I recently did a block for the Susan B. Komen Breast Cancer quilt. The quilt will be used to raise money for the fund. It is a good feeling to participate in a worth while event. I have attached a picture of the block.
I will be in Houston next week to serve on the IQA Board. I am excited to have been asked to serve. This is the organization that puts on the Quilt Show for Festival each Fall in Houston. Wow!! it is great to see the quilts. Somewhere around 54,000 people attend this event
While there I have some free time to shop Festival. Always a good opportunity to spend money. There will be somewhere around 1000 vendors there. This makes a good road trip with a group of quilter’s. I love a road trip with friends. On Thursday I have volunteered to help Ami Sims raise money for the Alzheimers Art Quilt intiative. All the quilts are donated. I will be working on Thursday 2:30-3:30. Stop by and see me and the wonderful quilts for sale and take a quilt home with you.
Off tomorrow to do a lecture in Montrose Colorado. I will take pictures.
Blessings Linda

This and that…

I had Jack and Elanor over this morning and managed to get a picture of Jack, not moving. A lot of the pictures I take of him are blurry because he’s always moving! I was sitting on the front porch and Jack was on the sidewalk in front of me. Those are berries that dropped off of the weeping yaupon tree on the concrete around him. Almost immediately after I took this photo I had to leap into action and dig 2 berries out of his mouth. He was not happy. They probably wouldn’t have hurt him, but I wasn’t sure.


These purple bachelor buttons were blooming to so I got this pretty image before we went inside. They remind of a blueberry quilt that Wendy Richardson made several years ago.










And… I’m still blurfing. I spotted this colorful home library on fffound. The rainbow of books on these shelves reminds me of the post I did about Valerie Madill back in July. 

I don’t have a real strategy on fffound. I just click on photos that I like. Every click takes you to different images. I like to see where all that clicking takes me. 

The link from the library photo took me to yet another great blog – de(coeur)açao. What amazing color! I love that quilt in the second photo and I wish I had the nerve to paint my refrigerator pink (or turquoise!) I can’t read the words on this blog which is not a bad thing. I can focus on the photos! 

I don’t know about you, but I find inspiration for my quilts from a variety of sources. These lovely blogs are great for sparking ideas.

More on the interconnectivity of the web…

I was doing a bit of blog-surfing today (in preparation for getting down to real work) and I came across a lecture on YouTube by Michael Wesch. He’s an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. If you go here you can watch the 1-hour lecture that he gave at the Library of Congress in June. It is surprisingly good. I know because I sat here and watched/listened to the whole thing. He tells a good story!


Dr. Wesch is studying digital ethnography which, as I understand it, is the study of how digital interaction is shaping our culture. Who knew that by doing all this blogging-commenting-YouTubing we are actually adding to our culture! 

You might be wondering what the photos of this coleus plant from my front yard have to do with any of this… in a word, nothing. They are just here to be pretty! And possibly inspirational. I think we quilters like pretty, inspirational pictures!

Now I really do have to get to work!

Becky

Blogging…

I never thought I would find the time for it, but I’ve become a blog reader. You can see the blogs I read regularly at the bottom of the right-hand column of this very blog. The easiest way for me to know when any of these blogs has a new post is to subscribe to them. Did you know that you could do that?


If you don’t know how to subscribe to a blog don’t feel bad. I’m going to tell you how you can. Look at the top of your browser window and find the URL for this page. (The URL is the line that starts with http://www…. ) To the right of the URL do you see RSS or a symbol? Click on RSS or the symbol (you might want to read the rest of this before you really click). 

A new window will open. I’m on a mac, using Safari. On the right side of my newly opened window I see a column. At the bottom of this column is an area that says Actions. I tried this in Firefox and there wasn’t a column, but there was a button that said “subscribe now”. If you are on a pc your window will probably be different from both of the ones I found, but I’ll bet you can find an obvious subscription area. Click what’s there.

I like to catch up on new blog posts in my email program, so I choose “subscribe in mail”. FYI – Mail is the mac email program. If you use some other email program it will probably give you an option to subscribe in that program. You may have to choose between RSS and Atom. I have used both and they both work.

Once I click “subscribe in mail” a new folder is automatically created in my email program. Every new post it shows up there. Treat them as emails – delete them when you want to. Forward them if you want to. You can see what my mail window looks like in the photo at left. The blog feeds are at the bottom of the left column in the RSS folder. Sometimes the emailed version of a blog is not a complete blog post but that’s OK because there is a link to the full post inside the email. 

A new blog that I’m watching is hyperthesis. It came to my attention in an enewsletter that I got last week from Chuck Green at Ideabook. This is not a blog that quilters might normally come across. I think the photographs on this blog are quirky and wonderful! The designers are Chinese (I think), living in New Zealand. The slightly fractured English in the text is charming. A more “quilterly” blog is HELLOmynameisheather. The photos in Heather Bailey’s blog make me swoon – and lust for a new camera! 

Isn’t technology amazing! That we can share these amazing stories and images, that we may never meet face to face – but that we are nonetheless connected… this is both amazing AND wonderful! I’m happy that you read our blog. Thank you and happy stitching,

Becky

Key lime cheesecake…

Thanks to a Feather Princess guild member, I came home from Tampa last week with 10 freshly picked key limes! The feather princesses told me that 10 is the magic number of limes when planning key lime goodies, something I didn’t know. These key limes look a lot different from the tiny, hard, green key limes that I always find at the grocery store. They were yellower, bigger, thinner-skinned, and very juicy. You can see four of them in the photo. They look more like little lemons.



I decided to make a key lime cheesecake with my key limes on Monday. The kids were coming for dinner on Thursday and it would have time to chill by then. I found this recipe at about.com. It is gluten-free which is important at my house. My daughter-in-law and grandchildren can’t have gluten. I substituted gluten-free gingersnaps for the graham cracker crumbs in the crust and I think they added a lot of flavor to the cheesecake.

This cheesecake raises a lot during baking. The top of mine got browner than I prefer. When I make it again I’ll lower the rack in the oven and I’ll check it more often. If it gets this brown again I’ll be ready to put some foil over the top of it to protect it better.


My plan was to make this cheesecake and not eat any of it. That’s always my plan with cheesecake. I know what’s in a cheesecake which keeps me from eating it. But Steve came home for lunch on Tuesday, the cheesecake had chilled overnight, and we decided to each try a little bit. Big mistake! This was possibly the best cheesecake I’ve ever made! By dinner last night (Thursday) the cheesecake was almost half gone – as you can see in the photo above. (I should have taken a photo before I cut it, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.)

I have to tell you that as I ate my (multiple) slivers of cheesecake, I was smiling! All leftovers went home with Christopher and Lorna so today at lunch I’ll just dream of cheesecake…

Becky

Celebrity Interview


Pat Sloan has interviewed me for her blog. Click here to read it: http://patsloan.typepad.com.: She calls these “Celerity Interviews”. Becky’s interview will be on Pat’s blog in early November. Pat’s blog is an interesting read.  There are more interviews on her site. To read them scroll down the right side of column and you will find Celebrity Interviews link.  Visit Pat’s web site for wonderful ongoing projects. She even does a radio program. http://PatSloan.com

Being referred to as a celebrity was nice. I may get the big head. 

I have been busy making pillows for my sister’s birthday. This is a big birthday. The applique pillow above with the bird on it gives you a sneak preview of the next BOM. 
I had not done pillows in years. The ruffle one I did the hard way by sewing two rows of basting stitches and then gathering the stitches by hand. The gathering foot I had was for my old Bernina. I advise you to use a gathering or ruffle attachment for your machine. It took way too long to do it the old way. 
The gathered cording was tedious.  I found out after I did the cording that there was also a foot to make gathering on cording easier. You all probably all ready knew this. All I can say is I make quilts and seldom have the time to make anything else. I think I need to take a refresher class on the attachments for my Bernina. No telling what else is out there. 
Blessings Linda