The Birthday Girl is 3

The birthday girl, Madison Marie Card.





My grand-daughter had her 3rd birthday party at Kidsville in Poway. What fun. Everybody in stocking feet and the whole village is kid-sized. Costumes galore along with a fire station, grocery store, theatre, pizza joint, boat, tree, beauty salon and all the pink iced cupcakes you can eat.



OK, this is not a real dog. It is a toy dog in a toy carrier. That must make backyard cleanup a breeze.






This is Madison's brother, the Amazing Spiderman, aka Gavin.




And the big brother, Hunter.

I should probably mention that Maddy had her hair done especially for this occasion. Yeah, Hunter and Gavin took turns with the scissors and a whack here and there and of course, the bangs (thus the askance barrett) and she had a new "do". Her mama just about flipped. Hmmm, I still have the photo of my sister after I cut her hair the day before "Picture Day" in the 2nd grade. It must run on the father's side of the family. Hee-Haw.

Tricycle Envy

Take a look at this beauty. There was about 1/4 of a million bucks wrapped up in 5 motorcycles parked next to my favorite breakfast restaurant this morning. They were all gorgeous. One, in particular, caught my eye. I could never ride/drive a motorcycle. But I bet I could ride that fancy trike made by Honda. Take a look at the tricked out dashboard with all the gadgets.

Bad Moon Rising

Bad moon rising. Creedence Clearwater could not have said it better.

Tomorrow is full moon.

But this was a somewhat spooky moon.

Storm #3 of 4

Southern California, in general, and Ramona in the back country were hit with a series of storms the week of January 15th. It rained for days. And there were wind gusts up to 75 MPH reported. Highways were closed due to the danger of winds. Then it got cold and we had snow in Julian for the first time this year. Julian is 22 miles north of us and sits at elevation 4,200 feet. First the wind. I got this with my Olympus Stylus 740. You can hear the wind blowing in the YouTube video.

Then we lost a tree in the back yard. See my post.

Today, we had a crew of 3 men working on getting the tree to stand back up. That's Jessie on the left, another guy and Jerry is behind the tree and up about 3 feet on a bulldozer. They lifted the tree with the dozer and dug it back in. Hope it stays up. Hope it lives.

Dogs and Doghouses

Barb wanted the dog house to show on this one. I just went overboard with fill and had a blast. I did a dog bone background fill, hearts in another doghouse, paisleys in another. The dog houses all had wood quilting on the sides and some sort of roof treatment. There were shingles, corrogated tin, red tiles, etc. The dogs were all outlined and had black thread whiskers. I had way too many thread changes on this.

Green Tea Batiks

Mary always picks out the loveliest fabrics for her quilts. This one is no exception. Pieced perfectly, flat and square, it is always a delight to quilt for her. She likes puffy batting so I used Quilters Dream Puff. The thread was both So Fine Chocolate and So Fine Green Pastel. The green block photos don't show the green too well, no flash so I could show off the quilting.




I used Darlene Epps's Tropicana block in the green blocks and Tropicana half in the triangles. The border is a variation on continuous curves with a leaf spike on each leg. The set is called DEST04C and I got the set from DigiTech. The set came with 3 squares of the CC, 4 squares and singles. I used the singles in the brown blocks. I had planned to string the 4-CC squares together but could not make it work. I decided to use the singles and discovered that by rotating the single blocks, a leaf design emerged as a secondary pattern between the CC-squares. If you look at the border, you can see the leaf as it alternates pointing inward then outward across the border. What a nice surprise. I delivered it yesterday and she loved it.

BOM #3

This is the first of the Block of the Months from the Crazy 9 Patch. The shop decided to do Seminole borders vice the traidtional blocks this year. I quilted 2 out of 3 of the LQS samples. This setting looked good with a panto. She used fusible web for the leaves cascading into the field of the quilt. I used Superior's King Tut thread named Harem because I wanted both golden orange for the leaves and purple for the background. The digitized pattern is call All Leaves. The batting is Quilters Dream cotton deluxe.

BOM #4

This one is done in black and whites. I used 2 different King Tut threads on this because I wanted the border to show. I used Pumice in the border and Rosetta Stone in the inside with Superior So Fine #408, Silver in the bobbin. This is the customers Warm and Natural batting. The digitized design is from Intelligent Quilting and is called Dusty Miller Grande.