summer catch up.....

My temperature quilt from 2016 and finished this year for the quilt show. I was picked for the featured quilter! Wow! What to bring? Mike Ellingsen makes a smile box slide show of all the quilts in the special exhibits. There are always a ton more quilts to see at the show!
I'll share the links.

smilebox of Wonderful watermelon fabric challenge

smilebox of my quilts

smilebox of Block Exchange and Navajo Code Talkers

During the show, I sat and made letters. I just about finished the whole alphabet. W is missing yet. I'm thinking an alphabet baby quilt right now.

I met my first blogging friend, in person, at the show! Carol came down from the cities to see the show.

Do we look nervous! We were! While we have communicated for years....we always had the computers between us!

Here is the link to her post about it.... giraffedreams.blogspotl

A HUGE part of the summer was taken up with babysitting Luke and once in awhile Zander came too. 

Luke

Zander

School starts this week. Back to work. What a drag.

It's finally spring!

I'm going to take some time this morning and post some pictures. I'll start with newest.

This is the first monkey. I will be making another one soon. I have it all cut out and ready to go. April here was still winter. It snowed a lot. Every week or so we had snow.
It looked like this quite often....

Every time it snowed we thought
THIS snow is the LAST snow
but NO!
And it did give me lots of opportunity to sew.
The grass is just starting to turn green and a few of the trees have buds.

Back to the monkeys....I wanted to make Zander one way last year and never got started. Then Luke was born in March. When the other grandma was here visiting, she kept calling the boys chunky monkey and hunky monkey. This was a sign that I needed to get started on the monkeys!

The quilt shop in Forest City is doing a 20 for 20 to celebrate 20 years in business.

Bring in unfinished projects to put on your list and get a 20% coupon when you finish. If you get 20 done, your name will go in a drawing at the end of the year.

I have a stack of 5 quilts that need binding. Most of them are pictured in older posts from last summer. I went to a storage crate and found tons of unfinished things or blocks that had no home yets

This was a kit. Finished and given away to a teacher at school.

Extra blocks from Block Lotto, done a long time ago and I decided it was enough for a baby quilt.

Finished and mailed off!

A collection of batik blocks turned into a table runner and given to a friend who is turning 60.

There were other smaller projects, but I gave them away so fast after getting them checked off my list that I never took any pictures.

The block exchange blocks this year.

Red White and Blue....

I'm using them as a border. Texas is going in the center.

I have no idea if there is pattern for this. I used a picture to create it.

The Navajo Code Talkers quilt. 

I am not sure how it got its name, as I didn't really see anything Navajo in it.

I didn't even like all the blocks from the pattern, so I changed some to my own blocks that are based on Indian symbols. And while looking for ideas, I found out it wasn't just the Navajo. There were many North American tribes doing the code talking.

Pretty cool.

All the blocks are done now. They make a pretty pile.

But I won't be sewing them together today....

It's really too nice outside to stay inside. We waited a long time for nice weather. So I want to go out and enjoy it!

One more thing....our new back door did its work and held out the cold. Some might say we jinxed it and we ended up with a longer winter. Maybe, I don't know!