Sunday contentment

Yesterday was Saturday.  It was an absolutely gorgeous, sunny day!  I had an out of town board meeting to attend (4 hours), plus a bit of a commute (3 hours round trip), but the meeting went well and I enjoyed the beautiful drive and listening to CDs from my daughter.  Given a choice, I would have chosen a different sort of Saturday, but I made the best of it, and despite being tired, I made a nice dinner for my family and then finished my January Dollies Online quilt top.

The pattern is called Hurry Home, and it was designed by Amy Lobsiger, aka Mrs. Schmenckman.
There are so many things to love about dolly and mini quilts.  Not only are they adorable, but they are quick to make and use up scraps of beloved fabrics too small for a larger project.  See my Amy Butler Gypsy Caravan scraps?  Still one of my favorite lines.

As you can tell by the picture, we are not having a repeat of yesterday's glorious weather.  My plan was to take a picture of  my dolly quilt top outside in the sun, but I looked outside to find a light but continuous drizzle.  And I found it oddly comforting.  Today is a stay-in-my-cozy-home-in-my-comfy-pajama-pants-and-do-whatever-I-want kind of day.  And a little gray drizzle is just the perfect stay-at-home kind of weather.  Throughout the area, there are probably plenty of people complaining about the weather.  Not me.

Earlier in the week I finished this block for a quilting bee:

Jessica is making a Coffee and Brown Sugar quilt and included the solid teal in the fabrics she sent, asking that it be used near the middle of whatever block we made (our choice).  This is Pinwheel #9, one of many free patterns available from Quilter's Cache.  This was just one of those blocks for me!  I think I made a mistake at virtually every step in the process.  You would have thought it was my first quilt block!  But it came out just fine in the end.  Phew!

As I leave you today, I just want to share that after 24+ years, my husband still leaves me scratching my head about so many things!  If I tell him something 100 times, he usually acts on the 101st time as if just hearing the information for the first time.   But occasionally I say something to him that gets melded into his brain immediately (if I could just figure out what and when!).  Well -- at the beach last weekend I casually mentioned that someday I would like to get a quilt stand.  On Monday he called a man he knows who owns an antique store.  The man emailed some pictures to Steve which he forwarded to me at work.  Two days later we were to meet outside the antique store at 5:00 p.m.  I got there a little early and they were already closing.  Steve got there about 5:10 (he had a meeting that went till 5:00 and another that was going to start at 5:30).  I told him they were closed, but Steve said he could still see them in the store.  So he called them on his cell phone and they opened for us. Not only that, but they discounted the price without us even asking!  And I went home with a new quilt stand in the back seat.

We got it so fast, I still haven't figured out where to put it!

These are two old quilts that are very special to me.  The double wedding ring was the quilt on my bed when I was growing up (and, no -- I did not grow up in the 30s!).  I loved that quilt so much and know every fabric by heart.  The rings were like roads for small dolls, paper dolls, and even cars.  Notice the red and green at the "intersections".  The lone star was given to us by our downstairs neighbor in the town house type apartment we lived in when we were first married.  She was a single woman much older than us, and she so appreciated any little chores we helped her with.  When she moved she gave us this old quilt that someone had given her years earlier for similar reasons. Talk about paying it forward.

With wishes, true and kind -- Joan