Just Like Old Times!

This is my friend Mary in her sun room -- before I got there, she rearranged the furniture and set up the tables for our machines. Mary loves to garden and over last weekend, she moved all of her seedlings from the sunroom to the raised beds outside in the back yard. She planted five kinds of tomatoes, three varieties of peppers, two types of cucumbers, jicama, oregano, basil and a variety of flowers. Mary's told me that toward the end of summer she is giving away all of the produce that is too much for the two of them to eat -- I have to come back in the summer when everything's "done"!

Ummm.....I hate to admit this, but who's the messy one here? Before I started quilting, I used to spend hours in Mary's sewing room watching her piece things together; I also went shopping with her when she bought her fabrics and gradually got interested in making a quilt myself. I am so lucky to have someone like her in my life!

My project is to complete a block of the month from Bolts in the Bathtub that I started in 2002. I finished the last three blocks yesterday and then laid out the fabrics for the completion of the top. The blocks are going to be set on point so I have to cut all of the green triangles for the 12 blocks and then make the sashings from the purple and the creamy gold fabric. The two at left are the border fabrics.

Mary is working on what we're calling "headless bees" -- they are paper pieced and the head of the bee is appliqued on afterwards. She has to make 80 of them! This quilt also requires 19 nine-patches that she sewed yesterday. The pattern is "Swarms of Summer" by Sherri Bain Driver and Barbara Tone Lister that was featured in the Summer 2007 issue of American Quilter magazine.

As we were sewing yesterday, I sewed a block together wrong and asked for a seam ripper -- don't know where in the world mine is; probably on my sewing table at home? I then said jokingly, "Well, I guess I'm the first one to rip!" to which Mary replied, "Oh, I'm sorry -- I didn't buy a prize for that!" We laughed so loud at this that Ron came out to find out if we were telling inappropriate stories or something!

Reporting on our projects to be continued..... after the Lakers game! GO, LAKERS!!!