Last month when Steve and I were in Oklahoma City visiting parents, we spotted the metal base to a patio table. The glass was gone, but the base was in good shape. I even liked the slightly weathered blue paint on it.

We got it back home and I decided it needed a mosaic top . We used a sheet of Hardie board for the base.

I priced tile and realized that I didn’t want to spend that much. I had some garage sale plates and white tiles. We bought mastic and grout.

I broke the plates between pieces of cardboard with a 4 lb hammer. Wear goggles!

Steve helped me with this project. It’s too bad we don’t have a movie of us hurriedly trying to stick the pieces to the table before the mastic dried!

I could have gone hunting for more plates, but honestly I didn’t have time. We both think it has a nicely casual look as it is. And it was (practically) free!

Congratulations to “Del”, poster #195. You have won my block!

How did we choose a winner? I asked my youngest son, Jeff, to do the choosing. He is a phd student in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins and seemed to me to be a perfect person for this very important task. He chose the winner by randomly picking a number between 1 and 314 in R.

So, Del… I need an address from you! You can email me at becky@pieceocake.com.

Thank you all for visiting our blog. I hope you continue to check in. We’ll have another blog door prize in a few weeks.

I am a Star Trek fan. There, I’ve admitted it. My kids grew up on Star Trek. We can all (even my husband) quote from the shows – the original ST with Capt. Kirk, Next Generation with Picard, Voyager with Janeway, and even Deep Space Nine.

Jeff, my youngest, just sent me this link. I have to say that I laughed out loud. I wanted to share this with those of you who are also ST fans… Click the following to read more – Masked Man Robs Convenience Stores With Klingon Sword

FYI – This is a batleth. You can read more about batleths here. I feel certain that if I were confronted with a batleth-weilding robber, I hand over the money!

We’ve had a couple of questions about how to leave a comment on the post below. At the end of the post it says “Posted by Becky at 6:14 PM 216 comments”. (The number of comments may be higher when you get to this spot.)

Click the word “comments”. That takes you to a page where you can read the comments. On the right side of that page there’s a box where you can type a comment. Under that there are options where you can choose an identity. You must choose one of these options. Then click the publish button. That’s it. Your comment will be added to the list of comments.

Be sure to leave your comment on the correct blog post. Scroll down to the post dated Tuesday, Feb. 2. The one with the picture of the block. Don’t put your comment on this post.

Good luck!

We had our first blog “door” prize in November and it’s high time for another one! This is a block from the sampler quilt in our book, The New Applique Sampler.

Becky appliqued this block (by hand, herself) for a class and it never made it into a quilt. The background is 12 1/2″ x 19 1/2″ and it has not been trimmed.

To enter to win this lovely door prize, leave a comment on this post. Be sure to leave your name!

I’m home and trying to watch the Super Bowl. It’s not easy. Unpacking has been distracting me.

The sun did finally shine on the last day (the REALLY last day) of the 29th Jinny Beyer Seminar. It was a lovely end to a lovely week. I wish it wasn’t all over, but I’m very grateful to have been a part of this last seminar.

Did you know that Jinny has 150 different fabrics in her current collection of fabric? I didn’t know this. They blend together – from color to color and value to value – in such a beautiful way. I want to use them – ALL! I’m going to have to buy them all – soon.

I wanted to share a beach find with you. There were lots of sand dollars in the sand. I resisted picking one up to bring home because they looked like they were still alive. The only sand dollars I’ve seen are gray (not green), without little hairs. It was pretty cool to spot some “in the wild”!