A Little Winter Warmth

The Shoulder Warmer is my design and should
be considered copyrighted.  If you use my
idea, please give me credit.

Living in the Midwest, one thinks about the cold.  Being part of an elementary school staff has you thinking about the cold of recess.  Kids are so much more tolerant of the cold than adults.  My sister requested hand-warmers, a shoulder warmer, and some medium size warmers.  I make them with flannel and fill them with dry rice.  The Shoulder Wwarmer is an experiment of sorts.  But I tested it last night and will probably offer some directions after Thanksgiving if it lives up to my sister's expectations. 
As we travel over the next couple of days, my needle will be sealing up the ends of the hand-warmers.  Once they are sealed, you simply pop the hand-warmer size into the microwave for a minute.  (Longer  than that makes them too hot to handle, especially because they are moist heat.)  The other warmers heat up at 2 minutes.  They make great, inexpensive, quick gifts that are very welcomed all winter long.

Wanted to Share

This is a customer quilt so I don't want to reveal too much, but this is a memory quilt created to mark a young woman's passage from high school to college.  Friends and family wrote messages and then her mom created this wonder quilt full of love and great thoughts.  I know it is for a special young woman because I had a chance to read the messages.

How can you create something like this? 
Pick a plain light background fabric and provide either fabric pens or permanent sharpies for friends and family to write messages.  Then use this blocks as parts of each block.  The picture does not communicate just how special this quilt will make the owner feel.

Weekend Efforts

Yes, I did do a little quilting.  I am doing some stitch in the ditch on to small Christmas quilts using panels from Nancy Halverson's collections.  I am good at straight seams, but there are a lot of small curvy places on one, and I am seeing improvement as I go.  Figure that it is an Advent calendar and will only be up for a month each year, so I can handle "coloring outside the lines". 
I am also continuing to do all the cross-stitch on my grandchildren's Christmas stockings.  I believe that the letter "Y" is my least favorite especially because it follows "r" in both cases.  Can you say rip-out!

The highlights of the weekend surrounded the visit of my daughter and family.  Had hoped to have both kids and their families, but Jon had overtime for the weekend.  Rats!  Thought I would include my favorite part of the aquarium adventure.  (We go every time the kids are in town, and sometimes without them.)  The movie is in sideways, but I thought it would still be fun to show my sisters why I think jellyfish are so soothing to watch.  Turn DOWN your sound because the background noise of pretty loud on a Saturday.

The next couple of weeks will be busier than normal because I have several customer quilts and a few of my own projects to finish, but with a forecast for ice and snow today, where else would I be going???

Today's Quilting

I had pie-in-the-sky hopes of finishing 4 or 5 sets of HeartStrings Quilt of Valor blocks today.  We have more like 2 1/2 but they are from 5 different sets of centers.  I am going to work for about an hour on one of them and then need to work on some cross-stitch for the remainder of the evening.  Ho!  Ho!  Ho! (My daughter reads this blog.)

I am a bit concerned about making my goal of 10 more by mid-January, but think if I whittle away at blocks over the next two weeks, I will feel like the group can finish all of them if we meet 4 more times.  I have several trips planned so I will have time for binding, and several others seem to volunteer to do this, as well.  We might even have total of 23 done.

Tomorrow is HeartStrings Day

We are trying to meet at my house twice a month to work on HeartStrings.  Currently, we need to finish about 12 more Quilts of Valor by the end of January.  I received a bag of blocks at guild this week so I worked ahead a little.  I put this top together today and made 9 more blocks.  The stars as  center strips are going to create a very interesting look.   The touches of gold create a little different feel, as well.  My goal for our group is to put together at least 3 sets of finished blocks tomorrow.  Then I will quilt them over the next few days and find others to finish off the binding.

Weather Outside is Delgihtful!!

  Just like Mary, I like in the Minneapolis area and am enjoying the first snow of the season.  However, I have actually had to do the shovelling.  This is one of those really wet, heavy snows, so I am pacing myself.  I have been out and done the walk and driveway twice.  Used a ruler to measure and found that it was a total of 5 inches so far.  More is still falling... 

I live across from a golf course, that is a gorgeous sight with all the untouched snow.  Funny, but they just closed the course at the beginning of the week.

I am using the rest of the day to work on binding and embroider more of the stars for my husband's

retirement quilt.  Took me a lot of time to find theright font, but I am almost ready to start appliqueing the stars to the rest of the quilt. 

Cat and Mouse

This another of those not quite "quilty" posts.  Today during water exercise we had lots of laughs.  Imagine for a moment, 30 women between the ages of 50 and 83 playing a chase game of cat and mouse.  It was quite the workout trying to either stay ahead of the cats or to be the cat trying to catch the frisky mice.  The stomach muscles are stronger for all the laughter if nothing else.  It is a memory that will keep me smiling for days!