mountain views on drives with our car clubs. A recent drive took us through Pisgah Forest up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and west to Maggie Valley. Heading up from the ranger station, the street has trees over the road most of the way up into the mountains.

Up on the parkway, it is green everywhere. This part of summer has some rhododendrons in bloom, but I didn’t get any photos of them on the drive.

We stopped at Waterrock Knob for pictures of ...

It’s been a fairly quiet week making for good days to putter around the house. Time for a new tablescape for summer. I decided on a chicken theme with fern green chargers and napkins.

The bowls have roosters on the sides. These are mostly for salad in the summer, but a bowl of my Chilled Corn Crab Soup would be good too. Or ice cream after dinner!

Green napkins are held with white ceramic chicken rings. Every day flatware is used.

The centerpiece is my white ceramic bowl filled with a riot of silk flowers. The colors are matched ...

Our days have been warm and humid lately, just what the dahlias love. They shot up in just about 2 weeks and put out 5 blooms in short order in gorgeous red. The contrast in the golden centers would make a wonderful fabric collage, don’t you think?

Some years ago, I dug up all the orange daylilies and gave them away. How is it now that I have a whole new patch of them? These are not my favorite color, but they are persistent!

The prettier day lily, this plum color with a yellow throat and ruffed edge, began ...

In our town of Hendersonville, we have a yearly art walk exhibit of bears decorated by local artists. The bears are on the street downtown for the summer, then auctioned off to benefits local charities in the fall. This year, several of the bears feature quilt patterns. This one had quilt blocks in mostly blues over its back and legs. The bright colors are eye-catching.

This bear wears a sweater with quilt blocks down the front and back.

This one was my favorite, a patchwork of pastels. There are 20 bears in all, four on the corners of five intersections ...

At the beginning of May, I pruned the geranium of its leggy twigs and set them to grow roots. Now, just four weeks later, the jar is full of roots, so it is time to put them in pots.

One plant went into this pot that had the mother plant. There is a lot of space and I’d like it to fill in a bit.

The other one got a pot of its own. I could have used a bigger pot and planted it deeper, but this will do for now. I can always transplant it later.

The bargain ...

Last weekend, we got up early and hit the road heading for northeast Georgia for a MINI club event. It was a 2-1/2 hour drive just to get to the meeting point for an early lunch. On the highway, the mountains in the distance were shrouded in fog and low clouds. The day was supposed to be a bit rainy, but our drives go on rain or shine. There was another MINI on the road ahead of us, but they weren’t going our way.

Arriving at the restaurant, we parked together. This was about half of the MINIs ...

Looking out the window one morning this past week, I spotted a deer crossing the driveway. This one is obviously pregnant, so I am looking forward to seeing a little spotted fawn in a few weeks.

Sitting on the veranda one day, I was enjoying the cool mountain air, reading a book while sitting in one of the rocking chairs. I almost missed the wild turkey mom crossing the meadow towards the driveway with 7 baby turkeys. I quickly jumped up to get the camera with a long lens, and waited for her to bring them out of the azaleas ...

The mountain laurel is in bloom now, and we have two large shrubs on our property. One is behind the house, the other on the edge of the meadow. I love these pink-tinged flowers with the red lines radiating from the center.

My bargain New Guinea impatiens have doubled in size and are blooming well. They seem to be very happy here. I really like the variegated coloring on the flowers.

My other bargain plant is a verbena. It also seems to be coming back well, getting larger and now sporting several blooms along with a bunch of buds for ...

An early morning view from the veranda this past week showed fog in the valley, and low clouds. We so desperately need rain that this was a welcome sight. The fire danger in this area is huge, as the downed trees and dead limbs from Helene are still prevalent all over the county, and may never be cleaned up.

Hearing a commotion one day last week, I looked out the front to see about 2 dozen crows were pecking around in the front yard. As the least bit of movement will startle them, they all flew into the trees.

There ...

Spring finally seems to be here. I know that our last frost date averages April 15, but it always seems to take its sweet time. I showed some of the azaleas before, and now the prettiest pink one has bloomed.

The deer stopped by one morning. Three were grazing in the meadow.

This one was watching me as I attempted to get her picture with the azaleas.

It seemed to take longer time this year for the azaleas to fully bloom, and after I took the pics above, I wondered why the others were taking so long. Going down to ...

Oh, finally, some days warm enough to run around in my roadster with the top down! Now that I am feeling better, it is lovely to have the trees leafing out and my azaleas blooming. I adore white flowers, and these are pristine this year. They had not formed buds when we had our last hard freeze, so the blooms are stunning.

This is just the first plant to bloom, we have several white ones. The sun was just coming up, and I need to take some better photos later in the day when the sun will be shining on ...

I wanted to start today’s post with a lovely photo of my bleeding heart which has begun blooming. The delicate pink flowers are coming out in a plume of blooms.

I want to let everyone know that I will be taking some time off of blogging due to a health matter. I have an infection in my lower jaw and back tooth which is causing a great deal of pain. What started as a dull toothache last Tuesday escalated quickly. An emergency visit to my dentist revealed the infection. I’ve been on antibiotics and pain meds for a ...

I know I’ve been quiet lately. It seems like I have been busy all week, but I haven’t had one thing to blog about. It is mostly mundane stuff, nothing exciting or even just interesting going on. I’m working on the Quilt of Valor that I’ve shown you before. Other than that, just doing a bit here and there, and moving things around for the flooring that was finished up this past week, trying not to go crazy from all the noise of hammering and chain saws. But, I did observe one exciting thing during one ...

This past week was busy with retreat, and some work around the house. So, I don’t have much for chatting today. We finally have a few flowers coming out as the weather warmed up this week. My one little clump of daffodils did produce some pretty blooms.

One little crocus is trying to bloom.

The early morning showed some lovely soft purple and pink colors, with a golden glow showing the approach of the sun.

Over near the retaining wall, where my husband has put stones over the bare earth, a few intrepid daffodils struggle to come up around ...

It is finally March, and I am ready for spring. The birds have been here a lot, getting their fill of seeds. It has been so cold, and they really need the extra calories. There are so many, they’ve been going through a feeder-full every two days. I need to get a couple more suet cakes done and hung up so they have the extra fat and protein. Here, a bluebird and a nuthatch grab a bite.

A goldfinch looks down from the bracket waiting his turn.

On the feeder, the rosy bird on the left is a male ...

Our first drive with the MINI club was this weekend. Everyone was excited to get together again and drive our mountain roads. Even with it still being winter, with no leaves or flowers yet, the countryside is still beautiful. It had been raining up to half an hour before our meeting time, and the skies were still overcast. We started out at a local grocery store parking lot to meet and have our driver’s meeting.

Then we were off. No rain fell on us during the drive. It was overcast most of the way to the interim stop. Since ...

With more time to sew this week, progress was made on the Quilt of Valor begun last week. When we left off, the top was assembled and ready to quilt. It uses a panel with six star blocks and large sections of a patriotic print.

I loaded it on the longarm frame, and began auditioning thread colors looking at light blue, navy, red, and white. I didn’t take any photos of that. Ultimately, I decided on a light blue Glide thread for the top with light blue Bottom Line in the bobbin. The backing is blue with light and ...