DAY FOUR

Steve and Lori Clayton run a wonderful quilt shop called Threads Run Through It in Phenix, VA.  I LOVE going there, even though it takes an hour and forty-five minutes to get there.

You can find just about any fabric you would ever want for your quilting projects.  Here, Myrt's devilish grin speaks volumes about 1) her glee over finding new goodies for her stash, and 2) her solution as to how to get these newest acquisitions past her husband when she gets home. 

Not really.  Most of us have co-dependent husbands who understand that a cold meal is better than no meal at all; that laundry can and does get done eventually, even if it's in the middle of the night while we're obsessively stitching out our quilts; that a happy quilter is MUCH better than a p----d off woman going through fabric withdrawal; and that if Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

Joyce has discovered the newest tease in the shop:  scraps by the pound!  I'm telling you, these people know how to market!  Could a restaurant sell scrapings from customers' plates?  Could a hospital OR sell used sponges?  Could a newspaper sell last week's papers?  No!  Basically, most left overs are ditched because they are contaminated or obsolete.  But not scraps!  Scraps are pure gold, and the more eclectic, the better.  Joyce is a very happy camper in this picture, believe me!

Mary hates to shop.  Fortunately, she has a hubby who doesn't mind doing it for her.  However, it's a different story when it comes to fabric.  All of us who quilt are basically junkies.  We get high just being in proximity to fabric.  We have all sorts of guilty (quilty) pleasure pulling bolts from their shelves, feeling the smoothness of well made cloth, fantasizing about how it will look in our projects, matching it to others that complement the color scheme.  Ahhhhh.  It's heady stuff, this addiction of ours.  Here's Mary, getting her fix for the day.

The Threads Run Through It team are so very welcoming, especially to groups.  They will make you a free lunch, and a very hearty one at that, if you tell them a group of you is coming.  The table above was one of two, chock full of treats.  Sliced ham, roast beef, turkey and two kinds of cheeses for our sandwiches were on this one, and grapes, cookies, raw veggies with dip and chips were on the other, along with delicious iced tea or water.  Yum!!!

Mary is taking a moment of peace after completing her shopping to text her hubby.  The front porch of this quilt shop is inviting, with its quilts hung on the walls and many rocking chairs.  Occasionally, Wingnut, the cat and familiar of this place, visits and INSISTS on being petted.  He is a long haired, mostly white and brown, large cat who thinks everyone is his friend.

And so we bid adieu to Day Four of Mary's visit.  We got home too late to do much sewing, so we knitted instead.

DAY THREE

Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting magazine had this pattern in it in the July/August 2007 issue.  It was called Whimsical Garden and was done in bright colors like orange and turquoise.  I didn't care for the color scheme, so I changed it to more of an old world look, with muted blues, warm browns and strong reds.  It has taken me over three years to finish this project.  The applique, which I did on the machine, was extremely time consuming, so I only did it now and then when I was feeling masochistic. 

Finally, I decided to finish it on Day Three of Mary's visit, because I want to enter this quilt in our annual quilt show in March.  Just the top is finished at this time, but I will be quilting it soon.



DAY TWO

Remember my Painless Cathedral Windows class?  Well, I used that approach to deal with the fabric challenge from my guild. This fabric is a Kaffe Fassett mille fiori sort of look on an olive background, and I think it's pretty ugly.  Others don't.  Our assignment was to take the two crayons in our packet, and the 1/4 yard of the fabric, find two fabrics that matched the crayons, add two other fabrics of our choice and come up with a quilty thing.  I KNOW I will never hang this fabric on my walls, so I made a pillow.

I put a zipper in the back.  My crayon colors were the pink and sea green that are on the back.  You can also see them in the windows on the front.  The added fabrics were a deep purple and a batik orange.

Now I have to fluff out my pillow and hand it in.  Our guild has a quilt show at the Library every March, and we will be showing some of our challenge projects as part of the show.

I finished this project on Day Two of Mary's visit.

DAY ONE

I thought for sure that I had already shown this quilt, but apparently not.  This was quilted and bound on day one of Mary's visit with me.  I don't know the pattern and would love it if someone recognized it and passed it on to me.  I found it in a box of UFO's from the year 1 in my studio while cleaning up for Mary's visit.    Love the scrappy look!

GREAT DAY!

Another UFO bites the dust.  I am ashamed to tell you that I made this quilt AND quilted it about 10 years or so ago, but I never put the binding on it.  So I put it by my seat on the couch, and whenever I watched TV, I handfinished the binding.  Now, this is not a quilt that I would ever enter in a show.  It's a Billie Lauder mystery quilt that I made back in 2000 or 2001, when I first started quilting.  Billie came to the Allenberry Resort (where my family and about 100 close friends all used to go each February for 17 years for the Murder Mystery Weekend) to teach this quilt under the auspices of Quilt Odyssey's Melissa Molino and her fall quilt retreats.  So now it is finished, at last!

Today several things arrived in the mail!  This luscious grouping of Sulky threads contains all the ones I didn't have for embroidering the St. Nick Lights the Way mantel scarf that is our next embroidery group's project.  This starts Februrary 2nd, so it has arrived in plenty of time.

These ChiaoGoo 24" circular needles also came today.  They are the same 1.5 size so that I can do the double needle technique of making socks, particularly an intriguing way of starting from the toe and knitting up, rather than the usual way of starting from the leg opening and knitting down.  This will be an entirely new experience for me, and there's no telling if I will even be able to master casting on, so we'll see.  That little tin at the bottom is shea butter for the hands.  It has an almond scent and feels quite lovely on the skin.

The piece de resistance is this super luscious Sea Silk yarn.  It is multicolored and looks almost irridescent, much like a butterfly's wing.  The yarn is made from 70% silk and 30% Seacell, which is some sort of seaweed derivative.  I can't wait to use it.  This is the yarn I am going to use for that shawl that I started in cotton.  I will complete the cotton one first so that I can learn from that experience and get all the bugs out of the pattern -- or out of my knitting, is more like it!

On a surprising and wonderful note, the little old black chihuahua that I told you about that was having a horrible time breathing in the vet's office the other day -- well, it's doing well!!!  I dropped in to see my vet today to ask how it was faring, and she was so happy to tell me that it was recovering rapidly!  It seems that its teeth were very very dirty with lots of tartar, and an infection around the base of the teeth in the gums had taken hold and spread to the entire body.  It took the diuretics to help the enlarged heart and lots of antibiotics to cure the gum disease. I suspect that the heart has something called endocarditis -- same thing junkies get from giving themselves injections with dirty needles.  The bacteria set up housekeeping in the heart and destroy the valves.  So this little dog will never be fully well,  BUT he will last alot longer than anyone thought when we first saw him a week ago!  Hurray!

The moral of the story is -LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER!  Brush your teeth.  And brush your dog's teeth, too!

COMPANY'S COMING!

This jumble of fascinating objects comprises my studio.  I have at least four projects going on at any one time.  Ordinarily, no one but me sees this mess or has to work in it.  However, I'm going to have company at the end of the week, and since she's a quilter, she needs a place to sit down and sew!  Yes, Mary is coming to visit!  Part of her visit will be to teach my guild the Tri Recs ruler applications, and part will be just girl fun.

So, one thing at a time is being put away, filed under level of need for immediate location and continuance of work, with an eye to two things:  the class I'm teaching this week and the class she's teaching next week.

But first!  One of my UFO's was regarding my new serger.  I bought this Babylock about 6 months ago.  It has all these neat bells and whistles, but the real reason I bought it is because it threads itself with little puffs of air that blow the thread through a series of tubes to the right place in the serger.  Well, I have never taken it out of the box until today.  It's all hooked up, and I have my manual ready for a daily attempt at operating the thing. 

Here's my sewing cabinet, expanded and turned sideways so the two of us can sew at the same time.  Now to organize the rest of the room.

As if I don't have enough interesting things to take up my time, I'm trying a beatiful and detailed knitting pattern.  I'm not much of a knitter, but if this turns out half as pretty as the pictures of the completed pattern, I'll put it on my blog for you to see.  I'm knitting a fingering weight of a lavender cotton thread.



DEAR FRIENDS

Jet is coming along slowly but nicely in healing from the surgery on his left ACL.   His fur is starting to grow out a little, and he's starting to put some weight on the repaired stifle (knee).  He is a valiant dog, I must say.  All heart, and completely uncomplaining.  We try very hard to make things as comfortable as we can, given that he walks on all fours and has to go outdoors for nature's calls.

I was in the vet's office the other day (seems like I'm there alot these days), and I noticed that there was an elderly man sitting in the waiting room holding a black chihuahua wrapped in what looked like a woman's pink chenille bathrobe.  The dog was having severe respiratory distress, gasping audibly when he tried to breathe in and having to force air from his lungs in order to breathe out.  Several things went through my mind -- heart worms, asthma, congestive heart failure, obstruction.  I was alarmed, as was another lady who had just come in to pay her bill.  A third lady was at the desk, explaining to the receptionist about when the symptoms began (4 AM that day) and that she had had to wait to bring the dog in until she could find someone to drive her to the vet (it was now 2 PM) and that things were tight and she was worried about what would have to be done to make her pet well.  She was old and frail and pale, and she held onto the desk as if she needed support to remain standing.  She told the receptionist that someone had given her the dog only a year ago, but that she loved him like a child.

So I thought:  we always hear about a dog being man's best friend, and it is so often true.  They ask almost nothing of their owners but give unflinching, unadulterated, unbelivable love back to us whether we deserve it or not.  And some of us truly deserve it.  This lady is one who does.  She had taken this somewhat older dog and given him a warm and comfortable home, provided veterinary care, cleaned up after him when he was wormed, worried over him when he was sick, and was as distraught as if it was one of her children  struggling for breath out in the waiting room.  Despite her limited resources, she was willing to do whatever she could to help the dog return to good health.  Frankly, I thought she was a very caring person.  But then, many of us pet owners regard our furry friends as family and become deeply attached to them, don't we?

Well, all of us were distraught.  The vet was in surgery, and even though the receptionist immediately went back to tell her about the extreme condition of the dog, she could not come out right away.  Finally, she nearly ran down the hall to the waiting room and took the dog into the examining room instantly.  I heard mumblings about heart and overnight.  And then the lady came out, crying quietly.  Lady-2 and I both had the same thought:  he died.  But no, he just had to stay overnight.  Xrays were needed, and four injections of some sort of medication were given. Ka ching!  Ka ching!  The elderly man had gone out to the car -- I guess he was a neighbor.  Lady-2 and I mumbled our heartfelt hopes for success in his treatment, and the lady left, without her dog.

Lady-2 and I looked at each other.  She said she had to return to the vet's office to have her dog's teeth cleaned in a few days and just had to know what happened with that chihuahua.  I felt the same way.  We both left, thoughtful and sad for his owner.

The next day, I had to go into town (such as it is) again, so I stopped by the vet's office to find out what had happened.  The dog had been taken almost an hour away to another animal hospital that had an xray machine, and they found that the chihuahua's heart was enlarged.  Diuretics and cardiac stimulants had been used to try to alleviate the dog's condition.  And that's all they knew at this point.  I will have to drop by the vet's again soon to see if the little dog improved or succumbed, but I fear the worst.

Anyway, I was sad to hear the vet say that there wasn't anything that could be done about an enlarged heart in an animal.  She meant that this dog was going to die from heart failure sometime in the future, possibly soon.  My own heart hurt to hear those words.  I walked up to the desk and pulled out some money and put it on the counter.  "I'd like to make an anonymous donation to that lady's bill,"  I said.  The vet, who is a sweet woman with a deft touch and a quiet style with the animals, smiled beatifically.  The youngster behind the desk was surprised and stricken.  "That's so nice.  Do you know her?"  "No," I answered.  "I just overheard her say that times were hard for her, and I wanted to do something to help.  I appreciate that she brought her dog in even though she knew it would be a hardship.  And now she's going to lose him anyway.  It's not much, I know, but maybe it'll help her with her bill a little."

I walked out of there feeling a little better.  My own dogs have had their serious medical problems and have survived, by the grace of God -- and good care from my vet.  Jet has seizures.  Razzy nearly died from an unknown tick-borne illness (no, it was not lyme disease) when we first moved to Virginia.  They got well because our vet is good and because I am fortunate enough to be able to afford decent care for them.  I am a good friend to them.  I watch out for them and seek help when they need it.  And I return their sweet, nuzzling, furry love.  It's what dear friends do.

Razzy

Jet and Razzy