Hi! It would seem that hexies are back into my life. They are very meditative to prepare and to stitch together (i.e. relatively mindless but enjoyable for a short time). 

Happy Purple & Spots

July's colour for the 2022 Table Scraps challenge is purple and the theme is circles, spots and dots. Until last year I had very few fabrics with spots but because of a wonderful gift of scraps, I now have tons.

Thunderstorms between midnight and 5 a.m. on Saturday brought very welcome rain.   The sun was out the rest of the weekend.

Pinnate prairie coneflower, jewel weed, rosin weed,  bluebell (campanula), spurge, joe pye weed.

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I do find time to sew, of course!

I used the picnic basket block (the guild July BOM) for the next batch of daisy mug rugs for an ongoing P.E.O. project.   All the baskets use the same daisy print.   (2 yards for all 16.)

Left: purplestem angelica.  Right:  Ohio spiderwort (beautiful blue!), Carolina puccoon.  Bottom: downy phlox, yellow star grass, coreopsis. 

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Stevens' annual wellness checkup was Wednesday. His chronic conditions are no worse, no better.  Heart, lungs, blood are all fine.  We followed appointment up with lunch at our favorite local Mexican restaurant and then casting our ballots in the Illinois primary (early voting). 

On Thursday evening I went ...

I apologize that I haven't commented on your blog posts this week.  I use Bloglovin and it was down for several days.  It's back today, fortunately.  (Barbara recommended Feedly and I'm going to set that up. Better to have two blog feeds than none.)

The AAUW summer luncheon was Tuesday.   No program, just pleasant conversation.  We had was a silent auction to benefit our STEM scholarship. I contributed some of the patchwork potholders I made for Joy's Table Scraps and this quilt as well as a stack of books that I'd read or that I ...

Wildflowers at Lyons Woods:  trillium, yellow rocket, garlic mustard. Bristly buttercup, forget-me-not, cow parsnip, white and purple violets. (It's a great year for violets -- there are a lot in our yard, too.)

Apple ("eating apple," the app called it), crabapple, brand-new oak leaves. 

 The memorial service for our good friend Bob was Saturday morning.   Such a wonderful tribute to a long life, well-lived!   (Here is his obituary.)  There were many people -- his widow, four daughters, most of the 17 grandchildren, and many of the great-grandchildren -- and so many friends.  Bob and Liz hosted more than 30 exchange students through ...

 Both of us were sneezy on Sunday.  My husband suffers from allergies year-round (dust and mold as well as pollen) but I only react in late spring when pollen is very heavy.  We took quick Covid tests and both read positive.   I don't have a fever, just sneezes and sniffles and a few aches.  He, meanwhile, is grumbling because we got our second booster shots last week so we should be immune, right? Umm, no.  I've pointed out that sniffles are a lot better than being hospitalized.    CDC guidelines say to self-quarantine for five days (=through Friday). I ...

The St. Patrick's Day soda bread turned out better.   We're still enjoying it and leftover crock-pot corned beef.  . 

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Spring Comes First to the Willows is a young adult novel from the time I was a young adult.  I think of that phrase every spring when the willows green up.   I don't remember anything about the book other than its title so I've put in an ...

I haven't had much time to join Project Quilting this year, but since this week's prompt is Rhythm & Repetition, I decided to take a couple of hours to make something. That's all I allowed myself because I know that I'm quite good at over-thinking and over-doing my projects. This was just a chance to play without expectations.

Rhythm & Repetition

In the Project Quilting 13.5 post, Trish included a couple of helpful links to articles on what rhythm and repetition looks like in art. I've included the links to these articles in Related links below ...

Lake Michigan at Illinois Beach State Park this weekend:   if you look closely you can see a freighter on the horizon.  

I paced the length of this trunk. It's nearly fifty feet.  A year and a half or two years ago it was growing some feet from the beach. The erosion is so severe that it undercut the dune and the tree toppled.

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In the studio:

It used to be that the "where where you when..." question was about Kennedy's assassination or, for our parents, Pearl Harbor. Now our "where were you..." prompt is twenty years old. On September 11, 2001, I was in the conference room at the North Suburban Library System headquarters.  Lynn S., Sandra N., and Carol L. and I were there for the initial meeting  of a fellowship/support group for women library directors. The big-screen TV was turned on to the news--the first tower had been hit. We thought we were seeing a clip from a disaster movie as we ...

The coffee cup mug rug pattern is available in the Flying Parrot Quilts pattern shop!

I really needed some instant gratification, and in the quilting world, it doesn’t come more instant than mug rugs. So, not quite instant, but still not that long! I had been wanting to make some new versions of the paper pieced coffee cup mug rug I made for a swap ages ago. (Does that make this instant coffee? I digress.)

So, because they went so quickly I whipped up five in an afternoon! (The bindings took several episodes of Star Trek to get through ...

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good week and got some quilting done. Since my previous post, I've been busy with several projects. I usually work on one project at a time, although not always get them finished. That's quite normal, isn't it?! :) 

First of all, I have a finished UFO! 

Yep! Another Postage Stamp Quilt! This is #9 (my UFO list). It's the same size as the other PSQ I finished recently; 72 x 95 inches / 183 x 241 cm. 

I finished the pomegranate mug rug for my friend who will become Bat Mitvah on May 31. ("Jewish tradition teaches that the pomegranate is a symbol of righteousness because it is said to have 613 seeds, which corresponds with the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, of the Torah. For this reason and others, it is customary to eat pomegranates on Rosh Hashanah. Moreover, the pomegranate represents fruitfulness, knowledge, learning and wisdom." Source:  Chabad.org) 

It arrived on Saturday, just in time.

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The water is still cold!

Phlox, false Solomon's seal, Golden Alexander,  Star of Bethlehem (a garden escapee), fringed puccoon aka narrowleaf stoneseed, sweet Cicely, mayapple, wild columbine (aquilegia).

Puccoon, blue-eyed grass, lupine, chokecherry, daisy fleabane, and what the i.d. app calls Umbellate Bastard Toadflax which to me sounds like a Shakespearean insult.

Every year I look for this patch of ...

(clockwise):  skunk cabbage leafed out (the flower is the purply-brown "horn"), violets, swamp buttercup, white trout lily (aka dogtooth violet -- "trout" because the leaves are mottled brown/green like a trout); bloodroot. 

Operation Warm also provides new winter coats for kids.  Our ...