Farm Potpourri

Hi there Mary and Jeni,
Odds and ends of pictures from the farm this fall

Deer through the screen porch (at the pond)

This deer and her friends are why the rocks were all tumbled into the pond instead of decorating the edge.

Jim sent me a picture of his harvest.

He sent me a picture of the bread he made also but the program he emailed it with made it teensy tiny.  I decided it was too small to show here.  (About an inch high)

A red bellied woodpecker in our crab apple tree, with an American Goldfinch.

Another view

And one more.

Red bellied Woodpeckers are rare in North Dakota, but they are being seen more often.  Below are two photo's of my current quilting project.  It looks longer and narrower in this photo because it was spread out on the floor at Faye's Henhouse.  It is 90" x 106"which is about a medium sized queen.  It is being quilted as I type.  Lois K. at Faye's says she has it pinned on already.  :-D

Jeni's quilt, the colors are not perfect, but close.

Detail of quilt.  This is Quiltville's Strip Twist pattern.

Hugs,
Nancy

Quilt Camp and More Leaves

Hi Mary and Jeni,

I was at quilt camp Thursday through Sunday this week. We had a great time. It was put on by Faye's Henhouse and hosted at the Cooperstown Bible Camp. The ride out was sort of scary as it had rained for over 24 hours and the gravel roads to the camp were, what we North Dakotan's call, 'greasy'. That means it is sort of soapy in texture and it is really easy to slide off into the ditch.

This is the quilt top I made this weekend. It is stitched into rows, but the rows are not stitched together yet. Luckily the Bible Camp has these convenient valances for you to pin your quilting up onto.

Another thing the Bible Camp has in abundance are oak leaves.

Here is a closeup of the pile I was standing in.

They also have lovely hiking trails. I went out and walked for 1.86 miles with my friends Deb and Karen. You are probably surprised that I walked that far. So am I. However, now that I am off of the cholestorol drug Lipitor, my muscles have stopped aching all the time. Even much of my foot soreness was part of the Lipitor problem. I have been off of Lipitor for about 3 months now and I feel as if I went back in time to when I was 5o. Heck, maybe 40. So we walked.

Above, Deb and Karen are waiting patiently for me to take a picture.

Below is a shrub, about 7 to 8 feet high. With these red berries. Anyone have a guess as to what it is? I certainly don't know. We saw many of these on our walk.

We crossed over the 'mighty' Sheyenne River on a floating bridge near camp and then started to walk back.

And walk back. Notice the lovely Oak Tree in the left foreground.

And walk back some more.

When we dropped into the woods for a while we saw this beautiful moss.

Eventually I tired of the woods and it's uneven footing and followed a deer track up onto the road. We saw this huge fir/pine/spruce tree and none of us knew what kind of tree it is. We hope someone will tell us.

Naturalists we are not.

However you might note that Karen is another leaf collector! Well, maybe you can't tell but she is holding up a handful of oak leaves.

How did they get that far ahead of me....?

Well it might be because I kept stopping to photograph leaves in the mud.

We are easily amused here in North Dakota

I think that is the last one.

Soon after all the leaves in mud we made it back to our sweatshop in the main lodge at the camp. It is a wonderful room and we all sewed merrily into the night. Some of us (not me) stayed up until 1 a.m.

I went upstairs early and read in bed for a while. (The first Jesse Stone novel by Robert B Parker) Then, since last night was the time change, I actually saw the sunrise this morning.

Beautiful.

Here is a closeup of my quilt pretending to be a stained glass window. It is all florals from my 'watercolor' stash. It will be queen size (86 x 108) when I finish it.

Love,

Nancy

Vintage Sewing Machines and Quilts

Hello there Mary and Jeni,
I am busy getting ready for the Quilt show this weekend. We have done lots of organizing and I hope we don't have any problems. It will be exciting to see who wins the raffle quilt, shown above. I sold a lot of tickets. Of course if Dad hadn't bought 5o I would have only sold 60 tickets. However he did buy 50 and so I think there is a good chance that someone I sold a ticket to will win the quilt.
We do sell a lot of tickets but I have about a 15% chance of being the seller of the winning ticket.
The other thing I have been doing is getting Faye's beautiful vintage sewing machines up and running. She is going to have a vintage sewing machine display to coincide with the Quilt show and we need to spiff them up. I have been working there all week and it is a lot of fun. I hope to get some of mine up to the quilt show too.
Other than that we are just watching baseball and watching the rain. We have had about a week of gloomy weather. However it is supposed to get down around 32 degrees tonight so we might have a clear sky and that may very well mean we have frost and that will be the end of the flowers in the garden. It has already been cold enough to stop the morning glories.
I have just finished Potshot on the Spenser series. He is getting better as he ages. I don't know how much longer he can keep this up though. Spenser must be getting really old.
I have started reading an occasional Sunny Randall story as it comes up in order. I am up to 2001 now because they talk about 9/11. I am glad you encouraged me to read them. Parker is a lot of fun.
Love,
Nancy

First Featherweight Quilt Top

I finished my quilt top made with Black and White fabrics. I used Cream and Black fabrics too. I wasn't fussy. I put in assorted aqua fabrics for some color and to match the many yards of flannel backing that I have. I knew the name as soon as I saw it laid out on the table at the quilt retreat.
A North Dakota Quilter Dreams of the Caribbean. Yup.
The first top completely made with my Featheweight machine. It is 84 x 108 at the moment but it will be a little smaller once Lois at Faye's Henhouse gets done quilting it with large meandering all-over Feathers.
That will be sometime in January.
I am having a wool batt put in and, with the flannel backing, that will make this a wonderful warm winter quilt. Good for dreaming of sandy beaches and tropical waters.
Love,
Nancy

Quilting

Hi there Mary,

There have been a couple of quilting milestones lately.

First, my friends and I made a quilt for out favorite waiter and college student Clayton. Clayton is our waiter most Tuesday nights. He is very rude to us when he serves us food and calls us OLD and generally gets in trouble at Paula's Diner every Tuesday night. He will be graduating from Mayville State this coming spring and so we felt it only right that we concoct a quilt for him.

So we interrogated some of his friends and acquaintances and found out alot about him. We then gathered fabric that reflected the stories we had heard and made it all into a quilt. We had money fabric for tips, and coffee fabric for the coffee addict in our group. We had deer fabric and cell phone fabric and baseball fabric for his Dad and food fabric since he is our waiter. We had almost as much fun finding fabric as quilting it. Below Deb is explaining to Clayton why we have deer in the quilt.

We hung it up in the local quilt show a couple weeks ago and someone, it is a small town, told Clayton that we had 'named a quilt after him'. He claims he was in the bar at the time and he told the person 'You are drunk'.

Anyway we made the presentation on Tuesday the 28th of October and he was quite surprised. We all got hugs.

The second quilting related thing is I used my (new to me) Singer Featherweight for the first time at a quilt retreat put on by Faye's Henhouse this last weekend. It was wonderful and I am so proud to have that nice machine for my very own. I will take it to the Park River quilt retreat next weekend too. Hopefully I will finish the black and white quilt top then.

Love,

Nancy

What is up on the Design Wall

Hi there Mary,
I have been working like crazy on my quilt for Operation Migration to raffle off during this years migration. I went into Faye's on Thursday to do some extra work on it and got all the hexagons finished. Like the previous two it will be a One Block Wonder style quilt. I have two versions. The white triangles are supposed to represent the cranes flying behind an ultralight. The only difference is that in one quilt the ultralight is shown with two triangles and in the other quilt it is shown with six.
I am fairly sure the six sized one is a better proportion to the cranes. I haven't decided which I will use. At this point the triangles are just placed on top of the area where I intend to sew them.
I hope to get the top finished and to the quilter before I come back to Minneapolis.
Love,
Nancy