We had two storms come through here only days apart. The first storm hit us pretty hard. No tornadoes were spotted, but the winds had reported gusts of up to 80 mph.  Thankfully no one was hurt and we had no structural damage. However, a few trees got pretty badly torn up and our neighbor lost 3 trees in their front yard.  One tree was a huge old pine. As it fell to the ground it caught the power lines, ripping them out of the neighbor’s house and damaging the lines to our house and the pole. It also covered the road in its massiveness.

It is an incredible amount of work to clean up that many trees.  Our church sent over a few guys with chain saws and Michael came, too.  By the end of the day our entire property was clean except for a huge pile in the front yard from the neighbor’s pine.  It felt good when time finally allowed and the remains of the storm were completely burnt.  What an enormous fire!

The second storm brought 4 tornadoes with it, but they touched down just a couple of miles to the north of us.  We had more branches down, but not the major damage that others suffered.  One man had his entire barn picked up off its foundation and moved across the street!  The hay and equipment was still standing on the foundation.  Now, how does a tornado accomplish such a thing?!  But it did show me  that “gusts up to 80 mph” are definitely a different story than a real, true “tornado”.

When looking at the following pictures, bear in mind that we forgot to take pictures until clean up was well under way.  It was even worse…. 

Here you can see the size of the trunk on the pine. It is sad to loose such an old tree.

The guys at work. I'm not sure how we would have gotten this cleaned up without their help.

Dad and Tammy unloading branches onto the fire pile. Thankfully, the store Dad is building wasn't damaged. That is not a barn in the background - it is a store in progress!

The view of the road after it had been cleared almost to the point of passing. I wish I would have had a picture before it was cleared at all.

The pile that was started in our front yard. It looks like a jungle!

The power company cutting a branch out of the power lines. It was a big relief when they came out and repaired the lines. You don't realize how much you depend on electricity until it's gone.

I’m glad that’s over!  Hopefully there will be no more tornadoes for a long, long time…………..

Here’s how it works: We each picked out our own pallet of fabrics. Then we placed them in a pillowcase. At each guild meeting we will pass the pillowcase to the next member in our Challenge group (there are 10 people per group) until the pillowcases go through the complete list of members. Each member has one month to use the fabrics in that pillowcase to make any block she chooses. We applied certain limitation to the blocks that can be made – i.e. no smaller than 6″ square and you cannot make the same block every month. Blocks can be rectangle or square, they can be large or small. The challenge will be at the end of the 10 month rotation to put all the differently shaped and sized blocks together into a quilt. I can hardly wait!

I am looking forward to seeing how all these blocks turn out. It is going to be a wonderful challenge to find a creative and attractive way to put all of them together. Last night at the guild meeting, a member of the guild brought a couple of Pillowcase Challenge quilts she had done. They were stunning! It was encouraging to see a finished challenge turn out so nice.

Allison's Pillowcase Challenge bundle made with Martinique pinks and Glace greens. The fabric bundle is sitting on top of the pillowcase she made for it.

The Park Avenue bundle that Tammy will be using

This month I have Carol Honderich’s pillowcase…. From previous posts, you know I consider her a special quilter in my life. Can’t wait to make her a wonderful block! Tammy has Marie Troyer’s pillowcase. She’s a special quilter friend too. We met her at the same time as Carol Honderich. (They came to visit our quilt shop in Michigan at the same time along with a Edith Shanholt and Janis Nelson.) It should be a great month!

We really did enjoy working on this quilt. It had been a while since we put “our all” into one of our very own quilts. Since we started our quilt shop all of the quilts we make are usually shop related… Fabric that needs to be displayed, new patterns that have to be demoed, or quilts for other people. This time it was for a family member and for Jacquie so we made exactly what we wanted. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Adam's Quilt from the book "Cottage Garden"

For those of you interested in the patterns used on the quilt… The border is Abundant Feathers and the block was Emily’s Feather – Square. All patterns can be found here: Three Sisters Fabric Digital Quilting Patterns – Feathers

Cottage Garden by Need'l Love

It has an applique center with tiny nine-patches surrounding it that are set on point and alternated with blank square blocks. (I haven’t done any applique work in a while and really, really enjoyed doing it again. It reminded me of my fondness for handwork!) The quilt has a nice, scalloped border surrounding it to allow for pretty quilting. I spent more than a day working on digitizing the patterns for the quilt.

It was such a pleasure to finally load it in the quilting frame and see it start getting stitched out! The nice thing about this quilt is that we made TWO of them…. One is for Adam and Gail, and the other is for Jacquie and Michael. I’m glad the cousins will have identical quilts. I think it’s kind of special – especially since they both started their married lives so close in time to each other.

Check back for the pictures of the quilt. I plan to post them when it’s finished.

I had a very bad day with internet, website, and blog troubles! It was such an odd and overwhelming thing that all of them went down on the very same day. The internet connection went down first…. Then I noticed that our website was down. And finally, in an effort to help me, my web host restored a backup that included not only the website, but also this blog – thus the loss of the posts and also some file corruption that had to be corrected. It was quite the day! Thankfully, it is over now and all is restored to good working condition. Orders are coming through again and the blog is legible!

Our happy little niece

Michael had a cousin get married in Costa Rica so they decided to go down for the wedding and also stop in Nicaragua to visit some old friends and meet some new ones. We are very glad they had the opportunity to go, although our life here is a bit dry with them gone. We live close to each other so it is normally (and thankfully!) easy to go back and forth with each other working together as “Three Sisters” like to do.

Jacquie has been faithful to email when possible. It’s been nice to get the updates on how everyone is doing. We’ll be picking them up at the Chicago airport on Sunday afternoon. It will be wonderful to see them again and catch up on all their experiences. Email is great, but nothing beats talking face to face!

April was a very busy month for us. It seemed there was always plenty of work to be done! Between quilting, we also did do a lot of gardening, cleaning, sewing, and gobs of other miscellaneous spring-time work.

A highlight for us was the CAM sewing we had with the girls at church. Since we have a quilt shop and also do a lot of sewing, it seems we have a way of a accumulating a large amount of fabric due to our own remnants or donations of our customers.  We usually have to put our time into making quilts out of our current fabric, so that leaves us with totes of fabric that we have no time or need to make quilts out of. It is perfectly new fabric that is able to be turned into dresses or quilts for people more needy than we. Thus was the birth of a sewing day for Christian Aid Ministries. The other church families donated their extra fabric and we ended up with more fabric than we expected. We spent two full days sewing and made 52 dresses of all sizes.

It also happened that CAM had a slide show presentation the evening of our last sewing day. It was a perfect way to end our sewing days -with a very strong reminder of why we did what we did. It made us more keenly aware of the needs of people in other parts of the world. And more thankful for an opportunity to serve.

Piles of fabric being sorted through and matched to make dresses of all sizes

Some of the girls cutting out dresses

The row of sewing machines and busy sewers

Butterfly Garden by Kansas Troubles Quilters

Introducing – Butterfly Garden by Kansas Troubles Quilters for Moda! We just loved the warm colors of this collection. We went ahead and bought the WHOLE COLLECTION. Every single print in the collection is ours to enjoy until it sells out. We think Kansas Troubles fabrics make some of the warmest, coziest quilts. The colors are so easy to work with.

These are the pre-cuts we ordered. We really like working with Jelly Rolls and Charm Packs. They make a quilt come together so fast and the colors all blend and we hardly have to think when we work with them! Of course that is great. Quick and easy! Isn’t that a great way to get a quilt done?!

Butterfly Garden Charm Pack

Butterfly Garden Jelly Roll

Enjoy the new fabrics! I think you’ll like them too!

Smiles,
Allison