A little rain….

 A little rain, a little sunshine and the daffodils burst into bloom!! The little round yellow flowers too                         (dandelions) spring is really here.  Sketches from three old sketchbooks and the current sketchbook.  My models are from the grocery store when they were available back in March. The flowers that opened all the way were beautiful but a lot were duds, the bud swelled then nothing.  I would love to pick a big bunch of daffodils but the neighbors might scowl if someone takes their happy little blooms.

Minki blankets

 

I made a couple minki blankets for the little grands because when the try to take a nap at grandma’s house….the bed isn’t right and the pillow doesn’t feel right and the little quilts don’t feel right either….so next time grandma will have blankets with minki on the back and I really hope they “feel right”. 

I just used some yardage that I had to make a ‘quilt back’ then laid it on the minki and folded the minki over the cotton then stitched it with the triple zigzag stitch.  After we read a pile of story books they can count the little animals and maybe fall asleep. Ha!! It’s a good plan. —Ann—

7 million stitches

Seven million…..7,000,273 stitches on my sweet 16 machine.  I bought it in January of 2013.  How many miles of thread would that be? How many spools of thread? Those would all be interesting numbers and bigger numbers than my brain can handle.  How many quilts have I quilted on it since 2013? That was a number I could find, I went through my blog and counted 135 quilts! Those are the quilts I pieced because I took pictures but I quilted a few for friends that I don’t have pictures of proof.
 By the time I finished the square in a square quilt my counter was 7,016,824 stitches.  The just swing an arc from point to point in the squares and stars.  Simple but effective free motion quilting.  —Ann—

Friendship stars

 

We got it together!  My girlfriend’s granddaughter was born early mom and baby are doing great. She went to help and stayed for a few weeks.  It didn’t take long at all to sew the triangles together then the fun of arranging them—random placement of the black prints or pair them up?  Pair them up! Mix the colors up but don’t put two of the same close together or the same blacks side by side. So many things to think about and so many ways to arrange things. We were just playing with blocks like when we were little.  I have had so much fun helping her put this together and she got more excited as each step progressed from strips to squares to 4 patches to triangles to friendship stars to blocks to a quilt top and then the borders. Tummy time will be fun time with these bright colors and black and white prints.  —Ann—

Pasque flower

 One day last week I looked through my old sketchbooks, I have a pile. This page sparked memories of the day I sketched the pasque flower. One of my PEO sisters had been out to the ranch and picked a bucket full of pasque flowers, we each took one home so I sketched it the next couple days. I think it was 2007.  Sadly so much native prairie has been tilled or over grazed that finding a pasque flower in the wild is a rare sight.  The top pic is a print I did 30 some years ago when I was doing a lot of calligraphy and trying to sell it at art/craft shows, I might have broke even on my printing costs. It is hand painted and I still have a stack of them.  We are having the same kind of weather as in 2007 I wonder where the pasque flowers are blooming. —Ann—