Where does time go?

Where does time go? I spent the afternoon in my garden clipping off all the spent daylily stems & wondering how it could be that my orange daylilies - tiger lilies my Dad called them - have almost gone by as have my Shasta Daisies. It seems like I was just drooling over Burpees seed catalog looking at perennials and the garden was tucked in tight for the winter.

And time is flying by too - my niece Carla is being married a week from tomorrow. How the heck did she get old enough to be married???

I made her ring bearer's pillow which my great nephew Zack will carry down the aisle and hopefully not lose the rings on the way there. When I offered to make it, I envisioned stitching silk embroidery flowers and a heart with Carla and Danny's initials in soft, romantic colors. I should have known better. Carla's colors are black and white. How the heck was I supposed to make something soft and romantic from black and white????

So I hemmed and hawed and tried to get her to let me add one color - "No colors Aunt Debbie" and finally came up with this last week. (Plenty of time - the wedding isn't until the 18th!") I wrapped it and Jim mailed it on Tues. She should get it tomorrow or Sat. I hope they like it. The black bow is actually a bridal fabric with crystals on it to give it a little pizzaz.

I made a band on the back for Zack to slip his hands through so that he wouldn't be tempted to carry it like a football. I also put a white ribbon through the knot of the black bow to tie the rings to in case they lose their minds and actually let Zack carry the rings down the aisle on the pillow. Zack is 7, his two cousins, Jordan is 8 and Faith is 6 & they are flower girls. He'll do fine, Jordan will be very serious and Faith will float down the aisle. Zack is my nephew Arthur's son and Jordan and Faith are my niece Jennifer's daughters.

Oh did I mention Carla and Dan's dogs will be part of the wedding party??? This should be a hoot!

The day after the wedding will be a slave labor day at my Mom's. Children of all ages are being drafted to help haul, weed and paint. There will be some grumbling but there will be food involved so grumbling will be kept to a minimum. The family will be together and it will be nice to laugh and tease and talk. I'm looking forward to it.

If the dogs are actually in the wedding - I'll post a picture.

Until next time.

Just one little thing . . .

A local chain store closed all it's location by us. The Rag Shop was where you went to get sewing notions like zippers, bra extenders, etc. You didn't really go there to get fabric anymore, they had less and less and more and more seasonal "junk". Which is why they went under in my opinon. Anyway, we had so many people coming in and asking for zippers, I decided to put in a small zipper display. Simple right?

Wrong. Who would have thought that a 26" deep by 30" wide display wouldn't just slip right into a 4800 square foot display floor????

The display came the day before we closed for the NJ state quilt show. The Wednesday after, I decided to move stuff around in the notions section to slip the zipper display right in. It couldn't take more than an hour or so right?

Wrong - two hours while the shop was opened only convinced me that the whole notions department needed to be rearranged, which meant moving thre reds and pinks, which meant moving the blues & purples, then the browns and blacks, then the yellows and greens and at that point why not the nauticals and baby sections too?????

I should have had the camera because at 10 pm I would say the store was littered with 3,000 bolts of fabric that had no homes. By midnight most of it was back in it's new home on freshly washed fabric racks (why does fabric create so much dust???) and only the baby section and the nautical sections were trashed. Back at 8am Thurs morning and we were actually almost done by the time we opened at 10am. We finished up at noon and hauled our tired bodies home to lay in the shade on what was supposed to be our day off. HA!

Once the major stuff was moved - fabric units, notions displays and fabrics - that meant the store still had to be "fluffed" which means news displays. That's the fun part. Here are some pictures of the store redo - come visit us & see the rest!

Till next time.

Goofing Off

Everyonce in awhile, you just have to goof off - ditch everything you are supposed to be doing and do something else. My friend Sandy Brawner, who owns Quilt Country in TX, gave me a pattern to try when we were at Quilt Market. It's called Four Simple Squares. It looked really neat and Sandy said it was really easy . . . .

So today, instead of doing paperwork - the bane of my existance! - I took some fabric out of the sale room and started the pattern.

Now I have at LEAST three redwork projects going, a pretty quilt with a scalloped border that just needs the bias binding stitched together & put on and who knows how many other projects going already . . . Did I want to do any of them? Nope! So what's a girl to do? Start another project!

The piece on the right is the fabric that all the blocks on the left came from! Aren't they cool? I actually read and followed the directions - great pictures by the way - and stitched all of these blocks and a few more in just about an hour.

I can tell you they are addicting. You sit and turn the pieces and get all kinds of neat patterns!

Here's a closeup of some of the blocks. I love simple things that look really hard! These are actually four patches!

I do have the pattern up on the website

http://www.quiltingpossibilities.net/ and if you are in the area of the shop - look for a class in July or August.

Till next time.

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.