To Winter and Back

Caroline's dream was to see snow for Easter. So, we headed up to Lake Tahoe last Thursday -- a 5 hour drive from our home -- to stay at my sister-in-law's house there. (How lucky are we, to have a Tahoe place available?!)

Here's what some of us were doing on Friday morning:



Caroline buried herself in the snow. Gemma frolicked wildly, never having experienced snow before. Roger and I took turns trying to keep her under control, while being pelted with snowballs.

Caroline does not remember her years living in New Hampshire, between ages 6 months old and 2 1/2. She loves to hear about how she stood in a snowbank up to her neck (just briefly -- we rescued her immediately). Now, at age 10, she has the skills to shovel her way out.



Gemma met a friendly neighbor golden retriever, Grizzly, and they had a good old time playing keep-away with a big pinecone.



I didn't get pictures of our big sledding day on Saturday. I was too tired from trudging up the hill over and over. But it was WAY fun. And we rewarded ourselves Saturday night with a lovely dinner at Sunnyside Restaurant (Mel! Where you AQ Tahoe guys went!) for prime rib and garlic mashed potatoes accompanied by a gorgeous cabernet sauvignon.

By the way, it crossed my mind to bring some hand-sewing project to work on. To Tahoe generally, I mean, not to dinner. But I don't really have a hand-sewing project. So bringing one would have required planning a design or choosing a pattern, choosing fabric, assembling supplies...It was simply too overwhelming and I was overwhelmed as it was with packing snow gear and clothes and dog supplies and Easter goodies and other weekend accoutrements.

So, instead I packed a big stack of books and a knitting project. I was so happy curled up on the couch next to the woodstove that I managed to read all 4 1/2 of the books I brought. ("Seaside" by Scarlet Thomas-- an eerie, unsettling mystery; "The Nominee" by Brian McGrory, a ripping political thriller that I didn't want to put down; "Julie and Romeo Get Lucky" by Jeanne Ray, a slightly fluffy but enjoyable story of two folks in their 60's in love and combining families; and "To the Hilt" by Dick Francis, an engrossing and totally satisfying mystery of hidden Scottish relics and business intrigue; and "Yarn Harlot," essays on knitting by the wonderful writter and blogger Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. I knitted only about 2 inches on the scarf, I'm embarrassed to say.

Our plan was to drive home on Easter sunday, after a relatively leisurely breakfast, so that Roger could be at school for Monday classes (don't you love a county where the community college has the week BEFORE Easter for vacation and the public schools have the week AFTER?) and Caroline could be at Day #1 of pony camp. But to our surprise and Caroline's great delight, here's what we saw off the back deck on Sunday morning:



After scanning weather reports and calling the Highway Patrol road conditions line to see what conditions were like on the ONE highway that gets from Tahoe to the SF Bay area, we determined that we should stay put. This proved to be an excellent decision, as the news that evening was full of pictures of stopped traffic and massive snow on Sunday afternoon, with the road eventually closing for hours.

So, we gave up our travel plans and happily resigned ourself to being snowed in. Caroline assembled a gingerbread bunny hut. (I'd like to say that we did this ourselves, but it was from a kit.)



Gemma got to taste an Easter "Peep."



Roger and I read and kept the wood stove burning and generally were very content.

And here's how things looked on Monday morning:



Gorgeous! The roads were totally clear and we had an easy drive home.

And here's what we found in our backyard back in Healdsburg:


9


From winter to spring in 5 hours.

Normal life will now resume.

Hippety, Hoppety...

Easter's on its way. And if it's time for Easter, that must mean it's time for...



See's Candy, of course!

If you live in the Western US, you know that See's Candy is delicious brand of candy...mostly chocolate confections, but other good stuff too. See's was started by Mary See in San Francisco -- her face is well known to everyone who has ever walked through a mall in California or opened a box of her candy. Someone told me recently (could this be true?) that she was an unwed mother, thrown out of the house by her shamed parents, and so she went to work for some candy store owner in SF. She learned the business and then started her own and voila, here we are, pounds later. Pounds of chocolate, for her...pounds of fat on the hips for many of us.

ANYway. Why am I blathering on about this? See's runs these great and surprisingly easy fundraisers for nonprofit groups like elementary schools. So, I've been running an Easter candy fundraiser for Caroline's school, and I've had chocolate on the mind lately as a result. The order-getting part was easy...after all, this stuff pretty much sells itself. But the shipment arrived Monday morning, which meant that I spent all Monday afternoon in the school library sorting boxes and assembling orders. And tuesday morning I walked all over the school grounds (in the rain, to those outside buildings where the room numbers don't go in order so you have to roam around to find which room is where...) delivering the orders to classrooms.

Today, I've sorted out few puzzling problems that arose, gave free chocolate bunnies to the three kids who sold the most, sold a few extra items just walking around school with it (wanna sell some chocolate? Hit up the teacher's lounge during afternoon recess...) and then distributed the remainder items to the hard working secretaries and classroom aides who make next to nothing but keep the school going.

I'm sorta sick of chocolate, and I didn't even eat it. Well, much, anyway.

We are off tomorrow morning to spend Easter weekend in Lake Tahoe. With the dog, which ought to be either really amusing or really a pain or some of both.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Proud to be Dumb?

Today, as I was getting into my car in the grocery store parking lot, I noticed the license plate frame on a car near mine. It read:

"Dumbs are not always blondes."

A dark-haired girl, probably in her mid-20's, was getting out of the car.

I've been puzzling about this ever since I saw it. Now, what would possess someone to put that frame on her own car? If it were on a car driven by a blonde, I could see it as intended to be directed to others, sort of a "don't assume I'm dumb because I'm blonde" sort of thing.

But the girl getting out of the car had very dark hair. Maybe it wasn't her car? Or she's proud to be dumb? She's jealous of all the attention blondes get their alleged stupidity? Hmmm, maybe she doesn't get what it means (and thereby advertising the truth of the sentiment)?

Or maybe someone put it on her car and she hasn't noticed it yet?

Go figure.

$100,000 Quilting Challenge

A friend of mine saw the magazine $100,000 Quilting Challenge and picked up a copy for me. I finally got a chance to look through it this weekend. Have you seen it?

The concept as promoted by the magazine publisher is to "bring the excitement of reality TV to the quilting and publishing worlds." The idea, I guess, is that people enter their quilts into one of 10 quilting categories, judges choose a finalist in each category per round, and at the end of the year, judges and the public (subscribers, maybe?) choose one grand prize-winning quilt.

The idea is clever, actually. Sort of like "American Idol" but without the bad singing! And this first issue of the magazine is pretty good, with substantive articles by well-known quilters like Ellen Anne Eddy, Katie Pasquini Masopust, and Becky Goldsmith & Linda Jenkins.

But here's what surprised and sort of disappointed me: some of finalist quilts revealed in this issue are ones I've seen before, and are from professional quilters and teachers. Somehow, I'd thought that this would be about seeing new, undiscovered talent, and wasn't going to be just a new method of judging the same quilts from the same usual people. I guess the comparison to reality tv is what created that expectation, because when I skimmed the rules, I realized that there isn't any prohibition from professional entering quilts that have been in other juried shows. And really, since anyone can enter I guess new quilts from new talent could show up along the way.

I was pleased to see that Frieda Anderson is one of the finalists for her "Shimmering Foliage," which is my favorite of the finalists. The finalist quilts are impressive ones in their categories. .

I'd like to see a quilt competition like American Idol -- better yet, like Project Runway! Take a bunch of quilters -- mixed traditional, contemporary, users of various techniques. Put them in a big studio (in Paducah!) and give them short periods of time to make quilts. Imagine the challenges!
* Take them to the Salvation Army, give them $20 and an hour to shop, and see what they come up with in 48 hours.
* Give them all the same assortment of solid color fabrics.
* Have a challenge where they can't use a sewing machine for ANYthing.

What challenges would you propose? The possibilities are fun to think about. Yep, I'd watch THAT!

More from Bishop's Ranch

It is only today that I have finished unpacking my sewing gear from last week's retreat. I'm still buzzing with inspiration, which is only slightly dampened by the reality of grocery shopping, laundry, floor-mopping, and other chores that are a bit out of hand around here.

But I'll pretend I'm at the ranch a bit longer, and show you a few more pictures featuring women from the Mt. Tamalpais Quilt Guild in Marin. A few entries ago, I introduced you to the back of Pat Dicker's head. She's the talented quilter who has the same taste in bright fabric that I do. Well, here she is again.

This is Pat's free-motion quilting practice quilt. Uh huh! Instead of using a scrap of batting and leftover fabric to warm up each time she sat down to do free-motion quilting, Pat assembled this top from left-over squares of novelty prints she had. Don't you love the artful arrangement of color? Then she sandwiched it and each time she was getting ready to quilt, she did a bit of free-motion quilting here to start. This is a charming mix of different patterns and threads and colors and the result is absolutely charming.



We both have an obsession fondness for the quilts made by Freddy Moran. Here she is showing one of her house quilts, which she was using as her bedspread during the retreat.



This charming chicken quilt is based on a Mary Lou Weidman pattern, done with Pat's usual wacky humor and flair for color. Can you see that some of the chickens are sitting on easter eggs?



This is one of the several projects Pat was working on during the retreat...a fancy tumbling blocks pattern from a Laura Nownes/Diana McClun pattern. And those red blocks over to the side? Pat would randomly switch and work on fusing those, too.



I apologize to Sydne for the inopportune moment at which I snapped this...She doesn't normally walk around with her mouth wide open like this! But it was my only shot of this lovely little quilt made from a Robbi Joy Ecklow pattern. Sydne was assembling the top at our last retreat, so it was fun to see it finished.



This is Diane Ansel, also from the Marin area. Some of you might recognize this quilt from various shows...and yes, if you saw it, it probably had a big old ribbon near it! Diane is especially proud that this won the Viewer's Choice award at Art Quilt Tahoe last year ... in fact, it took 2 of the 4 ribbons awarded there.



Diane's a quilter of eclectic taste. She's only been quilting for 4 years, I think she told me -- or was it 6? In any event, it's short given her talent and prolific output. Here she is with a star quilt she made in a class with Alex Anderson:



This soft pastel top is so pretty. (I think I crave pink around this time of year.)



I was enthralled watching Diane work during this retreat. She was making a small fish quilt for a close friend, which looked like this early in the retreat:



I love the piecing and staggered strips in the backround. (This is lying on a table, hence the skewed perspective.) By the end of the retreat, Diane had THIS:
9


You can't see all the beading and detail stitching, but trust me, it's there.

Isn't it gorgeous, and doesn't Diane look pleased?! (Of course, if I had just made this and I was about to head off to Paris for a month like *she* is, I'd be looking pretty pleased, too!)



You can tell that this retreat is about giving women who enjoy each others' company space to relax, sew, and laugh together. It doesn't matter if people are beginners or advanced quilters, and it doesn't matter that an art quilter is working next to someone making a traditional pattern with reproduction fabrics. There's no competition. We enjoy quilting and each other, and that's enough.

Meeting an old friend for the first time

Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone that you feel like you know, but you've never met them in person? It's oddly disconcerting and very fun. I used to have a job where I talked to certain people on the phone almost daily, and we developed very friendly relationships over the phone. It wasn't until I was leaving the position that my co-workers threw a party and invited everyone I'd been talking to, and it was weird but very nice to finally meet everyone face to face. (I hadn't pictured anyone at all the way they actually looked.)

Well, I had a similar experience while I was at the Bishop's Ranch retreat. I've talked a few times about Annie Smith's podcast "Quilting Stash," and how much I've been enjoying listening to the current and past podcasts. Because I only discovered them a while ago, even though the podcast is actually a year old (Hey! Its official anniversary is tomorrow, April 9!), I've been listening to archived podcasts from the past as I've sewn or puttered around in my office. Annie's podcasts are so congenial and chatty that I've come to feel as if I know her. We emailed back and forth a bit, and Annie even did a podcast about "How to be a good teacher" (go to Podcast #42) based on an email I'd sent her listing my pet peeves of things teachers do but, in my view, shouldn't.

[By the way, you do not need an Ipod or MP3 player to listen to these podcasts. Simply go to the link above, click on the particular podcast you want, and then WAIT a bit while it streams to your computer. It's best to click on the link and then do something else in the room for 5 minutes. It really does take a while to load, and I've talked to several people who -- like me, the first time -- clicked it off without hearing anything thinking it wouldn't work on my computer. In reality, I didn't give it enough loading time. So, just occupy yourself for a bit looking at a bookk or petting your fabric, and then you'll hear Annie's voice. If you do have an MP3 player, you can subscribe to the podcasts through Itunes or through Annie's site to download each new edition and listen to it on the run.]

So, I was delighted when Annie took me up on my invitation to visit Bishop's Ranch during the retreat. Last tuesday Annie braved a pretty constant rainstorm and arrived at the ranch at about 3:00 in the afternoon. She was friendly and smiley and she seemed right at home with a house full of quilters! Annie met everyone and got to see and talk about everyone's projects... It's pretty easy to get quilters to talk about their projects, don't you find?! What was especially fun was that Annie brought her recording equipment and spent several hours interviewing some of the retreat participants, including yours truly. So, within the next week or two, you should find interviews with various "ranch hand" quilters up on Annie's site. I babbled on about the Artful Quilters Blog Ring, so it'll be interesting to see if we see a sudden jump in blog readership after those are posted!

Annie joined us for dinner and a lot more quilty chatter. The nicest discovery was that, indirectly, Annie started quilting because of my friend Janet Shore! Many years ago, Janet and a few others put on a quilting symposium in the Berkeley area where they sponsored talks and classes by quilt artists and teachers such as Michael James and Nancy Crow. Apparently Annie's sister went to the symposium and came home raving so enthusiastically about quilting that Annie decided to give it a try! That's how she got into quilting! She was delighted to meet Janet and you'll find a podcast interview with Janet coming up on Quilting Stash soon, too.

With all of the excitement, I didn't think to get a camera out and take a picture of her. Duh. I was having too much fun talking.

I'm eager to hear Annie's description of the experience. I"m not sure whether I'll be able to listen to my own interview, but it'll be so fun to hear what the others had to say!

It's an amazing thing, how we're able to make friends through blogs and websites and podcasts.

More from Bishop's Ranch

Some more about the fun and fabulous women at the Bishop's Ranch retreat:



Meet Angie. She's the unofficial "official photographer" of these quilting ranch retreats, and here she is getting ready to document "show and tell." She's been posting her pictures from the quilting retreats on her Community Webshots album for several years now, and the Bishop's Ranch folks report that they get a lot of comments about them. Apparently a Google search for "Bishop's Ranch" pulls Angie's pictures up at the top of the list, so they're seen by quite a few folks.

Angie's lovely. She's got an infectious smile and a happy giggle. She's one of those people who looks calm and relaxed despite the vast array of responsibilities and activities she juggles every day.

Angie is also very knowledgeable about home quilting systems -- you know, the frame systems available to allow folks who want to do something like long-arm quilting without spending $20,000. Angie hosts a Yahoo group on home quilting systems and she can answer pretty much any question about any system. Very impressive. On Angie's Webshot album, she has pictures of her Hinterburg frame and her quilting set-up.

Here she is, head bent in concentration, next to Barbara. (Barbara is also a sweetheart and a wicked dominoes player...more on THAT later!)



Angie finished the prairie points on a small quilt she was making. Now, I'm not a big redwork fan, which is surprising as I adore RED of just about anything. But THIS quilt I like.




And here are Angie and Barbara, showing the quilt tops they'd made in a mini-group swap project. I guess they all made these Notan-style leaf blocks out of batiks and swapped them. Apparently everyone else made small wall hangings, and Angie and Barbara got carried away to bigger things.



By the way...a disclaimer about the above photo and others you see with that purple background wall. On wednesday, we had our group "show and tell" in the ranch's chapel. It's a stunning chappel, very small and intimate. It has these gorgeous, modern stained glass windows over the altar. See?







(Oops, there's a head there...but a better image of the window's design...)

Well, the windows are gorgeous. We all love seeing them. During show and tell, the light in the room is fine, and we admire the quilts happily. But the back-lighting of those windows makes for horrible photographs. In order to get presentable photos to show here, I had to tinker with the brightness a fair amount on Photoshop to get reasonably decent photos. That's why the pictures look horribly grainy. And ladies in the pictures, please excuse me...I always erred on the side of making the QUILT look as good as it did in person...which sometimes meant that the actual person didn't look so good. I assure you that any less-than-stunning portrayals of the people in the pictures was solely the result of strange lighting. They were all flawlessly beautiful in person.
Anyway. Back to the ranch events... On the last afternoon, Angie and Barbara found a very sunny spot to sit and do handwork while the rest of us packed up our assortment of gear. They'd managed to stow their stuff earlier when we weren't looking. Or when we were off nibbling this amazingly gorgeous stilton cheese with apricots in it that someone brought.



See? Doesn't Angie look like someone you'd want to sit and stitch with?



I mentioned Pam earlier. She's a riot. She lives out on a small ranch herself, where she and her her husband keep numerous dogs and horses. She works part-time at a quilting shop in Sonoma, and she's just plain fun to be around. We're trying to push her toward bright colors, but she's resisting mightily.

Here's the community quilt she's donating. She started this on day one, and had finished it by day 2. The fabrics were all these pale turquoise and red and brown cowboy prints, from a Michael Miller line, I think she said.



And she showed this asian horse quilt, made with photo-transfered horse paintings that a friend had found for her.



One of the nice things about these retreats is that you get time with people you know but don't KNOW. Shirley, here, is in my quilt guild and I've known her to say hi to but I never really talked to her. She sat right near me, so we chatted a bit. I teased her that every time I looked up, she had a different assortment of fabric in front of her and was working on a different project. And it's true...I don't know how she did that.

Here she is with a small project she's about to start hand-quilting. I love how the spaces between the stars form those little white squares. This is quite an elegant little block.



She showed a quilt she'd completed since October, from Sandy Cumming's "Thinking Outside the Block."



Oh! You should meet Janelle, the organizer of this retreat. She hangs out in the dining room, usually handquilting.



She was working on this set of miniature Amish quilts.



By the way, I've not raved sufficiently about how good the food at the ranch is. It is marvelous. And not just because someone else cooks it and cleans up after it...It is, on its own, delicious food. The first night there we had pork tenderloin in honey mustard sauce which was by far the best pork I'd ever eaten in my life. Ever. The chefs are very generous and give out their recipes, so guess what I'm cooking tonight? Yep! Roast pork in honey mustard sauce! This is my first experience in brining anything, so I'll report later.

It's all about the friends...

I was thinking about the Ranch retreat experience when I feel into bed last night (at 9:30, I was pooped!) . Retreats are great experiences for getting inspiration, getting work done, and for getting away from real life for a bit to recharge and have fun. But the best part, really, is the people. So, as I've thought about how to describe my retreat experience, I thought I'd organize it by talking about the wonderful women there.

I've talked about my dear friend Janet Shore before. She's a frequent companion (and, indeed, instigator!) of quilting field trips. Janet won't mind my telling you that she's over 80, though no one would ever guess her age from her high energy and humor. She runs us all into the ground. But Janet has been an avid quilter for years and years and years, and she always says that the best part about is the wonderful friends she's made and the people she's met.



Janet planned to work on an unfinished project that has been hanging around in her closet for over 5 years. It's a mix of all coffee-related fabrics, in browns and blues and rusts. So she was determined to get borders on it and get the dang thing done. She worked on that for a while, but as we all chatted, we got onto the subject of Sudoku, the Japanese number/logic puzzle that is now all the rage. She loves crosswords, and wants to get better at Sudoku, but is having a hard time with it.

Well, knowing Janet's quilterly brain, Margaret pointed out that the numbers don't matter--you can do the puzzle with colors. This caused Janet great excitement, as she'd seen a quilt where someone had pieced together squares following a Sudoku grid, and she was eager to try it. (By the way, this seems to be a popular idea right now...A Google search turned up a bunch of entries for "Sudoku + quilt," including a class offering here and one done here as part of an Electric Quilt design challenge.)

Margaret had done one, which she whipped out and showed Janet (sorry, no picture) , then offered up some of that fusible grid stuff that some folks use for quick assembly of watercolor quilts. Margaret thought that Janet could solve a Sudoku with color instead of numbers, so Margaret and Pam (avid Sudoku-doers... ooh, say THAT three times fast) put her to work.



(That's Margaret across from Janet in the blue plaid shirt, with Pam between them in the grey. Diane A. and Pat Dicker are looking on.)

And, sure enough, Janet had a much easier time completing the puzzle with colors!



By the time Janet left, she had 9 neatly-sewn 9-patch blocks for the Sudoku sections, ready for inner sashing and a border. What a fun idea, huh? And speedy! (It's even speedier if you don't actually take the time to solve the puzzle and just use the puzzle answer page to guide your color placement: 1 is yellow, 2 is blue, 3 is purple, etc.)

You also know my good friend Pat M., who sat next to me. Her sister Mary Lou, from Massachusetts, comes to our October retreats, and it was very odd to be there without her. We talked often about how much we missed her and how much she would have enjoyed being here. Ah, well...we'll see her in October, I hope.

So, here's Pat, doing an unusual bit of hand-stitching. She thought she'd try a small Hawaiian quilt project, overlaid with organza, but wasn't having too much fun stitching through the tightly-woven batik fabrics she'd chosen. Hey, those are the experiences that make you love your machine even more, right?



Pat was also working on assembling "Sticks and Stones" blocks. This was an early arrangement, but it had changed pretty dramatically by the end of the retreat (and by which time my camera battery had given up.)



Pat revealed a piece that had everyone at the retreat oohing and aahing in amazement. It's her fish, "Bodega."



Pat was inspired to make this by an old article in Quilting Arts magazine about making fabric beads. Pat made over 600 inch-sized beads by wrapping strips of fabric around 1" cut bits of plastic drinking straw and glued them onto her fish shape. We worried a bit about Pat when she was in her bead-wrapping stage (picturing her muttering, "Time for Wapner! Time for Wapner!") but she seems to have returned to sanity. Or something akin to it, anyway.

Here's Bodega's face...gorgeous, yes?



More reports to come...I'm gonna go unpack another bag and throw some laundry in....

A Piece-ful Retreat

I'm sorry for the few days' silence...I've been basking in the peace of my bi-annual quilting retreat at the Bishop's Ranch. And it was 4 days of bliss -- fabric, friends, great food, much laughing.

Some of you loyal readers might remember my talking about my October, 2005 retreat experience at the Ranch. The Bishop's Ranch is a retreat and conference center in my very own town (Healdsburg, California). I can't help feeling that it's rather self-indulgent to go off to a retreat in my very town--but it's efficient and convenient, too. I relieve some of the mom-guilt I experience by heading home late at night to see Roger, sleep in my own bed, be at breakfast in the morning to get Caroline's lunch packed, homework sorted, and send her off to school with a hug and kiss. And then I dash back to the Ranch and resume my mini-vacation among the quilters. It's ideal, actually, and it makes packing less onerous. If I forget something, I can simply get it later that night.

This retreat is a small one organized by a group of quilting friends in Northern California, and it has grown through word-of-mouth among friends so it's a very congenial group. Some folks have been coming twice a year for a number of years... This is only my second year attending, and my very first experience coming for the Spring retreat. The April group is a lot smaller, all clustered in the gorgeous old ranch house you see above.

The next few pictures show you what we looked like on Sunday evening. I've not cropped them so you can see a bit of the room in the backroom. Some of us gathered in the main living room...I was at the far end, so I could see across the whole room. Look at that expanse of tables and lamps and machines! That doorway on the left (with the chandelier) is the dining room, where there were 6 more quilters...and beyond that is the sunroom, where there were 4 more.



Here's the other side of the room, looking toward the dining room. And can you believe that with all that electric equipment we didn't blow a single fuse?!



We arrived on Sunday evening and everyone was busy unloading and setting up equipment. We all have learned to bring good lighting (for those late night sewing sessions), plenty of projects to work on (just in case you finish something and need more...), food, drink, and all of the necessary equipment. We laughed at Tamara, who remembered to pack everything (complete with individual bags containing neat stacks of sewn components for various projects)... and FORGOT her sewing machine! Fortunately, she was able to borrow a friend's (who was doing hand-work at first) until her friend visited and brought the missing machine.

I sat right near my good buddies Rita, Pat, and Janet. (This is Rita and Janet.)



Pam was just down the way, busy whipping out a quilt to donate to a children's shelter. (She sewed the whole thing -- piecing, quilting, and binding -- in two days. And it was adorable.) Pam is wonderful -- kind, funny, wildly entertaining to be with. This time, we heard lots of stories from her former life as a flight attendant for a major airlines. Pam tends to favor very traditional quilt patterns and muted colors, but we like her anyway.



At the opposite end of the room, in direct view and in shouting distance, was another wonderful woman and quilter, Pat Dicker. She is a delightful woman, and I was really pleased to get to know her better. Pat's an accomplished quilter, and she teaches quilting around the bay area at places like New Pieces in Berkeley. She has quilts in books (one by Mary Mashuta comes to mind) and magazines, and she has the best use of color. (You can see one of her quilts here.) Like me, she is drawn to bright and clear colors. In fact, we laugh at how similar our stashes are. But seeing her quilts really inspires me. She uses color so well, and her quilts are so happy. Pat doesn't design her quilts, but the way she applies fabric, thread, and quilting choices to patterns makes them truly unique. It's useful to be reminded that you can create gorgeous, artful quilts even when you don't design them yourself.



Poor Pat...her Bernina just stopped dead on Sunday night -- day ONE of the retreat! Luckily, one quilter was doing handwork so Pat could use her Featherweight. On Monday, I brought my trusty old Elna Super (an all-metal workhorse machine that was my very FIRST machine) and Pat was able to work on that for the rest of the retreat.

Of course, we must break out the wine at 5pm ... this IS Sonoma County, after all. Here are Pat and Janet toasting to our first retreat afternoon.



Here's Rita, relaxing below the Cinco De Mayo blocks I sewed at last October's retreat. I put them up on the wall to inspire me to do a few more this time around....I hadn't touched the thing since the last retreat! I'm going to call this quilt "April and October" as that's when I work on it!



I've got lots more to report, but I'm exhausted from all the fun. I'm headed to a bubble bath and bed. More soon!

The Gifts of 10

I have been doing a lot of reading about gifted children recently. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, as I consider myself a pretty involved and aware parent. But while Roger and I have been addressing a host of issues with Caroline, it never occurred to us that these issues were part and parcel of one issue: giftedness. Suddenly, lots of seemingly unrelated issues are falling together and making sense... I feel like I’ve been stirring a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces around and around and they just started to form a picture. Thank goodness for Caroline’s wonderful and amazing 4th grade teacher, Kathy Alexander.

The characteristics of gifted kids are fascinating. You can read about them here or here. I’d never encountered this information before, so probably like many folks, I equated "gifted" with "smart." And, to my surprise, there’s a huge difference. This is a simple illustration of the difference, if you’re interested...) The biggest revelation for me is how much giftedness has to do with a host of social and emotional characteristics and issues, beyond a high level of intelligence and/or academic achievement.

So, I’ve been immersed in this stuff lately, in large part because of the social and emotional angst Caroline has had about various things at school. We’ve had these long talks about friends and feelings. Oh, yes, and we’ve been having the Big Girl talks, too– puberty, periods, changing body parts... I guess it’s no wonder that I’ve been focussed on the serious side of life with a gifted, pre-adolescent.

Then, yesterday, I was in my office (reading online stuff about gifted kids, as a matter of fact) and Caroline came into the room. Well, she didn’t just come into the room. I heard a wild drum beat, and the stomping of feet, and she came prancing down the hallway from her bedroom wearing an african patterned fabric (actually, an old wrap-around skirt my MIL had given her for dress-up) wrapped around her head in a fancy turban-like arrangement, a pink sparkly Cinderella dress (now too small) worn as a top, and lace tights. She had plastic Mardi Gras beads draped around her neck in layers. She was holding a big bongo drum, and leaping and drumming as she came.

"I’m just feeling happy, mom!" she announced, and off she went, leaping and drumming and scaring cats out of her path.

This morning, I got up to find Caroline downstairs watching tv. When I came into the room, she had a telephone (an old, disconnected rotary telephone that is part of her play stuff) at her ear and was engaged in a dramatic conversation. "Yes... Uh huh... Really? When? ... Well, I don't know..."

At a pause, I asked, "Who are you talking to?"

"Mo – om," she said, rolling her eyes, "I’m not talking to ANYone, this doesn’t work, reMEMber?" Ooh, such derision in her voice. "Besides," she added, "I"m a horse."

10 is an amazing age.