Gratitude

As many of you may know, the 17th of October marks a birthday for me, I'll be 67 years old and proud to grow older. Maybe I should change that phrase to reading that I'm grateful to grow older!

In the mail, my very dear friend, Grace, sent a delightful assortment of goodies to help me celebrate, thank you Grace!!

There are three gorgeous Paula Barnes' Heritage Reds by Marcus Brothers and an Aurafil spool of a red to match! Whoohoo! And look at that bar of Godiva to munch on while reading a quilting booklet, too!

Thank goodness my birthday is during the cooler weather so as to not melt fine chocolate in the mail, LOL! I'm grateful for that, but I'm much more grateful to have Grace as a good friend, thanks a million.

After a week of plain ole' procrastinating, I finally did sew my prepared binding onto my "Summer Poppies" quilt!

It's been fun to drag it around and hand hem on it a little. Here's what it looked like as I sewed the binding using my trusty old White Sewing Machine, circa 1934 or 1935.

This is my everyday machine, a straight stitch given to me by my friend, Frances, who had promised me, before she passed away, that she would put the coffee on for me in Heaven. I'm grateful to have known her.

When I got around to joining up the two loose ends, they matched up really nicely, so I was pleased with myself.

I took "Summer Poppies" with me yesterday to The Sunshine Club and sewed a couple of needle's worth onto the hem by hand. As always, we were meeting at the Alton, New Hampshire Senior Center.

While I was there, I insisted that when Sue put her borders onto her really cool Black Diamonds quilt top, that she was using Bonnie K. Hunter's method of smoothing across the center of the quilt top.

Below you can see that we've already measured the border pieces through the center and are now ready to pin the correctly cut borders onto their respective sides of the quilt top.

Thank you, Bonnie, for teaching us this method on your fabulous website and blog. Here is the link to learn if you need it: Link.

Sue wasn't going to pin, wasn't going to cut the two sides of the borders exactly the same, or any of the matching and easing, to square up the quilt. Those bad work habits are just asking for disaster!
But I was able to convince her that it was worth doing it correctly, just by my sheer bullying.

Here, below, is Sue, showing us her perfect butterfly print from Joann's for her borders and her backing. Fabulous fabric!!!

 While Sue was working on all that, Bev, seen below on the left, was hand quilting on her big sampler.We were all chatting with a visitor named Marcie, on the right, who had joined us.

Mary, below, had been busy laying out all 24 of her completed scrappy strings blocks early in our meeting when the table was still clear.

 
We had great fun arranging them and labeling them for her to assemble at home.

Don't they look wonderful together?? Good job, Mary!

Bev, below, had been hand quilting and when she went to re-thread her tiny hand quilting needle it fell onto the grey spatter-designed floor tiles.
It might just as well have become invisible!! We spent a full five minutes searching for it before we did finally find it.

Before I forget to mention it, I wanted to share that I sold a few more tickets to the quilt raffle that will benefit the Senior Center.

The tickets are, $5 for one ticket, $10 for three tickets, and $20 for ten tickets for our November 18th drawing. The winner need not be present to win.

Lastly, let me humbly share with you my record of Sunday night's end to a rainstorm.

It was almost dark but a few stray sunbeams illuminated the sky and turned the cloud cover all pink with a rainbow in the center of all those clouds.

May your life be so inspired by the simple beauty that is all around you that you feel the sense of gratitude for being alive.

Linking up to Busy Hands. Link.

Happy sewing!