I've been waiting for the perfect time to start talking about the AAQI Celebrity Auction. Now is the time! All 12 quilts are shown below (mine is the 2nd from the left on the top row). Click here to buy things (t-shirts, mugs, thermoses, etc.) with any one of these images on it. As with the auction, all profits fund Alzheimer's research.

Those little pictures are… little! I think you'll want to see them a bit larger so I'm going to post two a day for the next few days. Click on the photo to see it even bigger.

This is Radiant Feathered Star by Marsha McCloskey:

And here is How Does My Garden Grow by Mary Sorensen:

I'm so honored to be a member of this very talented group! Mark your calendar…the online auction will be held November 1-10.  

We are celebrating Jack's birthday tonight, a few days early. Steve is cooking dinner, I made the cake. Jack requested a Minas Tirith cake. In case you need a refresher, Minas Tirith is the heavily fortified capital of Gondor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I asked for pictures…

Really?!!!! I make cakes but nothing like this. Jack is turning five but he's always been interested in extravagent cake making. I have no idea where that came from.

Chris sent me this link to show me cakes that others have made. I am once again surprised at what people think of, and how they do it. Here's an example:

Again – really?!!!! Jack requested my lemon cake with buttercream frosting which is not particularly moldable. Plus, I couldn't devote days to this. However, I kept calm and carried on.

I made one layer each at 9", 8" and 6" round. I made a foil-covered cardboard base with a back wall that is supposed to be the mountain. I got everlything out and ready. That included slicing each cake layer in half horizontally and spreading my home-made lemon curd inside. (That is a key ingredient that makes this cake taste so good.)

With the frosting made, I had to work fast because the frosting was not stiff. I used lots of toothpicks to hold various layers together. I managed to get the cake into the refrigerator without dropping it. The cold hardened the frosting and made it all more stable. I decided that the cake crumbs in the frosting were OK because it looked rougher, more rock-like. That blue bowl has extra frosting in case I need it.

After the frosting hardened I took the cake out of the refrigerator and used gray cake spray paint on it – yet another thing I didn't know existed until a few days ago. I thought I would use the sparkly sugar flakes too but they didn't show up and this cake does not need any more sugar. I made a pointy tower and various add-ons with crumpled foil…

It's official. I am really bad at this! I'm hoping that it's so bad it's good, but it may be too bad to ever be good. The cake itself should taste just fine (even though shiny gray cake looks pretty unappetizing). 

Jack and Chris are going decorate it with Lego guys. I hope Jack will use his imagination and sort of see Minas Tirith. At the very least he'll know I tried and maybe that's the most important thing.

I had four more photos that didn't seem to fit well in any of the previous posts. Here they are…

It was fun to see how they used small pumpkins: strung tightly together into garlands, strung farther apart in streamers. And there was that hanging thing that was a cross between and mobile and a chandelier. It was better looking in person – here you mostly see the corn husks – but still, a nice idea.

Individual little pumpkins were wrapped with a bit of flexible (copper?) wire and hung on the fences… None of these pumpkin ideas would be hard to do at home.

I didn't take many flower pictures but could not pass up this pink hibiscus. The way the bud sits, head held high, was nice.

I found one iron manhole cover that just needed to pose with my new boots! Don't you love this design? It would be nice in a cutaway applique…

That's the end of the Dallas Arboretum pictures. I'm teaching in Granbury, TX, Monday. It's my last 'real' job this year. Then I hope to turn my attention to planning the quilts for my next book. Oh happy, happy day!

I've let magazines pile up but finally had time to flip through my Martha Stewart Living issues in the car on Saturday (Steve was driving). Of course there was Photoshopping involved but Martha looks pretty good! I wonder if it's a shock to see her in person?

I think that's really her in the photo below – not her head photoshopped onto a model. I think it's all Martha is because of the looks on the faces of the two girls closest to her.

The grin looks a bit strained, don't you think? That could be because they'd been at it a while; kids do get tired of smiling. (See, I'm trying to cut Martha some slack!)

Do you think they have a fan blowing on her (above) to make her hair look so casually brushed back? And I wonder if the paint on the brush is wet or dry? If I had that much wet paint on a brush it wouldn't take long for me to have paint on me, the table, etc. – but then I'm not Martha.

It's possible that that's only Martha's head on a model's body, but if so, they matched up the parts well. This ad actually worked on me – I would like to buy 1 or more of those glass domes. I'm leaving for Granbury soon. Maybe I'll drive near a Macy's!

Are you tired of pretty yet? I hope not because my favorite piece is coming up. This is the Dallas Star and it was amazing…

Notice those pumpkins lining the walk. There were hundreds of them in this part of the Arboretum. They led to the pumpkin patch the likes of which I have not seen before. More on that later. Now, back to the Dallas Star, much closer… It's icy looking!

We walked on a little ways and came upon the most exciting display of pumpkins that I have ever seen!

As you might imagine, this area was full of children who were (sometimes) happily posing for their parents. I was sorry that Elanor and Jack weren't with us. I suppose I might have been able to get Linda to pose among the pumpkins but neither of us thought that. 

You can walk through the houses. Pumpkins are visible from the inside as well. I don't know if they re-use the framework but I would suspect that they do. 

It was so much fun watching parents take pictures of their kids that I couldn't help be take a few myself. Don't you love the pink outfits with the orange pumpkins!

I really wanted to stand in front of these little girls' mother to take their picture, but that would have been presumptuous of me. They were so cute in their costumes and honestly, the view from the side is not bad at all. 

Linda spotted this family. Look close, down in the pumpkins… I'll bet that turned out to be a good picture.

And, last but not least, is this figure reclining on the grass back in a quiet area of the park. At first glance, I thought she was a sculpture. She must have been napping, or maybe reading, because she was motionless. Her footwear looks like work boots so maybe she was resting on her break. I think that is a knitted hat on her head… at any rate, I reminded of shapes Henry Moore might have sculpted.

The more photos I take of random people, the more I appreciate how different we all are. And how wonderful! 

These lovely white glass 'flowers' are more Chihuly-esque to my eye. There was surprisingly little of this sort of shape on display at the Dallas Arboretum.

I stood behind a mother taking a photo of her brood. It's a nice way to show you the scale of this glass sculpture – and to show how happy even teenagers were to be here!

I was headed to the ladies room when we saw the sculpture in the next photo. I might have gotten a better photo but was more interested in where I was headed :-).

Linda called this one 'snakes'. Now, if snakes don't agree with you, you might call it flames.

The butterflies loved this one too.

The next two photos show glass in waterfalls. Linda and I both loved these…

Look, they're dancing!