quilt bee

Loretta’s goodbye quilt

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When someone in our “Bloom Where You Are Planted” quilt bee moves we make them a house quilt as a parting gift. It is an expression of our love for all the years we have been together. Friendship and quilting are a lot like Super Glue … a powerful bonding agent. Since I’ve been a member of the bee there have been four “house” quilts made. The last one was for Jan. I blogged about Jan’s quilt some time back. We had to mail her quilt as she sold her house so fast one day she was with us and the next … gone. We decided to use the same “house” pattern. If I remember correctly, the pattern came out of one of Loretta’s quilting books. We all loved it … and changed the colors up a bit for Loretta.


When we learned Loretta was moving. we immediately went into hyper-quilting mode. We were determined to get Loretta’s quilt finished before she left us. After assembling the top and basting the quilt, we turned it over to Tina who machine quilted it and made the awesome patch on the back. I don’t know who sewed the binding on. I was out of that loop but I have to say the quilt turned out awesome!


This week at our annual Christmas bee we presented Loretta with her quilt. I don’t think she saw the surprise coming as we also exchanged little gifts and celebrated Tina’s birthday. We are sneaky like that.

Pigeon beaks and quilt bee cookies

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Drake
My lovely neighbor, Marie, knocked on my door the other day. She was wearing a frowny face which was most unusual. In her hands were a youngster’s blue hoodie jacket and a couple of squares of yellow felt. Oh, and the hood of the little jacket had what looked like very large “peel and stick” eyeballs on the top of each side.

“Drake has to dress like a storybook character for school and I’m having a little problem figuring out how to sew on a beak. Can you tell me what I should do?” Marie said.

I had heard about Drake’s favorite book, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” by Mo Willems. Marie had told me a while back that her son belly-laughs whenever he reads it. Of course, Drake MUST be a pigeon!

I quickly inspected the jacket and had Marie follow me into my sewing room.

“I’ll just snip the felt here and make a three-dimensional beak. Then I’ll stuff it a little and whip stitch it on. It won’t take long at all. I drop it by in a little while,” I said.

Did I mention that Marie makes these amazing decorated sugar cookies? She sells them locally. I order from her from time-to-time and just love seeing my friends’ reactions to her little works of art. A couple of weeks back I ordered a batch for delivery this week after searching through her website selections (www.missmariescookies.blogspot.com). I challenged her to come up with either a “bee” or a “quilt” type cookie. And I mentioned that if that was not possible the autumn leaves I had seen on her site would do nicely. So of course Marie gave me both the bee and the quilt! And they taste just as yummy as they look.

Oh, so let me finish my story about Drake’s pigeon beak. When I delivered the pigeon jacket across the street a little while later, Marie thanked me profusely. Drake tried on the jacket and looked just adorable! Actually, Drake looks adorable without the jacket, but that is beside the point.

“I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you again so much,” Marie said.

I smiled. Did Marie know how honored I felt to be able to participate in such a small way? Before turning to head home I stopped.

“You know Marie … my gift is that I sew … and your gift … is your amazing sugar cookies,” I said.

Life should be as simple as a child’s favorite book and a delicious sugar cookie.