What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

I WAS going to say Rose of Sharon!! I am quite confused about plants, but I believe you are correct! It's hard to believe that my paternal grandfather and mother had green thumbs, yet I struggle to name even a few plants in my garden. 

But I was attempting to use my pale green thumbs as I puttered in the garden in the morning. More in a second. 

It was another fun day at the Virtual Retreat. Our new hours are 3 PM to approximately 9 PM EST, in case you'd like to join us in the future ...

I'm back! Drinking water to rehydrate - I'm sure some would say it's still not enough, but I'm working on it. NO naps required, which was great! I did a slow, puttering pace all day, and that worked just fine for me. Did I make progress? Well, I didn't turn on any sewing machine; however, I'm working through that pile of stuff on the cutting table. 

Here's the cutting table in the morning before I started. YES - I remembered to take a before picture! So much stuff to deal with. 

The cutting table before ...

This week, I had a couple of days where I could spend the whole day in my she-cave. It was a good time to load up the embroidery machine and let it stitch while I was working around the room, pulling things out and working on the decluttering. Here are two of the kitchen towels that will be for sale at the fall festival.

I’m still working on the declutter challenge with my guild area, and got the rulers and applique patterns done while the embroidery machine stitched. I started on the fabrics, and took several yards to guild ...

Spring is arriving when the ajugas bloom, although this week has been a full-on Blackberry Winter with lows near freezing, and that will continue into next week. It may damage the plants that have already begun to bloom, like the azaleas, but these ajugas can take it. We have lots of clumps all over the lawn out front and the back yard. Most are purple like these.

Here and there are white ones.

The dogwood is blooming, this year a pretty white. Some years the blooms tend to a greenish color.

They are just lovely, looking like springtime at the ...

If only everyone could have an attitude like Tammy's sister - "I will love it because I made it!" Seriously? How cool and practical is that? If only everyone had that in mind as they make things. And let's face it -- there are some things that we excel at and others we do not! Pick your battles. 

It was an exciting day, and I have nothing to show you! I did paperwork in the morning and almost got all the follow-ups from the weekend out. And then it was the Virtual Retreat, and I was on that call all ...

I have a couple of days to sew this week, and I am looking forward to Virtual Retreat on Friday as a sew day too! I have started a secret project, and all I can show you for now is this. It is going to be so fun! More details later when I can reveal it. But, it will have embroidery as you can see. It is National Embroidery month, see the bottom of this post for a special sale at Sulky on all your embroidery needs. This is a great time to get that stabilizer!

The mail has been ...

Since we didn’t do the house party because of the snow, I had two pints of blueberries to use up. I decided to do some blueberry muffin tops, with a basic muffin recipe from my Good Housekeeping cookbook. I use a Muffin Top Pan, one that doesn’t have a deep well.  This gives you beautiful tops (the best part of a muffin!) without deep dry bottoms. I forgot to take photos, but these show what I did, same as another time.

The pan gives you beautiful muffin tops, with nicely browned bottoms. Yum, breakfast!

I made my Butternut ...

This week seemed super busy with various things and a big chunk of a day wasted with a stressful situation that ruined my creative mood. All was solved by the end of the day, but it was just maddening. When these things happen, I just have to slow down, and take a breath with a pretty dawn view, or marvel at the unexpected blooming of a violet in the kitchen. It just finished blooming a couple of weeks ago, and it was a delight to notice one morning that it had three blooms, and more to come.

The birds have ...

It has been three years since we’ve seen snow, and of course when it finally came it ruined some fun plans. The overnight house party we were going to do was canceled as the roads were just not safe with ice under the snow. Ah, well, My Sweet Babboo doesn’t mind having to eat the two pints of blueberries I had purchased for blueberry pancakes for breakfast. He’ll get blueberry waffles this morning, and some muffins for later. The champagne for the planned mimosas will hold until we reschedule.

Knowing the weather was coming, My Sweet Babboo ...

Seems like this week got away from me in a hurry. Cleaning out my closet took a couple of hours on Monday, then I was able to have a day of fun on Tuesday with Virtual Retreat. Thank goodness for that! Wednesday was full of appointments and meetings, as was yesterday. With the snow storm set to arrive overnight tonight, a trip to the store was in order as well. The good part of the two board meetings was both were accompanied by a sushi meal – one lunch and one dinner. Yum!

Colder days mean hot soup for lunch at ...

Reading this past month or two has been a mixed bag. Two books were meh, one not my cup of tea but others may enjoy it, and only one to recommend. Links are provided for some to Amazon so you can read the full synopsis.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – This book was recommended by an employee at our local used book store, and she was so effusive in her praise I decided to get it without checking out the reviews. In my quest to find stories to read that are unusual, the book jacket synopsis seemed to ...

With the weather turning decidedly toward winter, this past week was a good one for hunkering down and doing things inside. I got my fall decor put away, and all the Christmas decor is now up. I have my Santa collection displayed on the Victorian corner shelf next to the tree. The tree has been trimmed to the max, and I still have ornaments in the storage chest that won’t really fit on it – unless I hang them on the backside against the wall which doesn’t make a lot of sense. I was surprised one morning this past ...

Last year I made this little table mat for the side table next to my chair. This year, I converted it to a mini-quilt so I could put it on the Mini Quilt Stand and enjoy it more. It says “I just want to bake stuff and watch Christmas movies”, so that was the order of the day. I put on my favorite movie for the day after Thanksgiving, Miracle on 34th St (1947 edition). Do you love this movie? I thought it would be fun to do a trivia contest for you to torture entertain your family/friends this ...

I hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving. I had a very nice day, cooking turkey so the house smelled like Thanksgiving, dressing with a rich gravy, and jellied cranberry sauce right out of the can. Once again, I decided to experiment with another method of cooking the turkey, and I’ll share that with you soon. Sewing time this week made for a good bit of progress on several projects. I found a MINI logo on the internet for my embroidery machine, and I wanted to use it for a project for the upcoming silent auction to benefit Manna ...

There is a bit of good news. I managed to get about 5 hours of sleep (with no drugs) - well, I had taken a Celebrex earlier in the afternoon. I felt much better than the previous day when I slept less. It helped that I was able to get 50 minutes of naptime once I came back from walking the dogs. 

The worst part of the day is getting out of bed and waiting for that morning walk. Yes -- I could walk when I get up, but at 3 AM? A little bit of stretching, a little bit of muscle ...

As you know, I was very frustrated yesterday by the earbud situation. My voice kept cutting out on calls, the earbud mic dropped, and I could not move around and chat. 

I mentioned that frustration on my first call yesterday morning. I think there were ten people on that call, and can you believe that THREE of the people on that call have something different than earbuds? They are using what's called open-ear technology from a company called Shokz. Three people—that was amazing! 

Here's a picture of what they look like. 

Open earbuds

Time to sew this week is nice. I decided to start with a quick project in fall colors as a warm up project. I saw this pattern at my local quilt shop and had to get it. This wonderful stripe fabric is left over from last year’s fabric feature by Benartex, the line is Harvest Festival, but sadly is out of print. Still, this quick runner can be made with any stripe design. The pattern is Easy Striped Table Runner by Karen Montgomery, available in her Etsy Store HERE (no affiliation but the pattern is on sale now until ...

It was a busy day, but I don't have much to show for it! Unless you want to watch the video of our digital cutter class. Last year, the session was one hour, which never seemed enough. This year, I added 15 minutes. Yesterday, we went almost 30 minutes over that, and I have prided myself on NOT doing that in the past! Sigh!!!! 

But the information and the participation are amazing, so I don't want to NOT do it! It's not that I'm UNAWARE of going over. I'm very aware - I'll have to ...

I didn't think I was going to make it this morning! I mean getting my presentations ready. I went to bed relatively late for me, but I got up when the PILL alarm rang! I notice that's my last one, so I must go to the drugstore to get more. 

But the presentations are ready. Yesterday, I wondered if I had enough content for one of them, but after putting all the pictures together, I wonder if I'll get a chance to talk! This whole business of sharing in the Zoom format is fantastic, and I've ...

Gosh -- it's hard to believe that 24 years ago, we were all watching the New Year ring in in Sydney, Australia. Everyone was expecting the world to start ending as the computers couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. Now, here we are 24 years later, and all is well. But if the "experts" were that shortsighted for "small" detail, imagine how many more things are being ignored - like the disposal of batteries for electric cars! But I won't go there!

I want to apologize to those who came to the Zoom call yesterday, and I ...