may day, may day . . .

It's been a very busy Spring! I looked up and realized if I didn't post something here, May would go by (along with the bottom two-thirds of April) without a word from me. Heaven forbid!!  ;)

Our guild strives to be active in community-oriented events.  One of those events is Panoply, an annual arts festival held in downtown Huntsville's Big Spring Park.

This year at our booth, we went interactive! We had hexies prepped and ready to baste to engage passersby!  

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, over 200 people, adults and kids alike, basted up a hexie!

We'll whip the hexies together (after allowing members of our guild to participate) and it will become the #HEXIEquiltthatHSVbuilt! Go Team Hexie!

I also found a new-to-me LQS -- Hook & Bobin.  Cute little place ... this fabric *immediately* caught my eyes . . .

Isn't it marvelous??!!  Cat-finity!  Tah-dah! At this point I have absolutely no idea what I'll do with it, but I don't mind waiting until it speaks to me. Sometime in the summer of 2011, I fell head-over-heals in love with Moda's "Dragonfly Summer" line.  Bought yardage in several of the fabrics and a layer cake.  Once again I had absolutely NO idea what I was going to do with it all.  In fact, it's still sitting in my stash, nearly eight years later!  But it finally did speak to me . . .

This will be a picnic quilt -- 80" X 90" -- for Joc and her family. Whew! It's a very simple design, but I think it works for a big utility quilt.  Anyway, maybe I'll have something figured out for the cat fabric by 2025?

The older two local grandgirls had their end of the year ballet recitals!  They both did so well!

This was Evey's first year and she was the epitome of grace!  Edith wanted in on the picture, of course.  She's already gung-ho to start ballet and dances with her older sisters every chance she can!  

Joc and her crew were at the beach for Mother's Day, so we celebrated this past Friday.  Jocelyn set a lovely table and prepared a feast for our "Ladies' Lunch"!

Delectable, non?!  Everything was so pretty and tasted so yummy!  It was a fun treat. After lunch, they spoiled me with presents!

A little bit of something representing all my favorite things!  A book on tea that doubles as a tea diary, a pretty owl spoon rest, two wooden trivets that look like they were EPP'd, and Kathy Schmitz's book, Stitches from the Garden.  I have the other two books -- Stitches from the Yuletide and Stitches from the Harvest, so it feels nice to "complete" my set!  In fact, I think Joc has gifted me with all of them!

I'll leave with a photo of the girls and me . . .

They're growing so fast . . . and more beautiful with each day!

Linking up to sarah did it! and the HeLP post!

:)

holiday and hexie prep . . .

So, after all the Pick a Pumpkin posts, this was a relatively downright quiet week! At least on the blog.  Nothing doing in real life!

Thursday I spent the day with the girls. It was snowing (?!?!?) when I left the camp, and still flurrying forty minutes later when I arrived at their house, on the other side of the county. And very cold.  So much so that Jason turned on the fireplace! The older girls had asked me to bring three things:  gum, watermelon, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  So like any obliging, decent, loving grandmother, I did. Of course I did! And I brought the makings for Raspberry Thumbprint Cookies, too!

The day was the perfect Christmas prequel.  We sat in front of the fireplace (most of us in our jammies), eating Christmas cookies, watching Christmas movies, while snow flurried intermittently from grey skies outside.  Yes, the perfect day.

Today it's sunny and in the 60's.  There's no figuring weather in North Alabama!

BUT ... I've made amazing (in *my* mind) progress on my Mod Flower Fall (the name I've finally settled on) project! Look at how few stacks of hexies I have left!

Look at how many hexie flowers I've finished!

My sheet is still working for me.  I cross off the flowers as I whip them together.  Out of the 45 I needed, I've done 24.

Only 21 more to go and I can start whipping the flowers together! I hope to zip out at least another five before the evening ends.

The rest of the week will be focused on Thanksgiving prep.  We purchased our turkey, so he's thawing and I did the rest of the grocery shopping today.  There will be a modest ten of us, but if the forecast holds true, we'll host it at the Camp!  Tonight I'll prep stuffing, tomorrow and Tuesday I'll bake pies, and Wednesday I'll peel/cut/chop things and leave them in water.  Thursday should be a relatively easy day ... how about you?

I'm linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching over at Kathy's Quilts and hopefully I'll link up to sarah did it! and her HeLP post!

Happy Sunday!

:)

weekend wanderings . . .

Busy weekends and busier weeks (gearing up for our annual meeting at work) make for longer gaps between posts.  But I am pleased to note that I've surpassed last year's number of posts by five, with this post.  It's the little things, right??!

Todd and I did make time to take the boat out this past Friday. It was the first time I'd been out on our boat since prior to the surgery. I'd missed it ... but I was a little anxious about it, too.  Turns out I had nothing to worry about . . . except how many hexies I could baste up while Todd fished. What do you know?  Sunshine on my shoulder really *did* make me happy! (Thanks, John Denver.)

You can just make out one of my four shoulder surgery scars ... he glued them closed, so they're faint and hard to see, which also makes me happy.  ;)

It was a lovely day, and Todd had launched in a place I'd never been before, below the dam (Lake Guntersville). 

You can see the dam from behind us. It's pretty impressive and the launch is fairly easy. We Todd wanted to fish the bluffs, so that's where we headed.

Easily 100' or higher. But you can see where the fish were running the minnows! 

It was pretty exciting. Todd thought so especially . . . 

His final tally of the day was about 26. Mostly strip and spots.  It'll make good eating either way.

My final tally of hexies was 24 . . .

So I guess he won!  LOL!

But I was the one spotting all the waterfowl (and friends) as we tooled around and explored . . .

These buzzards (sitting on the rocks) were all hanging out for something we could smell but couldn't see. LOL!

Caught this heron mid-flight.  They were all over the place

And then we sited not one, but TWO bald eagles! Pretty cool.

Mid-afternoon, a small summer shower came up fast on us . . .

We rode it out and then enjoyed a really lovely afternoon.

About as pretty as can be!

Saturday morning I had a guild workshop ... which I'll (hopefully) share more about later.  I got home just in time for second half of the Alabama vs. Texas A&M game. It was a fairly comfortable game by this point, so I could sit (relatively) quietly and prep my next set of hexies . . . the last set . . . my yellows!  Roll Tide!  :)

After getting them all clipped, I even got a few basted.  The rest were my slow stitching for today.

I've got about a dozen more to baste, and then it's on to whipping them together.  I've really got to decide how I want to go about doing this.  I'm thinking I'll whip up the individual flowers, by color, first, and then put them together.  And I've finally settled on a name for this piece.  FINALLY!

Linking up to Kathy's Quilts Slow Sunday Stitching and the HeLP post over at Sarah Did It!

Have a great week ahead!

:)

this, that and the cat . . .

Our guild's year-end party was quite fun and we had a good crowd! 

My offering for our potluck was two dozen mini Gigi's cupcakes.  Served on fine china, of course! Unfortunately, the serving plate only held 23 cupcakes . . . 

No telling where that 24th cupcake went. LOL!  It's also at this meeting that the incoming president announces her board:

We're a good looking group of ladies if I do say so myself! I'm on the board as a co-chair of a newly created committee, the QIC.

I'm pretty proud of that logo, too! :) We'll be in charge of Secret Stitchers, a mystery quilt, and a seasonal, bi-monthly mug rug swap.  Fun stuff!

I've been slowly, steadily working away at my hexi basting.

I'm down to two colors left to baste and then I can start whipping flowers together. My plan is to whip the individual flowers together and then to lay them out to join together. It will be easy to mess up, so I want to take it slow. The only problem is, the deadline for entering quilts in our guild's show is less than a year away now!  Yikes!

I've been sitting looking at this lovely piece of fabric for several months.  

It was gifted to me and I left it up as a backdrop to my laptop because (1) it was patriotic, which covers May, June and July (for me), and (2) I wanted it to tell me what it wanted to be.

It finally did . . .

Something hexi-ish, of course! Which seems only fitting, given that the gifter was Sarah, from Sarah Did It!

I love table mats and this lends itself quite nicely, with a little fussy cutting, to show off those stars! 

EQ to the rescue again, to help me visualize my thought process. I couldn't get the fabric to quite get to the dimension I needed it to be, but close enough. I'll use something a little more subtle for the blue and red, but again, you (and I) get the idea. Maybe I can whip this up really quick and have it ready for Veteran's Day.  :)

Lastly, just wanted to share a little glimpse into the life of Leia, who started life as a two-human cat, and now is a five-human cat . . . 

Three of whom are little girls.  Leia will be ten this year -- and still playing with dolls!! And the only little people she tolerates are *her* little people. As is evidenced above.

Linking up with Sarah Did It's linky-versary for her HeLP (and for Feline Friday)!  I was there for the first one and I thought I should be there for this special anniversary, too!  Plus she's having a giveaway, so you should definitely hop over!  Also linking up to Kathy's Quilts slow Sunday stitching post.

Have a great finish to your weekend!

:)

six-sided stitching . . .

I'd made good progress on my challenge quilt . . . then ran into a snaffu, which has stumped me. Rather, I was trimming it down and trimmed it too much.  The minimum size has to be met, and I unwittingly trimmed 1/2" below that.  Ugh.  My last day to work on it will be Friday/Saturday of next week. I need to quickly figure out how to right my wrong.

I also made progress on my hexie quilt (and didn't then impede said progress with a stooopid mistake).  Our summer pattern for Fridays is to take the boat out; Todd fishes and Denise stitches. 

Well, I also read, swim, float, and dangle my feet in the water. It works well for us!  I got more than halfway through my dark turquoise blue hexies, leaving me 9 more (out of 23) to finish.  Then all I've got left are 30 yellows, 24 dark purples, and 24 hot pinks.

I've used this page (which I printed from EQ) for SO much!  It's helped me figure yardage, I've used it to mark which one were cut, and now which ones are basted.  I'll use it to note what's been whipped together, too.  It's been very handy!  

Much like my "station" has been handy.  I like having a station for hand projects; it makes it easy to pick them up and carry them wherever I'm going to be.  Whether that's work, babysitting, on the boat or in the doctor's waiting room.  Keeps everything tidy and at my fingertips!

This is a quilt I'd like to have finished by October 2019 (for our guild's next show). I know, I know -- it's more than a year away.  Still, that's pretty darn ambitious for me! I've got about 6.5 hours worth of hexie basting still to go before I start whipping them together. 

I got to spend some one-on-one time alone with Miss Edith yesterday afternoon while her big sisters (and folks) went to see a movie.  She's darling and we enjoyed our time together!

She's more interested in pushing buttons on the phone than smiling for a pic.  Ha!

That's it for me for now. Today is HeLP (HeLP for Hexie-aholics) over on Sarah's page, so I'm linking up there, as well as on Kathy's Slow Sunday stitching. Y'all have a great rest of the weekend!

:)

♫♪ i'm baaaa-aaaaack! ♪♫

I had a lovely time with the Panter crew in Irvine . . . lots of hugs and snuggles and kisses and laughter and good times. I hated getting on the plane, on the one hand, and leaving that precious family behind, but on the other hand, it felt good to be home and to sleep in my own bed and be surrounded by my Merkel girls and my sweet husband. Conundrum.

I'll share more about my visit, complete with pics, later.  For now, I really want to share whats going through my brain on the hexie train!

This past Thursday night was guild. I'm on the board again this year, in a rather innocuous position. My monthly job is to produce an article for the newsletter, relating to A Quilter's Journey.  I may share more on that later, too. Really what I want to share now was a little about our national speaker, who was Catherine Redford. She was a lot of fun and her lecture, Lessons Learned While Quilting, made me laugh. Her quilting style is quite a bit different from mine, but I enjoyed it and certainly appreciated her incredible talent!  

That being said, as she shared pics of her incredible quilts, I was very appreciative. Like I said, the lady has God-given talent!  But when *this* quilt appeared on the screen . . .

I sat up and took notice!!  (Sorry for the poor quality.  Lights were off! There's a better, albeit smaller, picture of this quilt on her site under the gallery.)

In fact, I couldn't get this quilt off my mind and had to pull up EQ to make up my own version . . .

Of course, my version is purple.

And bigger.  And has more hexies.  Two hundred thirty-two hexies, as a matter of fact.

I wanted my hexie flowers (and parts of flowers) to be BIG. So at first draw, I did 3" hexies and colored away. Then I looked at the overall size of the quilt: 158" X 179".  Holy guacamole!  Nice thing about EQ is that with a few simple keystrokes I could change the size of my hexies to 2" and change the overall quilt size to a more manageable 105" X 120".  Still a HUGE quilt, but wow, what a quilt! I'll be basting for a loooong time. But I've put the papers and the acrylic template on my birthday wish list!  ;)

I'm handstitching on a project I really can't share . . . I'm making my second (those little orangish hexies from my last post).  One was a birthday gift, the current one is for a swap.  Post-swap I'll try to remember to share a pic!  I'm also planning on getting into some wool later this after noon.  Pics to follow.

We spent the morning at Ellie's soccer game.  HOT!  But a lot of fun . . . they are so cute out there on the field, like little bumblebees!

Plus, I got to cheer with this sweet little gal . . .

Happy day!

Linking up with sarah did it! and her HeLP linky party.  Have a great rest of the weekend . . . Happy Fall, Y'all . . . and Roll Tide!!!

:)