Friday check in time

Another week as flown on by, just about. Early part of the week I was busily working on finishing up my row robin obligation and was able to get it mailed out on Wednesday as planned. The next one, hearts this time, arrived today. Sorry no pictures.

The quilt at left is one that Joy made--Twisting Star with an alternating Snowball block. I think it might be the first one she quilted with the Nolting set up that she has. The quilt group met on Tuesday but we arrived to find the pastor's wife and two of the church members setting up for an early Thanksgiving dinner. Turns out that the girls cottage that the church has "adopted" were invited along with their adult leaders and the director of the Presbyterian Home for Children. Since I had 16 quilts to deliver to that same facility, I arranged to leave the quilts in the closet and have them take them home with them. The pastor asked me if I wanted to come to the dinner as well to present them to the group but I passed. The church had early Christmas gift bags for them and I didn't want to interfere with that as we had not meant the quilts to be "Christmas" gifts---just part of a regular donation we make to the facility.


One of the Belles told me today that her brother-in-law had attended the dinner though. He commented about how excited the girls were about the quilts and how much they loved the brighter colored ones. There were a few "boy" quilts in the mix as well for them to set aside. I've been smiling all day after hearing that.

Trying to stay out of the way of the decorators, we set up our pinning table for three tops, had lunch and left early. The top pictured is Lois' Merkitties Challenge--Aline had her top done as well but I didn't get a pic of it. Lois used a blue print with little fishes and bubbles on it and the small print squares in green have turtles on it--inspired! I love how these are turning out. Mine is on tap as soon as I quilt three WTIL tops and that aforementioned friendship quilt.

We got sort of delegated to the kitchen area at the meeting though. I guess no one checked to see that it was our meeting date---or whatever they did took precedence. We couldn't have sewn if we wanted to since access to the tables and plug-ins was out. I knew that a few of the girls were not going to be able to make it the meeting so that might have been okay. Actually it was almost easily that one person in particular was NOT coming as we have a friendship/appreciation quilt planned for her and it made it easier to lay out the turned in blocks and make some decisions about sashing colors, etc and see how many more we might need.

Since I had been so bogged down with the row robin, I had pulled out a pretty basket block I had made some time back. Yesterday though, I whipped up these two blocks---both had "Friendship" in their name so I thought it was appropriate. The green is a 30's repro from my stash with little spools and tomato pincushions on it. The T block (for Theramae) used some leftover BOM stuff and a piece I had gotten at the "yard sale" in September.

6 of us met today at our friend Betsy's house to assemble the top. Of course we had the usual block switching up till we all were satisfied about the way it looked. Then the search was on for a enough and an appropriate color for the sashing---Betsy pulled something from her stash that contrasted nicely with the cornerstone fabric while Aline provided the backing. Since we had 20 blocks for a 4 x 5 set, I was able to calculate how many cuts to make. I like to presash the blocks rather than sew long rows of sashing and corner stones to long rows of blocks so led that way, instruction-wise while Jane and Betsy cut. We had five machines set up so the initial plan was to each take a row and then work on joining them. Aline and Betsy worked on joining the rows while Jane seamed the back, Sarah seamed the batting and I cut and sewed the binding. We'll pin it tomorrow morning. We had a little potluck lunch and lots of chatting. A friend from the JOY group came by in the morning and one of the Belles who is busy building a new home about 5 miles from Betsy came by after lunch with pictures of her new grandson Brodie.

The drive over to Betsy's was lovely as you go through a pass through the foothills---in spite of the drought we have been experiencing this year we now have a good bit of fall color, more than we expected. Cold and frosty this morning though and as white as I want to see the ground around here, LOL. I don't care if I never see another flake of snow being from the north originally. Because of my mid-morning obligation, I could not wait till later to get in my walking and got the day off from my routine. It happens.

Guess that's it for now----