Home Again

Everyone says you can't go home again - well you can, but everything and everyone looks different! I went home this past weekend to attend my niece Carla's, bridal shower. It was held in a pretty venue overlooking Gloucester Harbor and also overlooking Rocky Neck where I grew up and my Mom still lives. Like I said, you can go home again - it's just different.

I spent most of the bridal shower trying to figure out who was who - names were familiar but faces weren't! I saw one of my best high school buddies - Ann Marie - who I spent many, many, MANY hours with but didn't realize who she was until I talked with her for a few minutes while frantically flipping through mental files! She took off her huge sunglasses and there she was! Ann Marie still lives in Gloucester so she filled in names and faces of people I knew in high school. It was frustrating to have someone smile at you and then you spend the next few minutes trying to put a name to the face!

I left Gloucester for New Jersey 25 years ago and although I go back a couple of times a year, those trips are mostly hurried affairs and filled with family. Then you go home for an event like a shower and you see people you haven't seen in 25 years - it's sort of freaky.

Gloucester is America's oldest seaport. Usually when people think of Gloucester, they think of fishing and beaches. Me too - but I think of other things too. Walking to school across the causeway from what I now realize was island in the middle of the harbor - but who thought about that when you weren't allowed to wear pants to elementary school and the wind/snow/rain was whipping down the outer harbor across the causeway and you thought you'd freeze to death before you reached the other side? I took the ocean for granted - it was just always there, supplied food for the table and money for everything else. You don't realize how huge a part of your life it was until you go to college in the middle of Maine and it takes you a few months to figure out that the sounds and smells you are missing are the ocean. First thing when we all got home from college - take someone's mother's car and ride around the backshore!

The hall where Carla's shower was held is just down from where my Great Aunt Josephine lived - she made the best Italian cookies! Something was always cooking on her stove and her house was always full of people. There was a man there mowing her lawn on Sunday and it was strange to think that she's been gone for years and someone else owned the house now. Gloucester very much lives on in my mind - just as it was 25 years ago. You can take the girl out of New England, but you can't take New England out of the girl.

It was SO NICE to hear people talk in a NORMAL accent! The letter "R" has mostly been banned from New Englander's mouths. Most of my accent is gone but when I am tired or around my family for more than a day - it's back. We do pak our cas is the yad. And the instant someone say "I'm from Gloucester" and not "I'm from Glosestah" you know they weren't born there.

My sister-in-law Laurel is a great cook and she fed us constantly for two days. Won't let anyone help, she's the ultimate "I have it undah control" girl. So you sit on her deck gossip and eat the whole time you are home. I think my mom and I ate cheerios for breakfast at home and then stuffed ourselves the rest of the time at Laurel and Sooky's.

And speaking of Sooky - real name Arthur - Atha in New Englandese - here's a picture I found while looking on the web for Gloucester pictures (since my camera was sitting on my mother's couch during the shower instead of in my purse where it should have been!). This is my big brother who is actually some kind of big deal in the New England fisheries industry - which makes me absolutely hysterical everytime I think about it! He's fished and lobstered all his life. Everytime I find a quote of his on the internet or in the GDT (Gloucester Daily Times) I laugh myself silly. I am proud of him though - just don't tell him.

I've volunteered to make the ring bearer's pillow for Carla and Dan's wedding - colors in black and white. Any suggestions on how to liven it up alittle without adding any color would be greatly appreciated!

Until next time.

Quilt Market

Quilt Market is the wholesale show for the quilting industry. Held twice a year, the fall show is always in Houston TX and the spring show travels the country. This spring we were in Portland Oregon. Jim and I went out early and spent a couple of days with fellow shop owner Karen Snyder of Anna Lena's in Long Beach Washington and her husband, Bob.

Jim took this picture of us along the Oregon coast, notice Bob and I have on jackets and Karen is braving the weather without one . . . She finally broke down and wore one the next day, of course it was so foggy and rainy along the coast in WA that day that we could hear the Pacific ocean but couldn't SEE it!

Quilt Market was a brain drain - so many colors and ideas and stimulation - your brain is exhausted from trying to process it all (and this is the time when you are doing major buying for the next 6 months or so!) and your feet are sore from walking about three football fields of vendor booths. I think there were at least 1,000 vendors with everyone from the major fabric companies to pattern designers with five or six patterns for sale.

This is Jim and Larry, one of our fabric reps, in the Timeless Treasures booth. The quilts are samples done from the newest fabric lines. You sit in the chairs and the rep shows you all the latest and greatest from that company. This is one side of the booth, to the left is another row of tables and chairs and another wall of gorgeous quilt samples.

This is my friend Karen Montgomery's newest line for Timeless called Lindsey - named for her youngest daughter.

And this is part of the Crab Apple Hill Studio booth - wait till you see our newest hand embroidery block of the month coming next fall!

I bought lots of patterns, ordered bunches of new books and alot of fabric that won't arrive until later this summer. Stay tuned to the shop and the website to see!

Early Sunday morning we headed home - this was the gorgeous view out my plane window.

Until next time.

Flamingos and Maypoles

Fabric is arriving in the shop fast & furiously! This really cute line of flamingos - flamingos are not usually my thing - came in from Clothworks and they are obviously having some kind of a party! I took some home after checking it in and whipped out a table runner using one of Graywind Designs patterns - love those, they are so easy! - this one is called Four Across. This is the kind of fabric you look at and say to yourself, that's really cute but what the heck would I do with it? Hence the table runner! This will look great out on my deck this summer. We made up a bunch of kits and now I am thinking I should order more!

The entire line of April Cornell's latest fabrics just arrived too - all 40 some odd bolts of them! It's bright purples, yellows, greens and reds - very summery. We have it next to the Christmas fabric that arrived last week from Benartex! I haven't done a sample or managed to get all the Maypole line up on the website yet, I'm thinking it's going to be one of those lines that will sell by itself without a sample . . . ok, ok, I am HOPING it will sell without a sample!

I've been putzing around in my gardens this week. It's finally warm enough and dry enough to dig. I've been dividing and moving plants that should have been moved last fall. Some will go to the shop, but most will fill in bare spaces at home. Feels good to be out in the dirt again!

Till next time.

Christmas is Coming!

Yikes! Christmas fabric has arrived at the shop. What was I thinking when I said it could be delivered the end of March???? It sounded ok in October but I'm just not ready to deal with Christmas, I just got the last of this past Christmas's stuff back up in the attic!

It's Nancy Halvorsen's line from Benartex and as usual, it's pretty. Nice panel, and nice coordinates to go with it. I forced myself to put the panel up on the website but have been dragging my feet with the rest. It's in the shop and for those of you too far away, I will need to be goaded into the Christmas spirit to get it done!

Sigh - it's another panel. I like it, it will be cute when somethings done with it - I just have to sneakily talk someone else on the staff to taking it home and doing something with it!

We vended at the BeachPlum Quilters show last weekend. We were next to Julie from Julie's Sewing basket - who has great embroidery stuff! We set up our booths so we could sit, stitch and gossip. It was a nice way to spend the day, chatting with Julie and all the customers at the show. I finally got the pillow top stitched I've been working on since February. Ok, not every day, not even once a week . . . but I did get the last few flowers stitched and this week am actually sewing the nine patches for the border.

I even took the first couple of stitches in my next redwork project! I'm making this as a wall hanging in my guest room.

My panel mission continues - I found three bolts of a Beatrix Rabbit book in the backroom so I took one home last week and came up with this. I love Beatrix Potter!

Till next time.

Panel Rut

Help! I've fallen into Panel Hell and I can't get out!

Not really but that's what it feels like lately. I'm working on two new samples for the shop - both from panels. After Jacob Sails, I swore it would be a long time before I did another quilt from a panel - never say never. Well, I didn't say never, I just said a long time but surely I meant more than two months!

Holly Taylor did a great panel using flowers and hummingbirds. The colors are different - reds, greens and purples - just the color of the hummingbirds Jim and I sit out on the front porch and watch the feeder I gave Jim for Father's Day last year most summer evenings. We call them the hummingbirds wars as the males dive bomb any other hummer that shows up & thinks it's going to take a quick sip. (The kids think we need to get a life that has more in it than sitting on the porch watching birds!)

It's been sitting in the shop with no one taking much interest in it - hard to see a panel when it's rolled on the bolt! So I took it home, jettsioned my original idea of what to do with it and came up with this. It's not too big, not too small - a nice wall hanging for the summer, or winter when it's too cold for blooms or hummers! (Lori said the name of this kit should be Hummers and Bloomers!) You can see the details on our website by clicking here.

And on my "day off" Monday, I went up to a local distributor to pick up some odds and ends. While I was there, they were rolling Elizabeth Studio's newest line of fabrics onto bolts. It's called Friendship by the Sea and it's a PANEL! A very cute panel, but still a panel. By the time I was done, they had my order ready to go and I was the first quilt shop to have the fabric! Six bolts have been sitting on the end of my kitchen table - eat there? what??? we don't eat there, we eat at the other end! - waiting for inspiration to strike. It finally did yesterday morning.

I'm not happy with the corners and still might change them. I like the fabric I used, just think that maybe it's getting lost in the overall quilt. A tiny border may go in there sometime today. I still have to write up the pattern, it's on 17 pieces of paper spread all over my cutting table at the moment! Kits should be up on the website & available in the shop tomorrow or Saturday.

So that's what I've been working on - panels. What have you been working on?

Till next time.

Greening QP

There has been a lot of press in the quilting world about greening up the industry lately. Companies are starting to produce batting made from cotton - which I found to be scratchy, I'm hoping they improve it as time goes on - and fabrics are being produced from bamboo - which I found to be about the same price and pretty soft from Hoffman.

In my "real" life I have a BS in Environmental Science & worked in that field after graduating from college. I've been trying to "green" up QP since I opened - long before this welcome new wave of energy efficiency came along. I can argue the paper vs plastic bag discussion on both sides - really we should all be carrying a tote and using that! - and QP has had automatic thermostat controls for years. We recycle, we shut off all computers except the main one when we close - it has to be on for me to connect to it and work from home (hmmm, maybe we should shut that one off too!) - our building is as energy efficient as we can make it with new furnaces and an upgraded air conditioning system.

All this is good for the environment! I remember the energy crisis of the 1970's and sitting in gas lines for what seemed to be forever to my teenage brain. I also remember President Carter, his sweaters and solar panels on the White House roof. Some of those panels now reside on the cafeteria of my Alma Mata Unity College in Unity Maine. Last time I checked, they were still functioning, although some needed repair. When we were going to build, we had solar on the roof. If the timing & funding is ever right again, panels will go on this roof - and shine right on the nuclear power plant 1/2 mile away!

We will celebrate Earth Day - a couple of days early - at QP by having three Make It Take It workshops on April 9th to make a reusable shopping tote. Cost is $5 and all you need to bring is scissors. You can sign up on the web site www.quiltingpossibilities.net

One thing I've been kicking around with the staff - who think I've gone right over the edge into the tree hugging category - is how to encourage all of you to make a tote and bring it when you shop at QP. We've tossed it around at a staff meeting and haven't come up with any solutions, so I'm asking you for ideas. What would encourage you to use a reusable tote everytime you shop at QP?

Till next time.

What I've Been Working On.

Sometimes it is the lot of a store owner that you spend more time at the computer doing paperwork than you do at your sewing machine. This week I've actually been at the sewing machine more. It's been a nice change.

This is a pillow that I whipped up in an hour or so. Cute for spring! My sample still needs eyes on the bunnies!

Kristie whipped up the flower sample. My friend Karen from Quilt Company in PA designs these. She did the Christmas one that was so popular this last year too.

I had a customer in the shop Friday who asked why I didn't have any table runners for Easter? I keep thinking Easter is so far away . . . . WRONG. It's in three weeks! Yikes! So this morning I whipped up this runner & the girls kitted it today.

You can find all these kits on our webpage www.quiltingpossibilities.net

I thought I'd pawned off a sample on Judy - As The Baby Churns - but have somehow gotten it back to quilt it. I'm not quite sure how that happened . . .

I'll get a picture of it posted tomorrow.

Jim and I are off the Philadelphia Flower Show tomorrow. I can hardly wait to take that first step into the show and smell SPRING!

Until next time.