Standing Room Only (Penguins)

I first saw this quilt at a friend's house. An accomplished piecer and longarm quilter, Dawnell has endless energy and loves to come up with fun projects that bring out the child in you. One of my favorite photos of Dawnell was taken at the LQS on the day I took some tutus I had made for my grand-daughter and a couple of little girls. (I learned about the tutus on Jackie Russell's blog.)

We all had fun with those tutus. Something magical happens when a grown woman puts on a tutu and suddenly becomes a little girl who wants to be a ballerina.


I had long admired Dawnell's "penguin" quilt so when she appeared on the class schedule for the CraZy 9 Patch, I signed up. There were 6 of us making this wonderful quilt designed by Carol Morissey

It is a very large applique project. The white of the penguins is really the background fabric. The black of the penguins (and their beaks, feet and breasts) are all appliqued onto the white. Pretty clever, huh? I even ghosted in a penguin in the upper-right corner. The penguin that overlaps into the right border, I added another layer of batting and another layer of the backgrund so the blue border did not shadow through.

Let the unpacking begin....

We have just about given away, sold or dumped most of the things that we do not want in our new house. Since we were downsizing, from 2800 sq ft to about 1900 sq ft, we just do not have room for all that stuff. I was so afraid of this move, it kept me awak at night with worry. Then we sold Jacob's motorcycle which has been residing in our garage for over 2 years. As soon as the buyer picked up that bike, my worry started to ease.

We had a lot of help from our church. The real estate agent gave us their big moving truck to use. We got some help from the great guys at In His Steps. We moved the same week-end that our son moved from his condo to his house so he was no help. Well, I can't say that. He came with a U-Haul truck to take his side-by-side fridge, several boxes, some furniture that was stacked in the garage. But my favorite thing to see go down the driveway was his sand rail. For those of you who are not desert rats, a sand rail is a dune buggy. Jake also took 3 or 4 of his stand-up tool chests.

Now we just need to have a garage sale to get rid of the other stuff.

The internet was installed yesterday (Day 7 of the move). The telephone (quilting business line) will take a couple more weeks to port the number over to the new place and install telephone jacks. Yeah, the house does not have any telephone jacks. We are the first owners so we will put them where we want them.

The new carpet in the living room was also installed yesterday.

The Direct TV people were there before we arrived with out first truckload. Quick, turn on the TV!

The new washer and dryer come tomorrow.

We still have to clean out the old place but the big stuff is gone.

Now we have a garage (and studio) full of boxes to unpack. I predict there will be more stuff to give/throw away as the unpacking progresses. LOL. Me, I'm not the pack-rat. My motto is "If you don't use it once a year, get rid of it". My husband, like so many of the male gender, keep way too much stuff. We were going through a bookcase in the garage. There were dozens of long skinny boxes.

Me: Hey, can we please get rid of these boxes?
DH (running toward me with fear in his eyes): Noooo, what do you mean?
Me: This is just cardboard, it is like keeping old newspapers, toss them.
DH (Aghast at my suggestion): My baseball cards, we're not throwing these away.
Me: Remember we are downsizing. This is cardboard. Hey, isn't it a fire hazard.
DH (muttering as tries to grab all the boxes in a demented sort of group-hug) OK, I'll see if Jake wants them. Some of these are classics.
Me: It is cardboard!

I don't get it.

27 Million Strong - Quilters is the U.S. (so says MSNBC)

I was surfing the internet this morning and came across an MSNBC.com article about the Elkhart Project, Quilt Gardens to attract tourists to Elkhart, Indiana. What an undertaking that was, 72 million tons of topsoil had to be moved to make the gardens slope so they could easily be seen and photographed. It is a gardener's paradise.

One of the statistics I read says there are 27 million quilters in the US and that many are also gardeners. So what a natural merge of these two skillsets to put quilts in a garden.
Then check out this link. Be sure to listen to the audio tours which cover some of the history of this event.