a quilty day

Pippi in the pizza box

Today's picture: She is testing out a project box of a quilt I was re-piecing for my husband's niece. His aunt, her great-aunt made it back in the 60's probably (based on when she passed away). The background fabric was torn, stained etc so I had Sheri's permission to re-piece it. The HSTs ranged in size from 4 1/2 inches to 6 plus in the pre-rotary cutting days. I trimmed them all to the proper, uniform size before preceeding though.

Okay, that has nothing to do with what I did today but you need a picture of something up there, LOL.

I got an earlier than usual start on the day as the Bama Belles and I had a field trip planned today. Since I was going to a quilt shop, I needed to be sure if there was anything else I needed so that led to a treasure hunt throught the sewing closet for something. I tell you, I can get up in plenty of time and STILL have to scurry around at the last minute to get out the door. Today was no exception. I only had 5 mins to spare picking up one of the girls who lives near me.

We had an appointment to tour the Big Oak Girls Ranch facility today at 1 p.m. (Link is in my sidebar--I am just being lazy about editing HTML right now.) We are making quilts for this group this year and plans to do the same for the boy's ranch next year. 10 of the 16 active members of the group were able to go today but we had to leave early in order to get to the quilt shop when it opened. I thought they didn't open their doors until 10 and it was 9--no matter, I wasn't going to get up any earlier!! And I'm in charge, LOL.

Shopping time was a little limited but we were able to get our stuff cut and rung up in a reasonable length of time. One of the girls needed to quickly run into the 2nd shop near the restaurant where we planned to have lunch. We sent the 2nd car on to get us a table. Lunch went off like clockwork as we had beat the "lunch rush" crowd. Good! Back to the 2nd shop we went for another 30 mins---love to shop and look!

I got mostly boring stuff today and won't take a picture. A nice purple-teal print to go with the stuff I have previously gotten from the shop and some white on white that looks a bit like snowflakes for some snowman BOM on an embroidery list I co-own on yahoogroups. From the other shop, a fat quarter of the Debbie Mumm print I used for sashing on my round robin section. For the group, I got some peach colored sashing fabric for the project--part of that early morning closet expedition. I need to re-organize the container I drug out and take the box that WAS on top of it out to the storage room. Later though.

All of us were quite impressed with Big Oak Ranch. They take no state or federal money--all corporate or private donations or donations in kind. (We all know that government money comes with big strings attached. ) There currently 7 nice 2 story brick houses on the "campus" with plans to build 3 more. They will be breaking ground on one of them later this year The director who took us around in the van said they do not take out loans either. Ground is broken when they have 250,00 in the bank to pay for it---the house 150,000 and another 100,000 to run it for one year. Each house holds 8 girls--some 9, he said but ideally 8. They are doing good work there and giving kids a leg up from how their lives had been.

So anyway, I got home about 4:30 and here is a box from Finn at Pieces from my scrapbag. She had told me it was coming but I thought perhaps tomorrow or the next day. Like my mom, she knows how to stuff a box!! That thing was packed to the gills and all kinds of lovely things were in there. Remember her recent bowtie top and that wonderful little basket quilt? In there. Backings for three quilts, 9 rolls of fabric that will come in great for our sew in at the end of the month and a pile of 2.5 inch blocks. We are going to make a ton of four patches with those that will turn into Chiclet tops ultimately. Thanks so very, very much, Finn. The Belles will make good use of all these goodies for the girls and later, the Boy's Ranch. I'll post pictures here when they are "done-done"

I'm going to take the rest of the day off and hit the ground running tomorrow. I'm piecing for a few days anyway---