Remembering Mom

Today of course I would like to use this post to remember my mother. I don't have her with me on this earth anymore, but she is always with me. I found this pattern envelope about a year ago when I was going through some of her things. I never even knew she had kept it. It was torn in a lot of pieces, so I taped it together and realized that it was the pattern for her wedding dress that her mother had made for her in 1946. I don't have any of the actual pattern pieces, but the envelope is precious just the same.
Here is the actual dress which I was able to clean up and hang sweetly.

It was made of some beautiful sheer organdy and tafetta, which I am surprised that my mother actually wore. I always though of her as being much more conservative. Last year we had a display of our mother's wedding gowns for our Mother-Daughter banquet at church so I took this picture. Below is my Mom on her wedding day.
And here she is holding me when I was a baby, then taking me for a walk in the snowy driveway when I was one year old.

Don't you just love those red boots? Thank you Mom for a lifetime of wonderful memories.
I hope you are all having a beautiful Mother's Day.

Beauiful May

I'm a few days late with my calandar this month..oops! But here is my Diane Phalen picture for the month of May. Pretty iris', and I love the way her houses always look. Wish I lived in one of them. :) Plus the Double Wedding and Around The World are some of my favorite quilt patterns. Around the World is a LOT of fun to make, and I have a very speical one that someday I'll show you.. when things aren't so crazy around here. Right now they are.

Happy Weekend

Got the sweetest card in the mail today from one of my friends. Gave a smile to my face.. exactly the kind of stuff I love. Sold by Laughing Elephant.

We'll be spending the day with our daughter celebrating her graduation. Hope you are all enjoying a beautiful spring weekend. And my prayers go out to all the families who are cleaning up after the storms.

Yellow

Usually I would post my Diane Phalen Calander picture for the first day of the month, but that I will save until tomorrow, because I just discovered that Angela over at Cottage Magpie is extending her Color Yellow Challenge a couple more days. Yippee!! I just saw Nanette's post yesterday with all the lovely yellow things that she has, and was afraid I had missed out on the fun.

I do love this color and have a lot of it in and around my house.

This is a corner cupboard in the kitchen that I can't reach easily, so I took the door off several years ago and set some pretty old do-dads and things up there. I'll pick out and show only the yellow.

A stack of Fiesta bowls and plates.. (ooops.. I do use these for soup and sandwiches sometimes). These are not old, but I like them anyways.

An old Fiesta creamer that belonged to my mother.
My mother's Wise Old Owl pitcher that I blogged about before, and The Pussycat which I found at a garage sale a couple summers ago.
On the top shelf is a ceramic watering can that was also my mother's and a little dog I picked up at the same time as the pussycat.
Now for the "Useful" yellow things. My ironing board.
My new watering can for the outside flowers.

These I every single day, usually many times.
This is my favorite sweatshirt at the moment. I love the turtleneck collar for cool spring days. ..AND some fun play things. I have lots and lots toys and books and could fill a whole week's worth of yellow with those. But here are just a couple. My tin doll house from when I was a little girl. I only have one of the people left.. but was able to find a lot of furniture.
A dress I made for one of my big fashion dolls..
..and one of the Bleuettes is dressed all in yellow at the moment, so she'll get in the scene.
These beauties are perhaps my very favorite yellow things of all. They are singing gloriously right now, and the males are splendid. They are called Goldfinches, and a dozen or so of them visit my feeders all day long. I can watch them from my kitchen window. Wish I had a better camera for close-ups though!


So I think you might have one more day yet to join in. It is so much fun to see what everyone else has and picks out to show. :)

What's in Those Jars?

One of my new blogland friends Mary Kate asked what was in the jars on my dresser. So I got to thinking maybe someone else might want to know too. Well..they contain a few strings of old buttons that I have been hoarding.. I mean collecting for a while now. I would really like to display them in some better way, but I just don't have the space, or really any good ideas. So I'm just doing what my mother always did.. string them together until it is time to need them. But the trouble is, I find myself not wanting to use them for anything except looking at and playing with. :/
I think I need to make the strings a little looser so I can spread them and see them better, but then I am sure I would have a tangled mess!
Then last night the weatherman kept telling us to cover any plants or flowers we didn't want to lose to the frost. So we went out and tied trash bags on our lilac bush. It was no easy feat. The neighborman pulled in his driveway and hollered over, "What holiday are you decorating for?"

When I went out this morning at 6am, it was 39F and cloudy.. not a speck of frost anywhere. Ugh I had to take all those bags off before anyone saw them and thought I was confused about the season we were in!

And finally, I really have GOT to work on my sewing stuff here. I keep getting so many interruptions. But this baby quilt needs to be finished by the 17th of May.. that's when the baby shower is. And I really have to have it done to give at the shower. I keep plodding along on it. I am about half done with the quilting.. just need to buckle down!Hope you all are having a good week!

I Like Mondays

I really do. It is my day to catch up from the fast and not always so restful Sunday. The whole week lies ahead like a clean slate waiting for us to make our pictures .

I had every intension of going grocery shopping today because we are out of almost everything. But I think we can eke through one more day before running out of bathroom tissue. And I wanted to take some time to put things back into my newly painted and papered bedroom. SO much stuff has been squirreled away in there. I have to find somewhere else to put it. Or get rid of it!

Our furniture in here is very dark. Old pieces that came from the lady who used to own our house many many years ago. I don't really care for dark furniture. But its what we have. And it does look pretty with white doilies. Today is rainy and chilly, so I cut some of the lilacs and brought them in. Here is the top of my dresser. Hope I can keep it this way!

All the lace doilies are in a drawer of a chest that is blocked by some other things in another room.. (way too much stuff in here!).. so this grandmother's garden quilt patch that was easy to get to suited just fine don't you think? Not made by me, but found by me at a rummage sale.

Ok.. back to sorting things. I did have fun this morning catching up on all the delightful blogs I like to read. The world is full of some really wonderful and creative people. Hope you are all having a lovely Monday.

Look What Can Happen..

..when you are indoors painting and wallpapering for 5 days. None of these were out on Monday.
This is the first year the RedBud has blossoms.
Violas in the rockbed..
Bleeding Heart nearby..
Little blue flowers in the grass.. I have no idea what they are. But they are going to get mown over I'm afraid..boo-hoo...
Lilacs. THESE just started to open today. I know they were not out there yesterday, because I did look out my window there and did not see them.
And remember my nine little Spring Beauties that I was afraid to pick and put in my white lady vase? Now I think there must be 49 of them out there. Still not picking them. I'll let them flourish...
Next week it is supposed to snow. Hope they are wrong about that!
I have a lot of catching up to do all the way around. Funny, but no emails or crafting happened while I was working on the ceiling and walls.

Hope your weekend outlook is splendid!

I Love My Clothesline

Don't we all?

Ok. I don't have any new crafty things to show at all. The best I can do is something old. I came across this quilt while cleaning out a linen cupboard. I had forgotten it was in there. It is my first quilt I made when I was around 12. Of course Mom helped me quite a bit. I'm pretty sure she put all the big blocks together, but I definitely remember piecing the nine-patch blocks.. because I thought it would take me forever. The fabric was leftovers from my own clothes that I had made, and pieces from Mom's scrap bag. That brown and orange flowered patch was a cute summer tunic with puffed sleeves and a pair of shorts I made in 4H one year. I modeled it in a "fashion show" at the county fair. The one pink floral was a dress, and the yellow/seafoam green was a nightgown. I wanted to use only new "pretty" fabrics, but I had to also mix in some of the old ugly stuff, because we never wasted a scrap. This quilt is fairly worn out. I wish now I would have just folded it up and kept it, but when I was growing up I never heard of such a thing.
~~~~~

Ok. I hope I've been getting back to everyone who has made such lovely comments, if I have missed anyone I'll try and catch up. Been playing spring spruce-up around here for over a week. So this is what still awaits me. Not even opened yet. So I have a ways to go.

be back later!

White Lady

The weather has quite suddenly turned gorgeous here in Ohio. Hard for me to stay inside and work on my quilt and the white dolly underpinnings that I need to make for an order. Especially when there is a pickup truck bed full of new wondrously scented mulch to spread around fragrant hyacinth and bright red tulips.
These are in the front yard bed that I try to keep neat and trim for people who pass by. But my back yard is a different story. Stuff kinda gets out of hand back there. That's OK.

When I was growing up, we had tiny little white flowers that grew wild out under the Oak trees in the early spring before the leaves are on the trees. Remember when the crocuses and tulips would bloom?.. but those had to stay in the flower beds.. never to be picked by little girls. How hard was that?? So I anxiously awaited the Spring Beauties and wild Violets. We had hundreds of them. I would gather them in my little hands as many as I could hold, nibble on a few of the delicate white flowers' stems, and then take them in to my mother. She would reach up on one of her knick-knack shelves that were on either side the kitchen window, and carefully bring down the White Lady. The White Lady was a vase with a basket built right in to her skirt to fill with tiny flowers. I cannot remember a spring where I didn't look forward to this, even as I grew older.

Along with most of Mom's trinkets, I inherited the White Lady. She now lives on the shelf in my kitchen, and looks forward to the flowers every spring.
Trouble is, never had any Spring Beauties growing at my house in town. So I dug some of them at the same time I dug the crocuses, and brought them over here in a bucket of dirt.. put them in the back yard under some trees.. and hoped they would find conditions favorable to thrive here as well. It has taken a couple of years, but finally I think they are going to spread.. I hope! There are only nine of them out there right now, so I was very frugal to only pick two for the White Lady, and the rest Violets. But she will just have to wait patiently. Maybe next year there will be more.

Jams and Jellies

A big huge thank you and hug for all the nice comments about my uncle. So many lovely people in this world. My blog list keeps growing and growing.
Everything went smooth, and in our family, we tend to have a very good time when brought together. Remembering all of the wonderful things about our dear relative, and laughing until our faces hurt.

On our drive there, I was hoping to take a picture of something Amish, and usually we pass several horse drawn buggies. But yesterday we didn't see a one. I did stop the car once though. We drove by the Smuckers headquarters in Orville Ohio, where they make their famous jellies and jams. "With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good" is their slogan. I thought you might like to see its pretty red roof.

Later on this afternoon I hope to join in with Little Pink Studio's "Show and Tell Sunday". Analise at Sugar*Sugar is hostess today showing vintage handkerchiefs. If I get time I would like to show mine and what I do with them, but I didn't submit my name for her blogroll, just in case things were too crazy this weekend.

Plus I see so many new posts as I scroll down my blog reader. I just have to get back here. Fun!

So maybe I'll see you all a little later on.

One of those..

..days or weeks that seem to go on forever. First I want to thank you all for the lovely comments on my Every Iota quilt, and for playing Tag with me. It seems like so long ago that I posted about that. But one of my dear uncles passed away on Wednesday and his funeral is tomorrow. So I have been busy scrambling to get my dad a flight from Florida back up here to Ohio, and arrange for my brothers, (some of whom are also traveling), and I to go with him to his brother's funeral in the morning. Right now he is on a plane in the air, and I don't usually worry about him flying. But the weather is so unpredictable right now. I just wish he were already here.

ANYways. I thought I would show a picture I took of my teensy tiny daffodils that are bobbing around in the air so joyfully today. They look so happy and carefree. This is Their Time. Then they will go to sleep and come back next year.

There was a rainbow just a little bit ago. But my camera did not want to cooperate, plus I thought about it too late. I really would have liked to shown that now. Oh well.

I'll take my camera along tomorrow. Not that I will probably see anything to share, but you never know. Maybe a horse and buggy.

Tagged

I've been tagged by Jackie of Canton Village Quilt Works. Thank you Jackie! Except I am going to break the rules just a wee bit.

Here are The Rules.
1. Once you are tagged, link back to the person who tagged you. (got this one)

2. Post THE RULES on your blog. (got this one)

3. Post 7 weird or random facts about yourself on your blog. (got this one)

4. Tag 7 people and link to them. (failed!)

5. Comment on their blog to let them know they have been tagged. (got this one)

These are the weird or random facts about me. This part was easy, because I am pretty weird.
1. I have forgotten how to write in script, and only print in capital letters.
2. I love to play online Boggle, and my nickname there is *cloudi*.
3. I talk to my 87 year old father for 20 minutes on the phone every morning, and still call him "Daddy."
4. I love creamed fresh or frozen peas, and sometimes will just cook them for myself for lunch. But for years I used to only eat peas raw out of the shell.
5. I like snakes, but spiders terrify me.
6.
7.

Ok.
I really know only a handful of bloggers so far, since I have just been doing this for 2 months. So the best I can do right now is five. That probably means I am only supposed to say five weird things about myself.. so I erased two of them.

But anyways, these folks have left some very nice comments here, and their blogs are some of my favorites that I look at every day. So I'm tagging them, but if any of you have already been tagged, Sorry! I guess you could break the rules too.


Button Beauty

Ginger Patches

Lucy Locket

M Kate at La Vie Est Belle

Ulla at kotkarankki

~

Every Iota

53F, sunny and breezy this morning. Perfect for hanging a quilt on the clothelines for fresh air. The fabric line is from "Every Iota". It was designed for Robert Kaufman by Kelly Alford and was featured in an article & pattern in the Oct 2007 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. My daughter went nuts over it, so I made it for her for Christmas.

I confess I did not use 100% Every Iota, there are at least three prints that are generic. But I think it still turned out ok. In case you don't feel like clicking to make the picture bigger, here is a closeup of one of the edges. I just wanted you to see the quilting if you can. The print is so busy that it is hard to see when it is just on the bed. But out here in the sunlight I notice it a little more. There is a big funky flower on each nine patch, and random squiggles on the border and sashing. These were all done by hand in the quilting frame. It was a lot of fun!
Also, here is one more little group of posies I found in the front yard this morning, under the shadey trees and bushes. I do need to move these pretty crocus' to a better place, some years they don't even come up. But it is so hard to remember in the fall to dig them, plus usually I can't find them! I brought them from my late mother's home after Dad sold the place, so I really do want to try and keep them going.
I am hearing the weather reports from all around the USA, and I feel so blessed that we are having such a glorious week of springtime so far.

Hope your Monday is going fine, and for my friends on the other side of the planet.. your Tuesday. :)

Purple Peeping

Just a little bit ago while walking the dog in the way back yard, my eyes spied a new color below foot besides brown leaves, gray dead grass, and new green grass. I could find only one tiny wild violet just starting to peep up, but it was so pretty I had to run in for my camera. I don't have a good zoom-in lens so this is not really comment worthy, but it was the best I could do.

So anyways, ever since I started blogging a couple months ago, I have found a world of wonderful people with so many interesting things to share. Seems like there is always a meme, contest or a drawing going on. Someday I will do a give-away. But today I'll just share this one I came across the other day (at the risk of lessening my chance for the prize!) Purple & Paisley is giving away the cutest little rotary cutter and some other little goodies at her blog. She explains more about the awesome tutorial contest going on over at Sew, Mama, Sew! Go on over and check it out.

Have a lovely remainder of the weekend.

Spring Rummage

Today was the spring rummage sale at our church. I have been working all week helping to put prices on things, filling the tables, and baking pies to sell at the lunch stand. My payoff was sweet! The workers were to go up and down the rows before anyone else was allowed in the door and "shop" first.
I did find a couple of treasures. One was this piece of cute rose bud fabric, on which I placed this glorious old English Toffee tin for the photo. Not only some beautiful buttons in there, but two old plastic thimbles.. (I adore these!), snap fasteners, and a package of needles. Tomorrow is "fill a bag for a dollar". I'll be running the lunch stand again, but it will be such fun watching all the piles of stuff go down. Does my heart good to see people recylcing stuff.

April Inspiration

This is the beautiful picture on my calander this morning when I turned the page. Does not quite look like this here, that looks more like May. But I can seriously enjoy these flowers on my wall for a month. Not to mention the quilts.
And in the mail yesterday came my June Issue of American Patchwork and Quilting. LOVE when this arrives in my hands! But I always look through it too fast.

I was tickled to see the one little article about "Big-Stitch Quilting". I strive for very tiny stitches in my hand-quilting, but my maternal grandmother thought this was a waste of time. I never knew her, she passed away before I was born. But Mom told me she remembers her mother whipping through a quilt in a day or two once it was in the frame. She used black heavy thread, and said that it made the colors stand out. I was only lucky enough to end up with two of her treasured quilts - a Nine Patch and a Dresdan Plate. The latter is quite worn. You can see her big black stitches.
How about this one for inspriation?? I could look at these solid stripe bars forever!

Hope you are finding some beautiful things to inspire you today.