Photo: Common Angle Moth

Macaria aemulataria, the common angle moth

Photos: Butterflies, Flowers, and a Cat

A very bedraggled red-spotted purple butterfly

Painted lady butterfly

White hostas

Tall lavender phlox and white hostas

Clematis

Tiger

Photos: Clematis, Hostas, Phlox, Skippers, & Boston Ivy

Clematis

Tall lavender phlox and white hostas

White hostas

Silver-spotted skipper on Autumn Joy sedum

Peck's skipper on Autumn Joy skipper

Soldier beetle

Boston Ivy

Photos: Cats and a View

View from the second-floor window of my quilting studio.

Teensy

Tiger

Journal: Bear Paws & Ribbons & Hostas

Some quilting ladies were discussing the marking pens they use on their quilts, and after one said she was done with chalk (because of the mess and instability of the marks), and using only her FriXion pens from now on, I thought I would again pass on this warning: 

FriXion pens might not be the best choice.  The ink can show up again. 

One lady sent a beautiful quilt to a big quilt show.  It went by plane through the cold, cold skies, and when it arrived, all the markings were back again, and her quilt was disqualified.  

Also, even after the marks have been removed by heat, and again by washing to remove the chemicals that make up those inks (a necessity that many don’t know about), they can leave a light-colored ‘shadow’ line that never will go away, especially on dark fabric.

I have some of those pens, and I use them – but never where they will show when the quilt is finished.  Another choice is washable Crayola markers.  Those come out very nicely in the wash.  However, I often do not wash the quilt after making it, so I rarely use them.

My favorites are the Mark-B-Gone and the air-or-water-vanishing pens.  Mark-B-Gone comes in white or blue, fine point or regular.  To remove the marks, just spritz with water.  I like to add a teaspoon of baking soda to each cup of water, to ensure total removal of the marks.

The vanishing pens vanish often, and I can’t find them to save my life.

Oh, that’s not what ‘vanishing pen’ means?

Okay, okay... the marks will vanish in a little while, usually a few hours.  When I want to take pictures of my work, and the marks are still there, I speed up the process with a small spray of water.

I have a variety of chalk pencils and rollers, too, and use them when the pens aren’t showing up on the fabric.

Tuesday, I loaded Larry’s brother Kenny’s Bear Paw quilt on my frame and started quilting it.  By the time I quit for the night, the top two borders were done.

When I know I’ll be repeating a design multiple times throughout the quilt, I take many pictures as I go along, so I’ll be able to duplicate it correctly.  No way can I otherwise remember what I did in the top border, by the time I get to the bottom!  😃

Loren and Norma gave me a big piece of 100% cotton batting for this quilt.  Loren had bought it when they were moving Norma’s things into his house after they married a year and a half ago ----- she’d asked him to go to Wal-Mart for some packing stuff, to protect furniture and dishes and pictures and suchlike.  He wound up in the wrong department and bought an entire bolt of batting.  haha  So she wouldn’t let him use it for packing, and they saved it for me.

On the bolt, it says the batting is 90” wide.  The quilt is 94” wide.  I thought I’d have to piece a strip of batting to the side, but when I loaded it on the frame, I wound up with an inch and a half of extra batting at either side.

Larry went to Lincoln that day to have his teeth readjusted.  He missed his appointment last month, but hasn’t been having too much trouble with the dentures.

Wednesday, I looked through fancy pantographs to use in those big, blank squares in the quilt.  I chose one called ‘Pink Lemonade’.

I’m doing only a light custom quilting on this quilt, so it’s going fairly fast. 

Thursday morning, since we had quite a lot of peaches from our tree, I made maple and brown sugar oatmeal for breakfast, and sliced half of a banana and a couple of fresh peaches into it.  Mmmmm, that was good.

I did a little more quilting after our church service that night, and got almost to the halfway point.

Lookie, lookie what a friend sent me from the Nebraska State Fair Friday!  I got Best of Show and Best of Division (whatever that is).  I have purple and blue medallions, a gold Best of County medallion, a blue First Place ribbon, and a red Second Place Best of County ribbon.

I got several blue ribbons in Textile Arts, too.  😃

I wrote back to my friend, “Oh, wow, I’m famous!  But what’s that silly RED ribbon doing in there????”

I was kidding, but I did wonder how I could get ‘Best of Show’ and not get ‘Best of County’, too.

That must’ve given me a burst of energy, because I was soon washing cat beds... vacuuming the rugs... cleaning the kitchen... and going to town for a stop at the bank, and then to do some things on one of my blind friends’ computers. 

I suspect I must enjoy cleaning the house, since I invariably find myself singing or humming, anytime I launch into the job.  😉

Or maybe it’s because I feel like I’m wasting my time, doing something that’ll just have to be done all over again before long, and therefore I sing, in order to at least be doing two things at once.  😄

When I got home, I had a snack of fresh peaches and a bit of mozzarella cheese with a small chunk of 12-grain bread.  After posting pictures of my ribbons, I got back to the quilting.

A friend wrote, “Congratulations!!  I hope Lydia is as excited as you must be!”

“Maybe she is,” I responded, “but she’ll probably be more excited, when I’m finally done trying to win ribbons and prizes with that quilt!  hee hee”

By then, I was having fun doing ‘thread painting’ on the bear panel itself.  Thread painting is fun, but it’s not my favorite.  Is it rulerwork?  Or pantographs?  Or free-motion feathers, pebbles, leaves?  I like all parts of quilting, from the designing to the cutting to the piecing to the quilting to the binding to the label.  😃

For supper that evening, we had ancient-grain-encrusted cod, green beans, macaroni and cheese, cherry tomatoes from the neighbors’ garden, and peaches from our tree.  The Schwan man had come earlier, so we had frozen yogurt for dessert.

Saturday, Hannah and the children went to the State Fair – and she learned from one of the judges the story behind that red Second Place ribbon.

The judge, wanting to 'spread the wealth around', chose a different one for First Place Best in County.  It’s hand-appliqued and hand-quilted.  She hoped that was okay.

"Well, of COURSE not!" I said to Hannah.  "I wanted all the wealth!!!!!"

I shall be gracious... but if one quilt is considered better than another, it should get the ribbon.  We don’t want to live in a socialistic community!  I never mind losing to another, when it’s truly fair.

Teensy

That other quilt, done in aqua and brown, is lovely.  Many would find it more appealing than an all-white-and-cream quilt.

At one big quilt show, I saw some really, really ugly quilts – with poor workmanship – sporting big ol’ ruffly First Place medallions.  What in the world?

Tiger

The quilts that won ribbons at the much smaller show in Creede, Colorado, were truly beautiful.  Funny, how that works.  Maybe tells you the political bent of the judges.  Or whether they were quietly related to one of the winning quilters.  heh

Truthfully, I can imagine that judging quilts for a show must be a hard job.  What if you wind up with a whole pile of quilts that you think are beautiful, unique, and skillfully made?  Some of it just has to come down to judges’ tastes and preferences, there isn’t any getting around it.  But I believe that, for the most part, they try to be fair.  (Not fair, though, to award a ribbon to someone just to ‘spread the wealth’.  Nope, that’s not fair.)  (I shall not have a tantrum, however.)  😉

Clematis

Saturday evening, Larry was sharpening a chain (for a chain saw) for his brother Kenny, until I called him in for supper (filet mignon!!! and mashed potatoes, gravy, and steamed asparagus, along with fresh peaches).  He managed to get his supper down, but then, whilst trying to text his brother, they both fell asleep, mid-text, and nobody wrote to anybody for a long time.  hee hee  Poor guys.  They work hard.

I quilted a little while longer, then decided I’d better quit.  My back was protesting, and I didn’t want to be trying not to fall asleep in Sunday School.  Sometimes I catch a glimpse of some of the teenage boys nodding off, and for some reason, if I was the slightest bit sleepy, that wakes me right up. 

The dark smudges at the bottom of my screen have come back... gone away... come back... and gone away multiple times since I thought they inexplicably vanished when I reset the touchpad on my laptop.  Saturday night, after I shut down the longarm and wanted to post a few pictures, the computer had a Big Bad Crash.

It locked up... I did a hard shutdown... turned it back on... it tried and failed to update... and wouldn’t come all the way on.  Another hard shutdown... then turned it back on... it allllmost came on, not quite.  A third hard shutdown.  This time it came on enough that after it stalled I was able to click ‘Restart’ after pressing Ctrl Alt Delete.  Finally it came on, verrrry slooowly.  I started pulling up the windows and programs I’d had up.  Everything was extremely sluggish. 

It occurs to me that the lockups often happen when I am working with pictures – especially when using Windows 7’s Photo Gallery.  I downloaded it to this Windows 10 laptop when it was new, and use it often, because it works so much better than the Viewer in W10.  But I suppose it isn’t completely compatible with the system.  😕

Because many people have asked, I rounded up a few choice photos and posted them – the highlights from the making of the New York Beauty quilt:  New York Beauty Highlights

Amongst all the nice comments, there are some that make one scratch one’s head and wonder, How does she know how to type if she doesn’t know how to read?!  And with some, you wonder, How does she survive in this ol’ world?

For instance, I typed below the above picture, ‘Venice lace’.  Yet someone writes, “I love how your quilting makes that look like lace!”

If you follow the above link and look at the blog post, you’ll see that the first photo and the second-to-last photo are shots of the entire quilt.  It even says ‘completed’ underneath, with the date.  Nevertheless, someone wrote (in a snippy tone), “Why don’t you show us pictures of the whole quilt?!”

I don’t suppose the proper response is “Don’t be such a dingbat”?

I wrote matter-of-factly, “The first and second-to-last photos are of the whole quilt.”

The pictures are in order.  They are even dated.  They show piecing, then quilting, then the adding of the beaded piping... and then the sewing on of pearls.

But someone writes, “How did you get your longarm to quilt through all those pearls?”

The pearls were not sewn on until the quilting was finished, and I’d removed the quilt from the frame. 

Others write, “How long did this take?” when, directly above the pictures, there is a Grand Total of hours (639.5), and a short breakdown of how long certain individual tasks took (piecing, 106.5; quilting, 168.5; making the beaded piping, 42; attaching piping and binding, 63.5; sewing on pearls, 109).

One person responded before I had a chance to, “She wrote that, in her description.”

The woman who’d asked the question replied, “I don’t read those.”

Well, then, what would ever make me think she’d read any answer to her query?  🙄

These are those about whom the teacher wrote on the backs of their fifth-grade report cards, “Needs to work on comprehension skills.”  heh

I was surprised when I was compiling those ‘highlight’ shots, to see just how many days it took for each and every part of the process. For instance, I spent from February 8 to April 6 quilting, and I quilted for several hours almost every one of those days.

Yesterday after our morning church service, we were invited for dinner with Kurt and Victoria, and a friend of Victoria’s, Sonia, who lives in Washington State, visiting with her baby girl, Annalise.  Anna has Down’s Syndrome.  As is typical of so many who have this condition, she is loving and affectionate, a happy little thing.

Victoria had a lovely meal of roast, carrots, potatoes, and onions baking slowly in the oven all morning, and it was perfectly done when it was time for dinner.  She had also made banana bread.  Sonia had purchased fruit and peach pies at the Farmers’ Market in our Town Square Saturday morning, and altogether it made a delicious meal.

Our neighbor man stopped by this afternoon and gave us a gift card to Applebees as a thank-you for caring for their animals.

Today I was surprised to see a picture someone posted on a big quilting group on Facebook – a photo of my New York Beauty quilt at the Nebraska State Fair, with a man and woman standing there looking at it.

A lady commented, “People usually don’t get this close to any of the quilts.”

I responded, “There are so many quilts entered at the Nebraska State Fair, there just isn’t room to ‘fence them off’, even in that huge room.  They even have to overlap many of them, to make room.  But in the times I’ve been there, I’ve never seen anyone touching them.  White-gloved helpers will pull back quilts so one can see some that are partially covered, or look at the back.  (It is fun to get so close, I must admit. 😉 )

“One time Larry and I were looking at a quilt... he reached out to point ------ and at the very same time, on the opposite side of the aisle, a husband and wife were also looking at a quilt, he reached out to point... In unison, the other lady and I exclaimed, ‘DON’T TOUCH!!!’  Both husbands jerked back like they’d gotten soundly thwacked.  They looked guiltily at each other... and then we all burst out laughing.”

The white hostas around the yard are all in bloom.  And what a profusion of blooms it is!  The Sphinx moths are happy.  The Autumn Joy sedum buds are opening and turning pink, too.  Here’s a little Peck’s skipper sipping nectar from the new blossoms.

Tomorrow morning I should find two or three big boxes of groceries on my front porch (or just inside my door, if the weather is bad).  I order most of them from Wal-Mart, and a few things from Amazon.  Shipping is free, when one buys $35 from Wal-Mart, and $25 from Amazon.  It’s so helpful, not to have to lug heavy stuff around the store, out to the car, and then into the house.

Back to the Bear Paw quilt!  I will be done in a couple more days, if all goes well.

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn           ,,,>^..^<,,,