Quilt As You Go, Simply Done

Simply Done

Nice things

I am Thankful that I have made it to 50 and have helped a few people along the way

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I’d like to help more and I am going to make that a focus for 2009. I had a great time at the CASA auction, best of all was seeing a quilt leave my pile and go to a good home!

I’ve been traveling, reading and contemplating and I left my camera with my daughter Sarah, so no photos yet. I desperately needed some (a lot) of dental work and my need coincided with a trip that Tom had already planned and paid for, so when my passport arrived *in less than 14 days* after applying, I made arrangements to leave him for a portion of the trip and go to Mexico for dental work. The climate change from Seward, Alaska to Los Algodones, Mexico was a shocker even for me, and I do a bit of traveling. The dentists there made my pain & infections disappear and I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to heal.

We stopped in Seattle and I visited a quilter and fellow author at Krause Publications, Maggie Ball. What an awesome woman and her efforts in Mongolia just tugged my heart. At home the snow was falling and it is looking wintery, which is just so different after spending 5 days in the southern desert. I am beginning to think that the Arizona snowbirds have the right idea 🙂

I am continuing to think of new videos that I want to make and post to YouTube, and it looks like one of them has gone viral – -the number of views skyrockets every day. It’s my “How to make a cheap quilting table” video. I need to fix this video! I threw it up on YouTube for a few friends to watch and give me feedback on and then people started finding it! Yikes! It is so raw and not well presented…..oh well, I will learn and do better as I go 🙂

I hope that this finds you well, healthy, happy and whole and I wish you the best of the day.

Quilting for a Very Good Cause

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My daughter Sarah and I love to donate quilts to the CASA program for their Quilt Auction each November. We also use the auction to see and visit with quilters that we only see once a year – -at the auction! I look forward to seeing my pals Kathy Harte and Judy Wedemeyer and Ruth (who bought one of my quilts last year – -thanks Ruth!!).

This year my offerings are meager compared to last year, and I am not too happy about that. I am donating the quilt you see here, made with RJR Fabrics (donated by them and Thank You Very Much RJR!), featured in our book Crazy Shortcut Quilts, called Sweet Sixteen. It is 60″ x 60″ and very pretty, with bright colors.

I’ll also be donating a book called Fat Quarter Quilting and package of RJR Thimbleberries fat quarters and some batting too – -(almost) everything you need to make a quilt!

The Quilt Auction is on November 22 from 11am-2pm in downtown Anchorage at the Phillips/Arco building at 7th & G. I would love to see you there and I can’t wait to watch the bidding on all of the gorgeous quilts 🙂

Sharing Expertise on Squidoo.com

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I love to share info and trade tricks and tips with sewers and quilters, so when Seth Godin posted on his blog about Squidoo and described its function, I went a built a few lens’s. Here’s one of my lenses (that’s what they call the pages at Squidoo) on how I built my cheap quilting table and I recently inserted my new You Tube videos there too, for a really good tutorial.

A couple of things attracted me to Squidoo. First, it’s a static page, not like a blog where after a while posts are archived. This lens is always up, front and center, for anyone to see. Second, it generates money for charity. The folks at Squidoo put ads on pages, relevant to the page content, and the lens writer can choose to get a cut of the money or donate their share to charity. Mine goes to charity and it says so right on the page.

I believe that millions of people have valuable experience or talents and that many of us like to share information and help others. If you have a subject near and dear to your heart but don’t want to start a blog just to get the word out, try Squidoo and see if you like how it looks and works, and if you need some help building your lens just email me and I’d be happy to lend a hand.

Also, Seth’s blog is one of very few that I consider a daily “must read”.

Stitch Envy

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Whenever Sarah does a demonstration of our Crazy Shortcut Quilt techniques she mentions “stitch envy”. It happens during class when the students are quilting their squares using the decorative stitches of their sewing machines. They look at the quilters next to them and the stitches they have on their machines, and well, you get the idea.

We teach a lot of ways to get the most from your machine no matter how many stitches it has and I’ve quilted on machines with just 5 or 6 stitches – changing width and stitch length just to get some variety.

Today I got an email from a really cool lady who couldn’t wait to show me what she’d stitched up after reading our book. “We inspired her” she said, “and be sure to look at that crown stitch” she said. So I looked at her photos and now I have stitch envy!

She has crowns!

I want crowns!

Look at those stitches. I am so broke that I just couldn’t ask what machine she has – – I’m afraid to ask! LOL I’ll be dreaming of stitches tonight….thanks to Sandra Wucher of the Stashbusters Group on Yahoo!

Baby Bunnies

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On July 5th Tom brought home 2 baby bunnies that each had conjunctivitis in one eye. It just broke my heart. I didn’t post about them, or take photos, because I was sure that they were going to die. They were very, very infected, starved and barely 10 days old. The only hope I had was that they moved around and wanted to eat. So, we regularly soaked and cleaned their bad eyes, painstakingly cleaned up their fur, fed them alfalfa hay, fresh dandelion greens, ground pellets and goat’s milk (by eyedropper). They lived.

They are still under “clean up” care in my living room but they are eating, playing, grooming themselves and each other and their fur is almost totally clean. I believe that they will both be blind in their infected eyes, but I am not positive. The white rabbit’s bad eye almost looks normal now. I just can’t figure out how to give an eye test to a bunny! Lol 🙂

Commercial Fishing and the Cabana Family

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This season has been a difficult one so far and every day I dread more bad news. Last night Tom called and said that they were coming in because the skiff (with it’s brand new thousands of $$ outboard) had been swamped. In salt water. It was less than 36 hours old, and all the breakdowns that lead up to it’s unexpected purchase…well I won’t bore you with the depressing details.

In the middle of these miserable events, my heart was gladdened by the people who are our biggest competitors on the water – the Cabana family. Fishing is very competitive. I’ve been side by side with their boats, fighting for the fish, trying to out catch them and they try and beat us. That’s the nature of this work. But the second that they saw Tom’s skiff underwater they cut throttle, disconnected lines and came racing over to help. That is the Alaskan way and their family is one I admire.