A Week of Quilting, Meetings, Ava and Weather

One of my goals for this year is to make more quilts, and a second goal related to it is to use up more of the fabric in my stash, or "fabric aging room" as my guild friend Jane S. calls it. So earlier this year I joined a scrap quilting club that is coordinated by another guild friend, Teajuana M. Our first project, begun the last Saturday of March, was a simple arrangement of 5-inch squares. I already had lots of 5-inch squares in Christmas prints that I got in a guild exchange, and had no idea what I would ever make of them, so they seemed perfect for this project. By mid April I had my squares joined according to the directions. It was time to lay the quilt out on the dining room table and slash diagonally through the plain squares. I gritted my teeth and pressed on. After slashing, I sewed new seams, again according to the directions. The pattern is called Twist and Shout.
It was a limited time free pattern by Lyn Brown on her blog.

Here is my finished top, as photo- graphed by Teajuana at our meeting last Saturday, and first published on her blog. By slashing and turning the sections, you get a quilt top "on point" that is more interesting to look at. The green border came from my stash, too. The only new fabric is the cream border with holly leaf print that I bought on sale at the store where we had our March workshop! I am looking forward to quilting this and having my very own Christmas Quilt after all these years! Then we set to work on our next project, Bento Blocks, which I hope to get joined in the next week or so. Both of these projects involved exchanges, which expanded the number of fabrics available without having to buy anything new. I really enjoy this new club and I'm also making more progress on some other long-standing projects as well.

After I left the scrap quilt workshop on Saturday, I drove home under a menacing sky. On the car radio I heard we were under a tornado watch. Suddenly they issued a tornado warning for an area two counties south west of us. Not long after I got home, our county warning sirens went off. We stayed near the TV and the computer, watching radar, until it started to hail. Then we headed for our basement, with Ava in tow. This was the first time she had ever been down there. We heard a little wind and a lot of rain. About 5 p.m. we came back upstairs and the worst part of the storm had passed. There was a lot of damage in southwest St. Louis--Des Peres, Kirkwood, Webster especially. The Weather Service confirmed a small tornado touchdown. We were very fortunate here, with just little branches scattered about and only about 1/2 inch of rain. This was the same day the huge tornado cut an 80-mile path across Mississippi and killed a dozen people.

On Sunday evening we went to a surprise birthday party for DebE, a young woman we have known for a while. She and her sister Kim joined our church over a year ago, and their energy has been a real inspiration. About 15 people gathered in her kitchen and yelled "surprise" when she arrived home from a cake decorating class. Her husband grilled brats and hamburgers and the rest of us brought side dishes or beverages. Dessert was angel food cake and berries. And the evening ended with a fire in the back yard fire pit and adults sitting around, getting smoke in their eyes and toasting marshmallows for s'mores. It was a fun evening, as the kids would say.

Monday Ava went home, but on Tuesday morning she was back as Barb headed out on a long road trip. Ava will be our dog until May 6, unless she spends part of the time with one of Barb's other friends. Tuesday I went to the spring assembly for our area Disciples Women. As study chair, I had arranged the program and it went very well. Brenda B., who is executive director of Isaiah 58 ministries (an anti poverty ministry supported by our church, among others) gave the program and it was well received. I was grateful to have planned 3 programs this year and had them all be successful! Tuesday night, Norm and I went to Soul Care, a spiritual nurture group at our church. It was the last meeting until fall.

Today Norm attacked both our yard and Barb's, using our respective lawn mowers that were both recently repaired. Our two yards look much better now. With the recent rain, everything is SO GREEN! I put out sugar water in feeders for the hummingbirds, who are supposed to arrive any day. And I spent an hour or so this afternoon tuning up two of my three sewing machines. They are all in working order now. Last week our friend Dave B., who is handy with almost any kind of repair, fixed the frayed power cord on my 1950s Featherweight I had inherited from mother. It is now installed in the sewing cabinet my father custom made for it. No other machine sews as quietly and perfectly as this one. It is great for patchwork because it is so accurate. I also cleaned and oiled my 1968 white Featherweight and figured out why it wasn't sewing; I had the bobbin case in wrong and the needle was backwards. It's now in its travel case and ready to go to the next workshop. And the fancy stitching Kenmore, which had pitched a fit as I was trying to finish my Bento Blocks to swap last Saturday, calmed down when I put a different bobbin in it and got it a new spool of thread. So with luck I may get to sew some tomorrow and Friday. Norm has been doing more research about North Carolina in anticipation of our trip. I've been watching rental car prices. Eventually it will all come together. We are starting to get excited!