Cheddar and Sweet Potatoes

I think the last post ended with this pile of t-shirt scraps.  Well, after I counted and wrote my invoices it turned out to be the remains of 151 t-shirts.  Yeesh!  Our outdoor trash can was so full this week it couldn't quite close.

Adding to the drama down at the Other House, we got a message from a neighbor early in the week that someone had smacked into our mailbox.  Sigh.

Fixable though.  Gotta look on the bright side!

So now we are back to normal outside and talking to contractors about the repairs on the inside.  Please tell me nothing else is going to go wrong!!

The weather has been bright but cold.  The magnolia trees were in beautiful bloom until it got down to 26F a couple of nights ago.  So overnight the trees went from pink to brown.  :-(  This is the one we can see from our back windows.  All brown.  Such a shame.

The bradford pear trees around the pond are holding on, but like everything else they look a little sparse to me this year.

Thursday night was guild meeting and we had a wonderful lecture by Pepper Cory.  She is very knowledgeable, articulate, talented and a complete hoot.  The lecture was on the history of Amish quilts.  Fascinating.  And she had several beautiful antique quilts to share with us.

I had signed up for Pepper's Saturday workshop so spent Friday evening getting packed up for class.  We put on Rocky Horror Picture Show to keep us company and The Tramp entertained me singing along and sharing tidbits of information about the movie.  Fun!

Now it's DST it meant I was up before dawn this morning so I wouldn't be late!  Behold the pond at 6:48 am EDT.  The birds weren't even up.

The workshop is called Sweet Potato Quilts.  Pepper has a love of orange, gold and yellow in quilts....not my usual color palette.  This is the inspiration Carolina antique quilt from Pepper's collection.

One block.

The Bernina Record got it's first workshop experience.  :-)

No pink or purple here!  I decided to go out (way out!) of my comfort zone and honor the sweet potato theme.  So my background fabrics are bright cheddar and brown.  Some other time I'll explore the question why certain shades of orange are named after a white cheese.  Why aren't they called annatto orange??  Can you tell I live in a household with a cheddar culture clash?  The Tramp doesn't understand what he calls "neon" cheddar and in turn I don't understand the New Zealand penchant for cheddar on pizza and in lasagna etc....no matter what color it is.

I didn't finish sewing the block (18") together into a star.  I think I'd rather make a bunch more and then have fun shifting them around on my design wall to get the most pleasing arrangement.

This is a version of the quilt (note the checkerboard effect in this one) made by Pepper.  She pointed out to us how the lavender in the start points ended up disappearing into the grey background.  Live and learn!

Here are blocks some of the other gals finished.  There were more I didn't get a photo of.  The diversity was amazing, yet Pepper pointed out how well they would all go together in a scrappy raffle quilt.  Kinda cool.

It was a good day.  This evening we had a chat with our neighbor who does astrophotography.  We turned off our outside lights and shrouded The Sandbox window with blankets in an attempt to not disrupt his view of the night sky.  He was very pleased with our backyard tree removal as it allows him a better view from his backyard as the streetlight makes things difficult out in front.  We aim to please!  :-)

Now I'm going to take my migrainy head to bed.  Goodnight.