Spring Blooms

 Flowers, flowers...everywhere.  In spite of our most welcomed rains today, spring is all around us.  I've finished all of my little tulip blocks and am now assembling them into the larger blocks to create my Tulip Time quilt.  This is a Bonnie Hunter quilt pattern.  I may not have it finished for this spring, but I'm really liking the secondary pattern that the green stems and leaves are creating.

The outdoor flowers are even more prolific.  The roses are coming into full bloom.  I always love the first flush of flowers.  

The clivias have also shown their blooms this week. 

My Dragon Dreams came together and is ready for gifting.  I loved making this pattern. 

The hummingbird nest in the plant on my mom's front porch is supporting it's second set of babies this spring.  Since escrow closes this week on her home, I won't be able to get updated pictures as they grow.  It has been so much fun to watch these little ones grow and fly off over the years.  I hope the new owners will keep the plant and enjoy them as much as we have.  

As March comes to a close, I can say that it has been a good month for my block count.  With the additional tulip blocks and now making them into bigger blocks, I have added an additional 22 blocks this month.  This gives me a total of 93 for the month of March.  I'll be linking them up with the 350 Block Challenge.  

National Quilting Day

 Happy National Quilting Day.  I hope everyone has had a chance to get a few minutes of stitching in some time today.  I was lucky enough to spend several hours at the sewing machine today.  I'm working on a slow going project right now.  I'll share it momentarily.  

Project Quilting, Season 13 was all about Flying Geese this week.  I love Flying Geese blocks and I enjoy making them too.  The Bloc Loc rulers make it so easy to trim them.  I've needed a mini quilt to use for this time of the year  - spring green or St. Patrick's Day.  Whichever, it works great as a mini or a mug rug at just six inches square.  

I'm a bit behind on baby quilts for the new grandbaby and two new great grandbabies born in the last few months.  I finished one last week and am currently working on the second one.  Any ideas of where I am going with this one? 

One thing for sure is that I am adding up blocks in a hurry for my monthly total for the 350 Block Challenge by Prairie Moon. My total this month is already at 61.  

I am enjoying the springlike days with everything starting to bloom here.  It sounds like our temperatures will be more summer-ish next week....my favorite.  I know snow is still in the forecast for many places, but I know spring is just around the corner for you.  

Spring in the Air

 I know that a lot of people do not care for Daylight Savings Time, but I am so excited for this weekend and "springing ahead" an hour.  I love the longer hours of daylight.  

With several new babies in the family, I needed to get started on some baby quilts - my favorite kind of quilts to make.  I dug through some of my red fabrics to create hearts.  The pattern is With Love from Gigis Thimble.  It is currently in the process of being quilted, but I grabbed a few shots of it on the line before I started the quilting.  I am terrible at following directions these days.  Instead of sixteen hearts, I made twenty five.  I may just have to make a second quilt. 

Lots of time has been spent in the garden lately.  Plants have been divided and transplanted with the arrival of spring.  Meanwhile, the cymbidiums are all starting to bloom.  Many of these are plants were my dads at one time.  It's always nice to see them continuing to bloom.  He had quite the green thumb.  

The roses are also ready to burst open.  These little Angel Face roses were eager to be among the first blooms.

The Gerbera daisies are also prolific right now.  I love this wall hanging vase that was a gift from a dear friend.  

I saw this on the internet the other day and thought it sadly humorous.  While out today the cheapest gas I saw was $6/gallon.  Ouch!  

Block Check-In

 It's hard to believe that it is time to do a block check-in for February already.  I know it was a short month, but........

It was a rather crazy month around here, so my sewing really came in spurts.  Most of it was mindless piecing - just to be sitting at the machine with no thinking required.  I have a lot of flower bits all ready cut for that reason.  I tend to use them for leader/enders, but that was my sewing this month.  Surprisingly, I managed to get 48 flowers finished this month.  I'm linking these up with Prairie Moon Quilts.

We had family from Iowa in town last week to celebrate the life of my mother.  While here we visited the Reagan Library and spent some time at the beach.  To us it was chilly as the coldest storm to hit this season was upon us, but they thought it was warm.  Guess it is all relative!  The surf was good so we enjoyed watching the surfers catch their waves.  

In a recent giveaway at Crayon Box Quilt Studio, I was the winner of a delightful book of quilts that use 10" layer cake squares.  Michele Kuhns has a quilt in it called Jeweled Diamonds.  I have followed Michele for a number of years so was thrilled to see her published.  There are a lot of fun looking quilts in the book.  So many decisions!!!

Spring is right around the corner and I am enjoying the longer days.  I'm hoping to see a bit more sewing this month.  We shall see.  

Hello February

 Welcome February!  How did we get here already?

In my attempt to do a better job of blogging this year, I have several new projects to share.  The first is a small quilt for Project Quilting hosted by Persimon Dreams.  Each season I think that I will participate and end up getting sidetracked.  This week's challenge is Kitchen Influence.  I come from a long line of fabulous cooks.  I remember many days of helping my grandmother cook as well as my mom.  I fondly remember those warm cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven as we arrived home from school.  As a tribute to all of their wonderful recipes and fond memories, I created a small wallhanging for the kitchen.  In the center is a four generation photo of my grandmother, my mom, myself and my daughter.  Surrounding the photo are recipes passed down through the years.  

To create it I made a collage of photo and treasured recipes.  I then copied it onto a piece of treated fabric backed with butcher paper.  Cut to legal size measurements, it easily ran through my printer.  After heat setting it, I used it as my center block and framed it with simple borders.  They look wonky in the photo, but they really aren't. 

Even with all the technology of digital recipes, there is nothing quite like the old recipe box filled with the handwritten recipes.  The additional stains from the years of using them add to the charm and the memories.  I could never move these to the digital format.  

A wee bit more sewing happened as well.  My eldest granddaughter is moving to Kansas City with her husband and grandbaby.  She had started to make burp cloths several months ago and came over to sew a few of them to completion.  I will really miss my sewing companion.  We have spent so many hours over the years stitching together, but I know it is a good move for them.  

While cleaning things out at my mom's house, we noticed her hummingbird nest in the potted plant on her front porch had two eggs in it.  Watching it each day, we were rewarded with the hatchling.  I cannot begin to tell you just how tiny this little nest (and the baby) is.  I am always amazed at the shape of the beak when newly hatched.  It's fun to watch it grow into the sword shape as the baby bird grows.  I guess it would be really hard to feed the bird if it also had the long skinny beak.  ;-)  I wonder if it is the same mother coming to the nest year after year.  Life goes on...........

A New Year

 It's a new year and, hopefully, it will be a new chance to revive my poor, neglected blog.  The last few years have just seemed to be a constant drag and inspiration to post has disappeared.  To remedy that, I am joining a couple of groups that will help keep me accountable to posting more frequently.

Since my last post was about five months ago, I am just going to hit some of the highlights and show a few of my finished projects.  In August we took a cross country road trip with our daughter's family, including six children.  We toured lots of state parks and spent a few days on my cousin's farm in Iowa.  Everyone had a blast.

Who knew a water bottle could provide such entertainment?

Then DH and I took a lifetime dream trip in the fall to see the colors on the East coast.  Our weather was amazing and we so enjoyed seeing all the brilliant colors.  We don't see much color here in Southern California.  

I've managed to sew a Christmas quilt - a nod to my husband's heritage.  The pattern is Fair Isle, a design from Freshly Pieced Quilts.

My leader-ender project became a quilt that quickly got claimed by a granddaughter.  

Using a cute sewing themed cat fabric, I made a quick quilt for a friend who loved this fabric.  The quilting was paw prints.   

I participated in the 24 Days of Sashiko and so enjoyed the stitching each day.  In the end, I put all of my samples into a table topper to use as a reference in the future.  

The garden continued to give us enjoyment well into the end of the year.  I grew ginger for the first time and it won't be the last.  I have two more pots currently planted.  

The tomatoes were incredible.  This was our final harvest - in December!!!!

I finished pruning the roses over the weekend.  These managed to survive the pruning as my last roses of the year.  

The granddaughters wanted to get into cross stitch this year so we had some enjoyable stitching together.  Using Vonna Pfeiffer's You Tube videos, I finished my small cross stitch off as flatfold piece with handmade braiding.  The technique is a great alternative to framing.  

The end of the year was difficult.  I underwent hip replacement surgery at the end of November and followed that with a fractured femur a week later.  That put a halt to sewing for the rest of the year.

As it is with large families, there are the ups and downs of life.  Sadly, my mother passed away at the beginning of December, just shy of her 99th birthday.  She was an amazing woman and was an inspiration for all of us.  Living her last twenty seven years as a paraplegic was not easy, but she did it with such grace and joy.  She will be missed by all.  We then added a new great grandson to finish the year out.

As 2022 rolled in, I was once again able to use the sewing machine.  The one quilt I was hoping to finish last year became the first that I worked on this year.  The last round of trees and houses needed to be made and attached.  The pattern is Santa's Village by Thimble Creek Quilts.  Although there were some issues with the pattern, help from a blog post written by Elizabeth helped me through them.  I love the whimsy of the design.

 

Somehow, I ended up with four extra trees.  I'll use those in the backing.

In order to keep me current with blogging, I have pledged to keep track of the number of blocks I make this year.  The goal is one a day which means 31 blocks for January.  My Santa quilt needed 32 blocks for the outer border, but with four extras, I am counting it as 36 blocks so far this month. 

Just to show that this year is off to a new and wonderful start, we were blessed with a new grandbaby this week.  Joy Elizabeth joined her brothers and sisters, breaking the three/three tie.  We are all smitten.  It's going to be a GREAT year.