Sweet sweet Maddie

I was just on the phone with Maddie, my littlest niece....and she passed the......

"Name Those Aunts" quiz!

She was looking at the picture on the previous post......

We live so far apart and don't see each other in person as much as we would like.

The last thing she says is,

"where is my picture?"

So I told her I would work on getting her in the blog and here she is!!!!...............

I love you Maddie!!

Decorating for Memorial weekend...

Mom's birthday was last Saturday. She wanted us to meet for lunch and decorate the graves.She does this every year. She brings a huge screwdriver and a hammer, plus several bouquets of artificial flowers. I was going to say "fake" but artificial sounds nicer.
She takes the screwdriver and pounds it into the ground to make a small hole and then places the flowers in it for some colorful decoration. We all just stand there and watch. She has it down to an art form....we are still learning.

I did think to put the little LOVE quilt on grandma and grandpa's grave. It didn't stay like the flowers, but it made for a nice picture. Over to Jodi and Joan's grave........I can't believe it has been 5 years since Jodi died because of breast cancer. Joan was just an infant and also Jane's twin.
At the Kaiser Hauf where we were eating lunch, Jenny pulls out 3 little gargoyles she had bought at a garage sale for a dollar. She wanted to leave them on Jodi's grave since she loved gargoyles. We convinced her not to just leave them...they would be stolen.......or just cut up into many small pieces when the lawn mowers came through.
We talked about burying them along side the grave........Jill liked that idea.

But in the end Jenny decided to set them on the grave and then take them home for her garden. We took their picture. I'm thinking that our decorating is a little different from Mom's.

Jill still liked the idea of leaving one and offered to buy one of the gargoyles. She didn't want to give up on burying one of them. Unfortunately the price of a gargoyle had gone up to 10 bucks a piece .........

and Jill agreed with all of us that the gargoyles would look lovely among Jenny's flowers at home.

Here we all are at Jodi and Joan's grave. Jenny, Jane, Mom, me,Jill. This where we learned about
"THE SIGN"
Jill and Jon had found it a few years ago.........
If you stand like we are and look into the distance a cross shape is formed ...I don't know what the horizontal and vertical poles are exactly.....but there is a cross, plain as day. I wish I had taken a picture.

If you look behind the cross you see a shopping center.........and wouldn't ya know the cross is directly on the door of a liquor store.

Jill KNEW this meant Jodi was showing her where to go purchase some beer for the evening since they were spending the night. Jill is very good at finding "signs"......she has this down to an art form....the rest of us are still learning.



A trip to the cemetery isn't complete until we go see Allie Peterson (no relation).....he was a little boy who died in the 1800's....Grandpa always told us he had drowned, I can't verify this but it is the story we were told.....

I love his outfit and was always in awe of how BIG this little boy's grave was.
His feet are at my eye level now....but when I was little that statue was WAY up and very big. We noticed people were leaving pennies at his feet on the statue and we decided to leave a couple pennies too.

Happy birthday Mom it was a nice afternoon!!!

Tractor joe's Oliver

The 1600 Oliver was bought in the spring of 2008. It actually looked better than this shot because it has a hood and sides. What ever they worked on, at that point, needed them off. It was used for mowing the pasture at our place. It just didn't look very nice....YET! But tractor joe was still very proud of his tractor.

When my sister was here last summer and saw it, she actually said "is this a working tractor???" She earned no brownie points for that question.


This spring Mike was here (between jobs) and he started painting. The WHOLE thing was taken apart to work on....it was REALLY a sad looking tractor then. Even the small front wheels were missing and it sat on blocks.


Bits of it were all over. The hydropower bell something went to the shop for repairs. Everything on it was gettting a new coat of "meadow green" or "clover white"........We were all excited, it would look SO NICE!



It was a Sunday night when everything was put back together....the moment of truth...would it run again?? YES it did...but wait....something wasn't quite right. The hydropower bell something wasn't running correctly. Tractor joe, his brothers and Mike worked on it. The repairman was called and asked if it was possible he left a rag in it. Silence for a second and then...


"yea, it is possible"...........oh no!!! The whole thing was taken apart again and back to the repair shop went the hydropower bell something. Yep, there was a rag in it.


So by the next weekend the tractor was back together and running. You can see we still need to get the Oliver decals and as I write the back wheels are painted now, along with the fenders and dash.....it is SO COOL.


Mike has done a FANTASTIC job of getting the paint on!!



We think its a keeper!!

Dream Big

I made this quilt for a teacher at school. We had worked in the preschool together. She was wonderful and fun to work with. I used foam letter stamps and acrylic paint to put the words on. I liked the way that turned out and have painted words again on other quilts.

Pictures of those are on film and in the camera......sigh....someday they'll show up here.

http://lazygalquilting.blogspot.com/2008/12/rumspringa.html

see the LOVE? The link will get you to my inspiration for them. I added the heart instead of the letter "O".

Speech and drums

Last winter Chris was in Speech. The freshmen group did "Dance Dance Evolution" ....they dressed as The Village People. It was a little history of dance. I FINALLY had the pictures developed. Now everyone can see the outfit Chris was wearing. These two were the Navy. We have Jackie and Jesse to thank for it!!! It was a lot of fun watching them compete. This was in Decorah and still lots of snow on the ground.

We had tried some geocaching, but to much snow. We had a find rate of about 20%. WAY TO MUCH SNOW. We did find this old church. It was abandoned years and years ago. The congregation joined up with another church in the nearby town. Wish I had the details. We only had to read the plaque and answer questions to make the find...so it was easy to get this one done!. Kinda cool.

Then dear Chris bought a drum set. Two boxes arrived, two BIG boxes. When they were opened there were more boxes, smaller boxes with tons of little pieces, all over the livingroom.........and..........NO DIRECTIONS.....What to do??? We moved everything downstairs in front of the computer to find some online instructions. That wasn't enough.... we called Aunt Jenny who said she had put together drums and "it was easy"

WELL, if she could do it then Chris knew he could. Friends trickled in as word spread..."the drums were here" and after a couple hours of group effort they had the set together.

Sometimes I can't even hear myself think.

Hearts

I will be seeing my Mom next weekend for her birthday.

She will be getting a small wall quilt.

I made some simple hearts .....and......

some letters to spell LOVE

The hearts are two rectangles, with the background fabric in the middle. I ended up with something of a square shape. Next I sewed the triangles on the 4 edges...kinda like a square in a square block...

I have been so inspired by these letters. I fell in love with them......There is so much you can

do with them. I found them at............

http://quiltville.com/tonya/alphabet1.shtml/

Mom isn't hooked up to the internet so she won't see this, unless one of my sisters shows her. But even then it's just a sampling of what is in the quilt.

Hopefully I'll get a picture of the whole thing next weekend.

dear dear brother-in-law

I am surrounded by people with technology. Tractor joe's brother had his cell phone along last night.

We had decided to grill for Mother's Day at their Mom and Dad's house.

So my dear dear brother-in-law agreed to go take pictures (with his cell phone) of the grilling. He did kinda look at me funny, but he does that on a regular basis anyway.... The master grillers were hard at work.

We had hamburgers, brats and hotdogs. There was potato salad, strawberries, fruitsalad, potatochips......and we were worried we didn't have enough food!

....and don't forget the asparagus wrapped in bacon....OMG was that good. I see on my plate there is also a deviled egg. We had plenty to eat!!! The grillers did an excellent job!

So thank you dear dear brother-in-law for the photo's, and a post that doesn't make you use your imagination.

FFA quilt

I remembered a wall quilt I did last summer. I was just going to make some letters and send them to California for Gwen to use....Lauren was in the FFA, (yea we were all surprised) ...anyway...

I thought...

but wait I have a bunch of scrappy little 3" ninepatches....

and she talked of getting up at dawn so Lauren could feed the sheep....

I had some paperpieced blocks that kinda looked like a sun rising....

and surely I had some sheep pattern somewhere....

and before I knew it, a small wall quilt was born.

I was showing it to Chris and a friend of his..."look what I made for Lauren, she's is in FFA in California and is raising a sheep."

The friend says,"They have sheep in California?!"

He was really surprised, I knew I had to put that on there too.

Other news....apparently I didn't sweep that well, I found a piece of broken bowl this morning.

Tractor joe had to go to Montana. He had started mowing before it started raining yesterday...so that is what I worked on, finishing that up.
I broke a bowl...shattered all over the kitchen. Well that was as good a reason as any to finally sweep. Sometimes a broken bowl can be a good thing.

Well this is it

This is a new adventure for me. I was going to wait until I had a digital camera. Who knows when that would be...so here is the beginning of a "use your imagination" blog. As I get film developed, and that could take weeks or even months, I will post the occasional picture.