Whew!  It’s been a busy month… well, make that a couple of months.  My daughter came in from Denver right before Mother’s Day and brought snow with her.  We had planned on planting flowers, but we had to wait until the day before she left, when the snow was melting.  These are not the flowers we planted, but this is a reminder that we are now officially out of the winter season.  I planted these peonies 3 years ago, and this is the first year they’ve bloomed.  🙂

While I was at the Machine Quilting Showcase in Wichita, I took a class with Kim Stotsenberg.  She does wonderful swirly-type quilting.  You can find out more about Kim on her blog, Sew-n-Sew Quilting.

I’ve also been working on a quilt for a friend.  Trisch is an artist, as far as I am concerned.  She has a flair for color and design.  I’m truly surprised she is not a designer of some sort, but I imagine she doesn’t have the time for it right now.  Anyhow, Trisch allowed me to quilt this modern quilt of hers, and then she went and blogged about it.  You can find her at Hadley Street Quilts or you can find the blog about this quilt here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those of you who know me personally already know that I am working on yet another quilt for my quilt guild.  I must be crazy, huh?  This one is to benefit the Wounded Warriors Project.  Our guild is making quilts to represent 5 of our branches of service.  I am working with Susan on the one for the Marine Corps.  Susan wanted to paper piece 50 stars to put on the quilt to represent the 50 states.  When she first brought this up, I thought she must be crazy… but I don’t do paper-piecing, so there you go.  If you don’t know what paper piecing is or how to do it, check it out here.  Oh, yeah, it looks really cool… until you start trying to add the fabric and it’s too short.  Then you have to pick the paper off after you are done.  It gets to be a real pain in the @$$, if you ask me, which is why I don’t make it a practice to paper-piece.  Yes, I’ll do it when it’s called for in something major, but those times are few and far between.  Well, I told Susan that I don’t do paper-piecing, but she was not swayed.  I then asked if I could get her some help, and she only wanted a couple of helpers.  In my mind, I wondered how on earth she was going to get all those stars done on her own.

Anyhow, we forged forward with our design plans, trying to figure out how we could get 50 stars on the front of the quilt.  The quilt needed to show that it was representative of the Marine Corps, so I had already planned on putting a Marine Corps emblem in the middle as a focal point.  As it turned out, we only had room for 40 of the star blocks, so I put 10 on the back.  Here is what we have so far.

And, the back looks like this but with 10 stars…

Oh, and one more thing…  I went to my regular eye doctor to see if I could finally get a prescription for glasses.  They would not give me a prescription until I had the secondary cataracts removed by laser (Yag Laser Surgery).  This was my good eye, so I was really nervous about having it messed with.  This would also be the 8th eye surgery I’d had; 2 on my right eye and 6 on my left eye in the past 2+ years.  The good news is that I can now see to thread a needle.  To someone else, that is no big deal, but to me it is HUGE!  I am so happy!  I can only hope that nothing else happens to either of my eyes for awhile now.  I will be getting glasses in the next week or so – I’m hoping I can see to do a better job on my customer quilts!