Another Wonderful Day in Paradise

It was a balmy 84 degrees today with unrelenting sunshine. After a full day of chores, we were the guests of Kathy and Barney at Doc Ford's Rum Bar & Grille on Sanibel Island. The entire place was buzzing with people enjoying each other and the wonderful food. In honor of my birthday, I had the dry rubbed rib eye---yummy! It was perfectly grilled medium-well and served with roasted garlic and Parmesan smashed potatoes, carmaelized mushrooms, asparagus and roasted blue cheese tomato, surrounded by a shallot cabernet sauce. Add a couple of cool drinks and a crisp green salad and voila', the perfect meal. We were way too full for dessert, but the key lime pie called to us. It has been reported to be the best in the area. We opted to order the pie and took it home for a bed-night snack.

Thank you so much, Kathy and Barney, for the wonderful birthday dinner!!

You Sure Couldn't Do This in Michigan

Dorrie and Rich added an outdoor kitchen to their lanai. Rich is a wonderful chef and will certainly put this to great use. The bulk of the work is done and they are anxious to be able to use it. I can't wait for my next dose of succulent ribs!

Lovely Lavender

Dorrie re-created one of her spare bedrooms to be lovely lavender. This is the quilt I made her for Christmas.

Doc Ford's

Randy Wayne White is one of my favorite authors. Doc Ford, the main character in his books, lives in a stilt house in Dinkins Bay off Sanibel. The books include a lot of history and geography of south Florida's Gulf Coast. His newest book, Dead Silence, has had great reviews. My copy will arrive from Barnes and Noble on April 27th!

On Sanibel, one of my favorite places, RWW and others opened a restaurant called Doc Ford's Sanibel Rum Bar and Grille. Of course we had to stop for lunch. The restaurant was set up to simulate the stilt house described in the book.

On this trip to Fort Myers, we were able to participate in the grand opening of another restaurant, Doc Ford's Rum Bar and Grille at Fort Myers Beach. This restaurant resembles my eye's image of the stilt house wonderfully. We had a great afternoon enjoying the food, the great wait staff and the most wonderful view. For lunch I had the tropical salad with added grouper ($21.95). It was a wonderful salad with fresh baby greens, grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, mandarin oranges, sun-dried cherries, spiced pecans, homemade crispy onions tossed in their own secret balsamic vinaigrette dressing! The salad was the perfect companion to my Blue Moon! We watched the pleasure boats in the harbor, the shrimp boats docked in the pass, and the people!

Another perfect day in paradise.

Spring in Michigan Friday, April24, 2009

It was 80 degrees and the forsythia were in grand bloom on Friday. I almost felt silly leaving for Florida for some sun. I got of of town just in time!

Spring Vehicle Maintenance

Now that the snow and ice are gone, drivers of all ages are tuning up their vehicles for those lovely sunny, Sunday drives.

April Fools!

34 degrees, 5" of snow overnight...this is Mother Nature's April Fools surprise!

Note to self: Do not walk across the street, in the dark, in this weather, to get the paper!

Marshall Quilt Show

We spent last Saturday at the Marshall Quilt Show. There were some extraordinary quilts-actually works of art. Several were particularly interesting. The first picture is an applique wall hanging depicting women inspecting quilts at a quilt show. The second quilt was done from a pattern created by Edyta Sitar from Marshall. It's a pattern I have started but in very different shades than this. This particular quilt was interesting to me for its border.

Van, Judy and I had a great time together. In addition to the great quilts, we had lunch at Pastrami Joe's in downtown Marshall. It's a small deli with adequate seating and wonderful food. We each had a different sandwich and all were excellent: pastrami on rye, corn beef on sourdough and Reuben. The soups are homemade. I had the seafood bisque; it was excellent. I could taste the very sweet pieces of crab, it was light but flavorful. Yummy!

Grandmother's Fan

This is an interim update on THIS project! I have been working on this quilt since 1995. At that time, I thought I needed to totally piece a quilt by hand to appreciate the work and skill women used to create quilts before fancy sewing machines and templates. I cut the fan pieces individually by hand using scrap paper for piecing. (I actually used those pesky advertising inserts found in magazines - they were a little heavier weight and very easy to come by!) I then joined the fans together by hand and appliqued them to the yellow blocks by hand. For the sake of sturdy construction, I did put the blocks together by machine. I am now in the process of hand quilting the project. This quilt easily covers a king size bed! I have a lot of hand stitching to finish.

Sparrow Scrapper's Weekend

Once again, Sparrow Scrappers invaded the Holiday Inn Express in Okemos for a weekend of scrapbooking, cardmaking, laughing, talking and tequila. The amount of stuff hauled into the hotel to support these habits is incredible! The atmosphere was one of creativity, comraderie and excellent food. Rather than "buying out," and taking time away from the fun, everyone brings something. Wendy brought the best potato salad I've every had; Joan brought Irish potato -cabbage soup---including the option to add corn beef; Lisa brought cornbeef sandwich fixings. There was also chili, cornbread, and gads of wonderful salads. I can't forget the homemade sugar cookies, brownies, lemon bars and rice crispy treat! I didn't stay at the hotel like most people did-it's too close to home. It's a lot of fun - there are sister, mothers-daughters, cousins and friends getting together to do what they enjoy most.

Friday, March 13, 2009 Ready for the Outdoors!

President's Quilt

The outgoing president of the guild gets a quilt. It's a great tradition. At the end of her term, the president chooses a quilt pattern and each member of the guild makes one block for the quilt. This year, the president chose log cabin blocks in shades of blue, green or brown. Since I had some left over pieces of brown, I used that.

It seems like an easy way to get a quilt, right? Just like at work and home, the range of quality, commitment and ability to follow directions spans a great deal of territory. The perfect quarter inch seam is very important. For those who don't pay attention, that 1/8 " spread over 5-6 blocks can sure create an uneven quilt.

Foundation Piecing: On Eagle's Wing

I recently started a paper-pieced batik quilt that has been frustrating. The most frustrating part is that in paper-piecing, the stitching is opposite the pattern lines. Today, through the LAP Guild, I attended a class taught by Eydta Sitar of Laundry Basket Quilts. Eydta designs her own patterns and the most beautiful batik fabrics sold as part of the Moda line. While the technique she taught uses paper templates, the technique, foundation piecing, is much more enjoyable. The class project was a table runner. Rather than a table runner, I will use my squares as the inner blocks for a quilt. The pattern would be a very nice one to scrap. (Double-click photo to see close-up of projects and stitching.)

It's Spring!

It reached 60+ degrees today. Daylight savings time springs forward this weekend. The snow and ice are gone. The crocuses have sprouted. It sure looks like spring!

Noel Loves Dinosaurs

Yesterday when the mailman came, Noel received a colorful dinosaur placemat from my sister. He is very interested in dinosaurs right now. His favorite is one he calls the "longneck." He wanted one of the "longnecks" on his shirt for school. We looked through my embroidery patterns and found this one - with "longnecks" and pre-historic birds. He picked out the thread colors and helped cut the color-change stitches. It was a great project for us to work on together!

(double click on picture to see detail of the embroidery)

2009 LAP Challenge

The 2009 Lap Challenge has the following rules:
- small
- colors you don't usually use
- piecing that creates a challenge
- includes a picture
- embellishments
- leaves
-decorative stitches
- fun to make

(double click on picture to see detail)

Celtic Design

A couple of months ago, I attended a class at Country Stitches taught by Kathy Richardson. She taught techniques in creating designs for embroidery sewing machines. Using some basic pieces, I created this design and stitched it out. This is a trial, but I will use it as dust cover for my machine. If I were going to create table napkins or use this design again, there are some alterations to the pattern I would make: 1) re-space the four fans making the inner circle - thee is a slight gap in the left horizontal line; 2) use two tones for the flowers to show some variance between the buds and flowers. In this piece, some of the flowers were stitched out in green.
In my current software, I am not able to edit the stitches. I hope to rectify that soon!

Welcome

Noel Ward says:

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Up North

During our Quilting Weekend in Tawas City several years ago, we found the Cotton Patch Quilt Shoppe in East Tawas, Michigan. Two very interesting things about this quilt shop:

1. They had an incredible inventory of fabric, supplies and patterns for being in such an out-of-the-way location

2. On display (one of those, "My God, I need to make that!" quilts) were the blocks from the Northern Woods quilt featuring moose, deer, fish and other northern woods themes.

We spend quite a bit of time in the shop looking and talking to the owner. She is able to keep such a wonderfully supplied shop in such a remote location because the bulk of her business is internet sales. She had a "back room" where local women were employed to cut fabric into packets that are sold with patterns.

O, Tannenbaum

When we moved into our house in July, 1976, while others were celebrating the bi-centennial,we were celebrating the joys of being first-time homeowners. Although the lot is loaded with trees, the most charming one is the smoke tree The American Smoketree (Cotinus obovatus, syn. Rhus cotinoides). It provides gentle shade in the summer, has been battered by baseball bats through the years and currently houses a small pine tree growing in its mid-section. Because of its proximity to the Consumer's Energy lines, the tree must be either radically altered or removed. We have chosen to remove it and plant another in another section of the yard. The one nice thing about the current location is that it prevents us from spying on our neighbors living room and vice-versa!

In 1978, Beth Ann Bochenek was born, Her dad and poppa, to honor her birth (680 grams soaking wet), planted a pine tree [Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus)]. This tree has also been identified by CE as "problematic." Nearly half of one side of the tree will need to be removed. Although the ortho"tree"dic surgeon has told us they can remove only "half," it just doesn't seem safe to leave it standing. It will also come down this month.