fabric for your lifetime

I just heard about a contest that you might want to check out.  It is sponsored by Quilter's Club of America and Keepsake Quilting.  They are giving a grand prize of "a lifetime supply of fabric" plus additional one-year supplies for the runner-ups.  (Or is that runners-up?)

You still have time to enter your name, but the contest ends next week on 2/28, so don't delay.  And, after reading the fine print, which I seldom do on contests, I learned that you can enter daily!  And, if you enter by clicking this link, I get an extra chance, too.  And I'm pretty sure I will be in a sharing mood with my lifetime supply, since I think I already have a lifetime supply upstairs in my stash!

And how do these contest organizers define a lifetime supply?  Simply put, it is one yard a week for 20 years!  The fabric is selected by the winner from the Keepsake Quilting store, so there is plenty to choose from.  Keepsake operates one of the first and best fabric ordering operations that I know of.  Back before I started working at Bear Patch, and before easy access to the internet, I paid a lot more attention to my little Keepsake catalogs to keep me current on new fabrics and notions.

They crammed a lot of little pictures of fabric samples into their pages.  I used to "bookmark" my favorites, i.e., fold over the corner of the page the old-fashioned way!  Lots of pages folded over!  In August, 2007, I traveled with 3 good friends to New England, and we shopped at the brick-and-mortar Keepsake Quilting store.  What a fun trip that was!

Here's a little bit of randomness:

very cool vintage TV tray tables at my mom's house, preserved from the last century!  Probably 1960's?  I'm not totally sure, but I think that the white ones were a set that was at our house when I was a kid, and I think the black one was from my Grandma's house.  Still in use as temporary plant stands for the potted plants that my mom brings in from her deck to spend the winter by a basement window until it is suitable weather to go back out to the deck.  Which might be the 4th of July this year!  We have way more snow right now than our usual amount, and more is predicted for today.  Big piles (mountains?) in corners of parking lots are waiting for some heat to start them dwindling down.  Even with the past 2 days of temps reaching above freezing, the little bit of melting that occurred was barely a drop in the bucket of what needs to happen.

I have been getting some work done on curtains for the nursery for my new grandson-to-be:

I am sharing this picture because I thought the comparison was very interesting.  These were purchased curtain panels, solid blue.  I have added the white ribbon trim and a lining of light blocking fabric.  The picture on the left is the "before" (trimming pinned on to help decide ribbon width and placement) and on the right you can see the effect of the additional lining.  Makes a huge difference in privacy and darkness, both important for the sleep of the little guy who will reside in that room.  And the sleep of mom and dad, too!  I have 2 panels done, and 4 to go, so I have my goal set to finish them over the weekend.  I hope!

good eating

I've been doing some on-line research on the topic of once-a-month-cooking and today I have been busy in or near my kitchen all day long! This is not the norm for me! I do like to do some cooking, but what I still struggle with is thinking of what to cook. Bob is much better at that than I am. Even after raising up those kids and living the good life in the empty nest, I still can't seem to get my act together 9 times out of 10! So even though these monthly cooking binges are more aimed at younger families with kids at home, I am applying some of those principles for the 2 of us. This is what I came up with--

Oh, that's just the detritus of my day of slaving over a hot stove! The good stuff is mostly already in the freezer: 2 pans of tater tot hotdish, 3 pans of porcupine meatballs, 2 containers of chicken pot pie filling with accompanying frozen crusts, 2 pans of apple & sausage pancakes, 2 bags of bean & ham soup, and soon 2 bags of beef stew. Whew! And a roast with potatoes and carrots in the oven for supper! It has been kind of fun, except for the dirty dishes part, and this will get me off the hook for many nights to come! A wonderful autumnal day here and I found this when I went out to the mailbox--

I love the feel of that milkweed fluff, it is like nothing else on earth. Some of the plush minkee-type fabrics do come close, I think that's why I always see people fondling those bolts in the shop!

I finished up a quilt for Donna, a friend and member of the Ham Lake Piecemakers. It is a collection of blocks with a sunflower and birdhouse theme. Very cute, and now ready for binding!

Remember back in August I told you about the closet? Well, the makeover is nearly done, and this is what it's looking like now--

I think I'm ready to put the doors back on and call it done. I feel so good about the sorting and cleaning that this involved, with quite a few things heading elsewhere to new homes. I found an alarming number of bags of all shapes and sizes, that many bags can't be healthy! So 3 bags full of bags went to my mom for a church bazaar and I have one bag of bags to give to Brita, but I am still left with 4 big bags of bags! So I will be considering what to do about that. Bob did a fabulous job putting up all those shelves with good support so my heavy boxes don't make them saggy.

Sooo--that's what I've been up to lately. And finished the Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, a spellbinder to the very end. It's the end of the stories about Lisbeth Salander, and I would love to continue reading more mysteries about her, so it's bittersweet to be done. She's the grownup version of Pippi Longstocking, one of my favorite storybook characters. I wanted to be just like Pippi! But that was the 60's, and anything seemed possible! But every now and then I think I need to get in touch with my inner Pippi, don't you?

brush with fame

I had a really different experience recently that I just have to tell you about. It's about the Keepsake Quilting catalog. I used to get this in the mail regularly. All you quilterly people out there probably are familiar with the name, it is kind of a staple among the quilt community. This company has a store in New Hampshire and has run a huge mail order business for a long time. So there was one of these new catalogs laying on a desk in the back room at the store, not sure why, but I was asked a question about something that a customer had seen in the catalog. So I was leafing through the booklet, and stopped in my tracks on page 44.

Appearing on that page is a quilt designed by Stacy West (Buttermilk Basin) that I quilted for her! And my quilting even shows up in the picture! It was just a little thrill for me, personally, to see something that I had worked on in the pages of this catalog. Just had to share my excitement with you! You can sorta' see my quilting design in the picture on the website, but the print picture in the catalog is much better. So that's my claim to fame!