As long as I had several hours to kill before picking up Marcie and heading over to the Foothills meeting yesterday (waking up at 4:00 will do that) I decided to work on the t-shirt quilt, trimming all the 'blocks' to the 16" widths. I tried clearing off part of the folded up table to work there, but the height was wrong, plus there isn't any light. Did get one row done, but really need my sewing table unfolded. (Seems like it's been tucked away forever.) Yesterday afternoon I coaxed Tom into setting it up for me - so cutting the remaining four rows went much faster!
In September Joy and I had been the Foothill hostesses, meaning we supplied the food for the meeting. She had to leave before the end of the meeting for a trip out of town, but of course it was no problem for me to collect her two bowls and take them home with me. She was still out of town for the October meeting, I thought things "might" be too crazy at the November program/potluck, and I missed the December party when I was in California. Yesterday seemed like a good time to finally return them. We sat at the same table, and even though the bowls 'decorated' the center of said table the entire meeting, somehow Joy left without them - and also her travel coffee mug. (I hadn't seen her leave because I was busy trying to corral all of the new board members for a photo; almost as hard as herding cats!)
2018 Board: Karen, Gloria, Betsy, Yolanda, ?, Laura, Ellen, Sue, Dee
Show & Tell, at the end of the business meeting, is everyone's favorite part. The ladies loved my spool quilt (Laura especially, who also won 25 spool blocks that day but laments that hers are still sitting at home in a nice little pile.)
Here's Irene (who quilted it) pointing out some of the embellishments she stitched onto it.
She'd brought this "H" quilt she made for a friend's daughter's dorm room; since her last name begins with an H, and the school's colors are red/black/white, it will be a perfect gift.
With each new year we begin another UFO challenge.
Ellen started 2018 off with a bang, bringing in three!
Her McKenna Ryan quilt is stunning - then again all of those patterns make use of incredible detail. Of course there was much oohing and ahhing over Ellen's happy holiday quilt.
Ellen worked on this Seven Sisters quilt several years ago when she schlepped her machine to Europe when her husband worked a job there. While Ellen doesn't have seven sisters (someone asked, and I think her answer was three) Jan does - so she "offered" to take the quilt. <g> Hard to see the quilting in the pic, but it's gorgeous.
Her third UFO was started about seven years ago. Between the stunning stars (favorite block theme of mine) and bright colors (unfortunately washed out in the photo) I was practically drooling. Everyone insisted she should enter it in the show, and I think we talked her into it. (Apparently some of the spots where all the star pieces meet in the centers are not up to her standards of perfection.)
In the afternoon Wanda came over to pick up her quilt that I bound (she was quite pleased with my work, so looks like I'm "hired") and brought us more chocolate zucchini cake and fudge. She got to see the spool quilt now that it's all quilted, admiring the work that Irene had done on it, and I got to see another one of her happy little half-square triangle quilts. Wanda asked about the VOS retreat I'm going to in a few weeks, and wondered if I knew that 3 Dudes quilt shop (conveniently located right across the street from where the VOS quilt retreats are held) had closed. That was news to me! I haven't been on the VOS forum in a while, where apparently it turns out to have been a heavy topic of discussion this past week, but at least the ladies are forewarned. If we forget to pack some necessity, or run out of something next month, it won't be nearly so easy to replace it.
Last night we watched a wonderful PBS show on Black Holes.
While it was definitely aimed at non-scientists, with excellent explanations and descriptions along with incredible visuals, I admit I found myself lost much of the time. And I definitely had galaxy-sized difficulty wrapping my head around numbers describing size and speed: two black holes, millions of times the mass of our sun, spinning around each other hundreds of times a second?
This morning Bill is installing the grab bars in the bathroom (so far so good - he's finding studs right where we need them), and Joy has already stopped by to pick up her things. I have plenty of mucking/organizing to do, and then this afternoon will pop over to the lab for some routine bloodwork before next week's routine follow-up with the oncologist.
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