It's a "Flimsy"...

I've been working on the "Tuxedo Quilt" since January and it is finally a top...or "flimsy", as quilters call it!  Tomorrow I am going to go buy a stencil for the border, and then after marking it, I'll be loading it into my frame so I can start with the hand-quilting.  I went ahead and loaded the backing into the frame today.

The "black" fabric looks solid from a distance, but this is what it looks like up close...

The white is a tone-on-tone with a swirl design in it, too.

This is the backing fabric I chose...fancy but whimsical...

I'm planning on entering this quilt in next year's quilt show in April!  :)   It measures 97" x 107" and is a variation of the "Hunter's Star" pattern.  It was designed with EQ7 and cut out completely on my Accuquilt using the Hunter's Star die.


Loretta

Please Help if You Are Able...

No funny quotes or snips today...only seriousness and a heavy heart as sadness grips Andy's and my heart this week.  

Last Friday a good friend had a massive heart attack and is in a coma on life support.  Ron is Andy's best friend and was the Best Man at our wedding.  Ron is the person that got Andy to move to California...which is where he and I met, so I guess you could say Ron is the reason Andy & I met!  (Andy & Ron were childhood friends from Maine.)

Andy (left) and Ronnie (right) at our wedding

Ronnie holding 4 month old Erin

Our children call him "Uncle Ronnie" and his wife "Aunt Paulette", even though there is no direct familial connection.  Actually...when the kids were first beginning to talk, they called him "Uncle Macaroni"...because "Ronnie" sounded like "macaroni" to them.  LOL


But that was a long time ago.  Now he on life support with a VERY poor prognosis.

Andy left this morning to go to see him at the hospital in Virginia.  

The reason I'm posting this is because a GoFundMe page has been set up for Ron's family to help with medical expenses and possible/probable upcoming funeral expenses.  

ANY amount...no matter how large or how small...that you feel led to donate will be appreciated.  Five dollars might be a small amount by itself, but joined with others, will make a huge impact.  

Here's the link:  https://www.gofundme.com/fundraiser-for-ron-campbells-needs

I'm asking for your help...not for us, but for his family.  (BTW, you won't see our donation listed on the site because Andy took our check down to Paulette today when he went to the hospital...so I'm not asking you to do anything that we haven't already done ourselves.)

Thank you all in advance!

Loretta

January 2017...

Wow!  It's been WAY TOOOOOO LONG since my last blog post.  So I'm going to do a review of January in this post.  

Our daughter turned 30 in January, so we traveled to Tennessee to celebrate it with her.   

We got to spend a little time with our grandchildren, Sera and Clark.

Just a boy and his grandpa...

I don't know if I had mentioned it in a previous post, but our daughter is pregnant with her third child...due in August!!!   I have picked out the quilt I'm going to make based on her nursery theme.  HOWEVER...it is a paper-pieced pattern...and I don't know how to paper-piece...so I guess I've gotta learn over the next few weeks!  

When we travel to visit our children we take Ginger with us.  She loves to take trips with us and goes wild when we pull out the suitcases to start packing.  It's almost impossible to keep her OUT of the car at that point!  We throw her bed on the back seat  and she jumps right in and settles down.

On the quilting front, I started the black and white quilt that I call "Tuxedo"...but I'll post on that in the next post.  For now I'd like to tell you about some great customer service I received from Fiskars.  Several years ago I purchased one of their rotating mats for squaring up quilt blocks.  Over time it developed deep groves and lost its "self-healing" quality.  Someone on one of the Facebook quilting groups was talking about Fiskars lifetime warranty and that they had replaced a rotary cutter of hers.  

Since my mat was basically unusable anymore because of the deep groves that trapped the rotary blade when I would try to use it, I decided to go to their website and fill out a warranty for and email it to them...with pictures.

You can see the groves in the mat here...

Within 3 days they got back to me saying they had received my claim.  About 2 days later, I got an email saying my replacement mat was being mailed out and I received it about a week later!!!  How's that for customer service?  LOVE IT!!!

Loretta