Quilts

Layers of New Orleans’ French Quarter

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Beautiful bride in New Orleans
It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve strolled around the French Quarter, I always see something new. This time it was a wedding party shuffling down Royal Street with a marching band. The bride is beautiful don’t you think?

I like to think of the Quarter as the layers of a quilt. The top layer is often pieced together with lots of interesting colors of fabric … like the quaint antique shops and art galleries of Royal Street. The bottom fabric layer is often a large single piece of fabric with one identity … the seedy and colorful underbelly if you will … like bawdy Bourbon Street. But does anyone ever see the fluffy batting that lies between the two layers of a quilt? That is what I searched for in September while hubby attended his seminar.

This time I wandered into one of the gift shops along Jackson Square. Located at 523 St. Ann Street is what looks like a typical New Orleans gift shop, only on steroids, with lots of interesting history books and boxed pralines and all things New Orleans. It turned out to actually be a museum gift shop and a National Historic Landmark run by the Louisiana State Museum (www.crt.state.la.us/museum/properties/1850house.aspx). I never saw it coming. For a modest $3 (adult price) you can self-guide yourself up the spiral staircase in the back of the gift shop. The second and third floors of the antebellum row house will quickly turn back the clock 163 years. The rooms are furnished to represent life in the 1850’s before the Civil War. It is a lovely way to see with your own eyes what life must have been like before cell phones and computers.

There is only a small sign on the door which reads “Faulkner House Books” (www.faulknerhouse.net). If you walked past the shop after quitting time when the place is buttoned up tight, you wouldn’t even know it was there. It is another interesting layer of the French Quarter. Located at 624 Pirate’s Alley just off Jackson Square, it is also a National Literary Landmark that should not be missed. In 1927, the young William Faulkner rented rooms in the same space that houses the bookshop. Books in the tiny space can be found in every nook and cranny clear up to the ceiling. Closed only on Mardi Gras Day, they sell new, used and rare editions.

There is so much more to tell about the French Quarter. I’ll attempt to tie the layers of the quilt together next time. Or maybe I’ll just play around in the fluffy batting for a bit longer!

Life’s Loose Threads first anniversary

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Snickerdoodle

My little blog is having its first birthday this week!!! The cookies are snicker doodles. I made them last night.

Have to admit I still feel like a blogger baby trying to crawl off the blanket. Yep, but I’m still pretty proud to have posted my 46th blog post, topping out with 488 followers, without blowing the whole thing up. Thanks to my lovely daughter, Katie, for answering all my blog questions and her techie assistance!

Did I mention there have been 2,805 blog views so far from 37 different countries? Imagine my surprise when Mongolia, Bulgaria, Iceland and South Korea first appeared on my blog dashboard? And my deepest thanks to my son, Ricky, who read my blog while he was deployed. I would have never gotten all those hits from Kuwait without him!

While I’ve been writing a humor column for the past 17 years from the suburbs for several local newspapers, it was my thought to take the blog in a different direction. I’m one of those moms/wives that love all things quilting, recreational knitting, traveling around the block and the world, healthy cooking, not-so-healthy baking (let’s face it … everything is better with butter) and reading … mostly fiction. Although I’m not going to lie, I’ve read some pretty awesome non-fiction. It’s why it is difficult to blog about just one thing. Heck, I’m still finding my voice and attempting to make sense of any of life’s loose threads that might come my way.

Which reminds me … while not officially thread … it was also a year ago I started knitting the scarf featured below. When it measures 70 inches, it will be finished … hopefully by Christmas. I purchased the yummy red metallic yarn one summer when my mom and I were hanging out in the Texas Hill Country.

Don’t know how some knitters do it. I subscribe to one knitting blog (www.fortheknitofit.wordpress.com) and the lady is prolific! I am fortunate to get a couple of rows knitted in the evening while helping our handicapped daughter with her dinner.

I purchased the lovely yarn at The Old Oaks Ranch Fiber Art Center (www.theoldoaksranch.com) in Wimberly, Texas. It is a magical place with a fiber arts studio, sculpture garden and alpaca ranch. I know … interesting combination … but it totally works. Next weekend is the start of the “7th Annual Hill Country Yarn Crawl.” I can’t wait for my husband to ask me what a “yarn crawl” is. The art center and nine other yarn shops from Austin to San Antonio are participating.

One of the other stops mom and I made last summer was to The Tinsmith’s Wife (www.tinsmithswife.com) in the teeny, tiny town of Comfort, Texas. Touted as a knitting and needlepoint shop, they are also participating in the yarn crawl. With 5700 square feet of yarn heaven, let’s just say I’ve never seen so much luscious yarn in all my life! So much yarn eye candy, it felt like stepping into The Louve in Paris, France. Quite overwhelming. If you can’t make it to Paris … you should really try stopping by Comfort, Texas and go with a project in mind.

Now that I’ve practically made it off the blogging blanket, I can’t wait to see where Life’s Loose Threads leads me this coming year!

The quilt has a name!

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Mimi's flower garden quilt
I had lots of great suggestions for a name of the quilt I made that will be donated to The Village Learning Center (www.villagelac.org) in November. I loved all the suggestions! Loretta was the one that tied Mimi to the donation and I believe best fits the quilt. So “Mimi’s Flower Garden” it is!!! Why didn’t I think of that?

Name that quilt!

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I need some help naming a quilt. For you non-quilters out there, just like books, quilts need a name, or a title, if you will. Short and sweet words work best. It’s for a quilt that I’ll be donating to my special needs daughter’s day center. They have a fundraising gala each November and it’s something personal I like to contribute.

So several years ago I purchased a collection of thirty Kaffe Fassett fat quarters. The man is an amazing textile artist that does the most interesting things with color and pattern. If his use of color doesn’t cause your eyes to dilate, the designs will knock your shoes and socks right off your tootsies!

Earlier this year I used part of Kaffe’s collection to make a quilt for our special needs daughter’s room. I used a scrappy pattern entitled “Spider Star Quilt” from Edyta Sitar’s book “Friendship Strips & Scraps.”

Mimi's Spider Star Quilt

With all the leftover fabric from Mimi’s quilt, I made the simple quilt below with 2-1/2” strips. The beige print really makes the colorful blocks pop!

Some of my thoughts about the quilt title include: Kaffe’s Windows, or maybe Garden of Delights. Any thoughts?

My happy place is a quilt shop

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One of my New Year’s resolutions many months ago was to make up several scrappy quilts to have on hand. That’s so I don’t look like a deer in bright headlights about to get creamed by an eighteen wheeler when someone asks for a donation for their next fundraiser. I know what you are thinkin’. What is up with the Christmas fabric? It’s nearly the Fourth of July. I like to be prepared. Part of my Girl Scout training.

So this particular quilt was created with a disappearing nine patch pattern from my stash of Christmas fabrics. Easy and breezy! I promise to blog about the pattern in a future post. My friend Debbie demonstrated the pattern one day at Prayer Quilt Ministry. She is awesome! It’s my new favorite pattern if you need to create a quilt top quickly.

So last night I pulled out some of the larger fabric pieces from my personal stash that would be enough to bind the quilt. For you non-quilters, the “binding” is the edging that finishes off the quilt. One-half yard is about the right size but my options were limited. I didn’t like the all-over candy cane fabric for the quilt. And the batik with the red and white berries wasn’t speaking to me either.

It’s why today I traveled to The Quilt Room, http://www.thequiltroomhuffman.com, to purchase some binding fabric. The ladies are so nice at The Quilt Room and are always up for pulling down bolts of fabric for auditioning purposes. Adela helped me pull some Christmas fabrics over to the cutting table so we could figure out if any had potential. Laura, who also works at The Quilt Room chimed in with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. I came out of there one happy Girl Scout camper with a half-yard of dark green foliage and tiny red berry fabric. Let the binding begin!

Quilters R Us

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On Friday, I attended a local quilt show in our area hosted by the Kingwood Area Quilt Guild. The members put on a great show every two years showcasing their skills in manipulating fabric, creativity with design and interesting color choices. And besides providing lots of great eye candy for a fabric junkie like me, there was plenty of quilting inspiration to go around.

Some of my quilting buddies: Noreen (we call her the Fabric Whisperer), Sid (the needle-turn applique guru), Sally (perfectionist extraordinaire), Tina (she can do anything) and Kim (the long-arm quilting queen) won a bunch of ribbons between them. I’m so proud of these ladies. I credit them, and several others skilled in the quilting arts, for improving my own skills over the years. They have inspired me to grow outside my comfortable cardboard rowboat to wander through scary swampy areas like needle-turn applique, intricate paper piecing and taking risks with color choices. I mean … how can you sink up to your neck in yuck when you have friends that are there to throw you a life jacket?

It’s probably why last year I actually finished five quilts (photos are featured above). Two found a home with extended family as Christmas presents, two quilts I kept, and one was auctioned for a local charity. Without the help of Kim, who has a long-arm quilting business, that would never have happened. She cuts my quilt-making time in half and makes my piecing look amazing.

While the quilt show is now just a memory … they left me with enough ideas to last till the next time the guild show comes to town.

Its Christmas ladies sew let’s party

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I have belonged to a Prayer Quilt Ministry at our church for the past five years. We make prayer quilts for the sick of our parish and have quite an operation. Around 60 prayer quilts each year are blessed by one of our parish priests and given to ill parishioners. Most every Wednesday we laugh … sometimes we cry … we always pray … and sew.

There are a couple of tables on one side of the room with a nest of ladies hand sewing bindings down and prayer pockets on the back. On the other side there is a group of tables with two or three sewing machines humming along way over the legal speed limit. They are creating quilt tops and machine stitching bindings. There is another table where the three layers of a quilt are being tied. And we’ve got this awesome station where the ironing gets done. Our fabulous Helaine custom-made this huge heat-resistant cover for one of the tables. You can have dueling irons working at the same time.

Now I know my husband “follows” my blog and there is no way he understood what I just wrote. He thinks I knit quilts together. It is okay sweetie … you are not supposed to know about that kind of stuff.

So today we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the group and had a Christmas Party. Hey … we are ladies … we like to party. It’s in our DNA. Of course there was food involved complete with festive centerpieces and tablecloths. Can’t have a party without the proper décor. Betty came prepared with a couple of Christmas games she found on-line that was a crowd pleaser. No acts of sewing were accomplished but we connected and celebrated the reason for the season … the upcoming birth of our Lord.

Not enough time in California Wine Country

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My husband and I recently returned from our first visit to wine country. Our reason for heading to the Sonoma area actually had nothing to do with wine. But we managed to squeak in a couple of days just the same. Before our visit, I bought a book about everything you ever wanted to know about the area and then got thoroughly confused. I asked everyone I knew for recommendations and decided there were just too many choices for the two short days we would be hangin’ there. What follows is where we wound up!

North of Santa Rosa is a quaint little town called Healdsburg. It has a lovely town plaza surrounded by wine tasting shops, boutiques, nice restaurants, two dynamite bakeries, a memorable art gallery and even a tiny quilt shop called Fabrications. We lingered the longest in the Oakville Grocery, bookstore and kitchen shop!

We didn’t have a huge amount of advance notice when we booked the trip, so I was a tad concerned about finding nice accommodations. The B&B we chose was actually our third choice, as two other options were full. The Haydon Street Inn (www.haydon.com) was built in 1912 and restored with the perfect mixture of old and modern. It far exceeded our expectations. The Victorian mansion is a five-block stroll from all the action in the town square of Healdsburg. Our hosts were John, a former executive chef from Churchill Downs in Kentucky, and Keran. Can this guy cook!!! We stayed in the huge Cottage Suite. Separate from the main house, it has a claw-footed tub and modern shower and lots of lovely touches.

Every morning John cooked up an amazing three-course gourmet breakfast for guests in the main house. The cold raspberry soup, grilled grapefruit and ham/cheese omelet were my favorite. In the evening there is a reception with local wine and snacks. Did I mention that John built a pizza oven in the backyard? I know … I had to do a double-take when I saw it. You should see him hand toss that pizza dough. My favorite pizza was the pesto topped with cheese and artichokes. Are you drooling yet?

We soon learned restaurants require reservations and Keran made them all for us. We loved Willi’s Seafood & Raw Bar (small plate fare to share … loved the lobster rolls), Ravenous (teeny tiny place with amazing food/great desserts) and Zin Restaurant & Wine Bar (www.zinrestaurant.com) touts farm fresh at your table. Oh, and we also ate lunch at The Girl & the Fig (www.thegirlandthefig.com) in Sonoma after hitting a winery tour in the morning. Loved it!

Come back next week. I’ll be writing about the winery tour/tasting we took!

The unfinished project

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I took a black and white photography class in college a bunch of years ago. Spent gobs of hours in a darkroom and loved every single second of it. My favorite part was watching the images slowly appear on the photographic paper as I swished the tray full of chemicals to and fro. I gotta tell you … magical stuff happens in a darkroom.

One of the photo projects assigned by the professor late in the semester was to produce a self-portrait. I know what you are thinking. That’s pretty darn difficult considering you can’t be in two places at once … being the subject of the photograph and holding the camera. For the kinda of photo the professor was looking for, it woulda been mighty tricky to go the route of tripod and timer. So basically, the assignment required setting up the shot of how you see yourself and then having someone else just push the camera’s button. Sounds simple enough until you actually have to look at yourself in the mirror and try to figure out just who the heck you are!

At the time, I was a non-traditional student. I started taking college classes when our youngest hit first grade, so I already looked pretty funny carrying around a backpack instead of a purse that resembled a diaper bag. I could play off that angle, but it sounded a little too simple … backpack over one shoulder and diaper bag over the other. But I was also a wife, mother of three, daughter, sister, aunt … all the awesome roles that go along with living the life. Nothing inspirational immediately came to mind for a photo.

Fortunately, the college project happened to be right around the time we decorate the house for Halloween. One of the things I recall pulling out of the closet was a Halloween quilt that had never quite made it to completion. The cute quilt top had been pieced years ago with a number of pumpkins and bats. It never made it to the final quilting/binding phase. So the closet was where it stayed folded neatly for many, many Halloweens.

It’s amazing what idea pops out when you rattle the rocks around in your head a little. I wound up taking the unfinished pumpkin/bat quilt and draping it over my head like a scarf. Just like the quilt, it was certain I was also an unfinished project. Heck, we all are! And the Halloween quilt … finished it … last year. I’m still working on me.