Volcano Quilt Retreat

This past week was my annual quilt retreat at Volcano. As you can see, we had an evening with clear enough skies to see the glow at Halemaumau Crater at the top of Kilauea volcano. The glow is from a large hole in the floor of the crater that is open to a lava lake. You can see the wall of the crater behind the glow in the pictures. The plume is what blows over to Kona every day to create our "vog."

One of the things we did at our retreat was to sandwich and baste Mom's quilt top. There is a billiard table in the conference room we use that has a wooden top. It makes a great place to lay out a large quilt. But, as you can see, someone (moi in this case) has to get up on the table to do the stitching in the center of the quilt.

Rain, rain, more rain and flooding too

Julia told you about the snow. I will tell you about the rain and the floods. The rain rain rain came down down down. The fire station in Turner, where Daniel is a volunteer firefighter, was under water. They had to evacuate the whole town. Salem closed numerous streets because they had become rivers. I'm sure if you go online you can find more pictures and info. The water is receding but more rain is coming. Willamette Falls is officially at flood stage. Fortunately, the Molalla River and Johnson Creek have not reached flood level. We are not in danger but parts of Canby do flood when we get rains like this. Pat's Acres, where Amelia operated the Pineapple Express this summer, is now part of the Pudding River. I drove by it on my way home from work and it's a flowing river. We'll see what happens.

Here's the Turner Fire Station yesterday:

Snow Daze

I'm late getting this up as the snow is melted. But it did snow off and on for 5 days. Clark put some stickers on my window including this one so I got it in the picture. Nothing was interrupted for us as the snow was slight and it rained off and on too which took care of that. Big flakes falling are a nice sight though.

Tea for Three

The three of us just got home from a lovely tea in Niles and we're stuffed! I had ginger peach tea, Franny had apricot and Mom had some of the Earl Grey. Wish you'd been here! I leave very early tomorrow morning and will be home in Kona a little after noon Pacific coast time. Fortunately packing will be easy since I'm carrying two bags back. Mom needed an extra one coming home for all her Christmas presents and acquisitions in Kona. - Jeanie

Rummy Tournament Practice

We decided to practice preparing munchies for an afternoon of rummy. This is the third game we've had time to play and we're hoping for at least one more before I go. We chose to have healthy veg, cheese and crackers in preparation for pigging out at La Casita tonight. By the way, the Franny Convention (FC) has been in full force although one of the times Rick exercised it. Mom started out scoring the first game in hopes of exercising the FC but partway through she turned her scoring responsibilities over to Franny and you KNOW what happened! We will leave it unmentioned that I have won no games. -Jeanie

Yosemite Quilt

Jim Augustus, who was Bob's best man at our wedding had requested that I make a quilt for him to hang over his fireplace. His request was that it be in greens and browns. Since Jim has worked for years at the steam train near Yosemite I decided to use that as inspiration. The quilt is 42"x105" and depicts Yosemite Falls. I created it out of hexagonal blocks all cut from the same fabric and then rearranged to make the picture. Jim and Nichole had shown it off at their Christmas open house party but it didn't really hang right. So I went over on Sunday, sewed a second sleeve on the bottom and slid a piece of rebar into it to weight the quilt enough so that it hangs much straighter. Thanks to Cindy's advice, I also pinned it in a few places to the wallboard behind it. On that same day, Jim and Nichole adopted a neighbor's dog because the neighbor had passed away. They were already well acquainted with Miss Kitty and very fond of her. You can see she's an old dog, maybe 12 or 14, but she has a sweet disposition. She's acquainted with Jim and Nichole's cat, another Miss Kitty, and they got along just fine on her first day in the house. I took a little photo to mark the occasion of the dog's new home. - Jeanie

A "New" Quilt

Mom has discovered an appliqued quilt top that she made "back in the day." The applique is embroidered with some chain stitch, French knots and satin stitch.
So we went to the quilt store (an excellent excuse for it) and found a beautiful backing fabric with a rose design that will compliment the applique on the front. You can see it folded at one corner of the quilt top in the picture.
The really exciting discovery was that the stencil for the quilting is still on the fabric. It's faint (too faint to photograph) but it's plenty adequate to quilt by.
So, I'm taking the quilt to Hawaii and will ask my quilting buddies to help me sandwich and baste it while we're at our Volcano retreat in February.
This will be a loooong process but I'm looking forward to doing it. As you can see, it would go very well in Mom's bedroom and fits her queen size bed perfectly. So that's the goal. -Jeanie