I'm taking some quilt classes to relearn skills I'd learned in 1990, before we moved back to Creston from the Seattle-Tacoma area. With our building our house and me starting my birdhouse business, and sewing being the "reward" for when the work is done - ha!! I never got back to it until now, but now I have several directions I want to try, and I need to reaquaint myself with some of the rules so I can break them.
This is a modified four patch based on "Four Patch Harmony" from the book "Fat Quarter Frenzy" by Daphne Grieg and Susan Purney-Mark. It was supposed to be a throw about 56 X72 and then James said "I hope it will be big enough for the bed" so it has some growing to do.
I learned a slick trick for lay out. We've stapled an elcheapo plastic table cloth with a flannel backing backwards to the wall and it works like a felt board. I am so pleased.

So on Mon the 13th I spent a good part of the day cutting birdhouse parts in the shop, and by that night was coming down with the current crud that is going around. I'm still fighting it off and spending time watching the Olympics and finishing the quilt I started on the 10th and 11th. I didn't make it back to last weekend's classes - didn't want to share the "dread disease," nor have I made it back to the shop.
Massive quantities of dust and a cold don't mix!
Today we met at Annette's Delicate Essen for lunch, and to plan this summer's ArtWalk.
James is still painting more beautiful pictures and has managed to stay relatively "disease free."

Everything is beginning to look like a quilt. Here's another little village James painted.
I spent another day at Quiltview Corner doing the quilty thing.
I have many little pieces in different states of being unfinished but am hoping to have it pieced by Friday, when we start another.
As per Wednesdays blog, I did ship 3 birdhouses to Nelson and getting back in the shop is also on next week's list, and watching the Olympics - 1 gold so far, for Canada, Yea!!!!!

Well, I went to my quilting class today, to try to shake loose some of the rust - like which side of the fabric one cuts from with the rotary cutter so as not to end up needing stiches. I've cut the pieces for an 80 X 80 quilt from "Fat Quarter Frenzy" and have begun sewing. It is all flowers, and like "Candy is chocolate" so, "Flowers are roses," and there are lots of them. The pattern suggested using batiks and the ladies laughed at me when I said I was "saving them."
It is incredibly cold and crisp tonight.

James has been busy in the studio. He created another piece for his circle series last week.
i need to ship an order of birdhouses to the Craft Connection in Nelson, BC.

It's hard to believe it is 35 years today, though in retrospect there's a whole lot of water under the bridge in those years.
We were married in Seattle, WA at a friends house on Queen Ann Hill, and my bouquet had daisies from a flower shop, and heather snitched from the rocks along the front of the Hari Krishna Temple on Roosevelt Street.

So, in Eastern Canada and the United States I understand the groundhog didn't see his shadow, but here I fear he did.
The sun was wonderful though. We've had so much gray we'll take what we get.
I've signed up for a series of "Fat Quarter Fenzy" quilting classes just to get the juices going again. Since I bought my new Janome - and all the appropriate feet - last fall I've only managed to sew one square for a quilt for a friend with cancer( It's the one above. The center piece is a block print James made) and to mend, so this should get me going again.
Betty came over and we did a grand furniture move. I directed while she and James "yoe-heaved", and now the computer room is much improved but the sewing room is in absolute grid lock, and the hall is full of apple boxes of books, a bunch of which go to the library for their spring garden sale.