Best Wishes, Yvonne!

When my daughter's second grade teacher announced at the beginning of the school year that she would be retiring in June, I knew I wanted to do something special for her. After doing all the sewing for 14 people for my September wedding, I needed to take a break from sewing for a few months. Unfortunately, I'm also an accountant, so my 1-2 month break turned into almost 6, and then suddenly the end of the school year was right around the corner.

Fortunately, one of the other moms had done a craft project with the class, and I was able to get the self portraits that all the children had done, and using t-shirt transfers and my ink jet printer, I turned them into quilt blocks. My daughter picked out the fabrics, and off I went! I did a simple sashing around the blocks, and the finished piece was machine quilted in the ditch.

As you can imagine, she was surprised and absolutely stunned. I know that she'll remember this class for many years to come.

New (to me) Quilting Resource Site!

I was recently contacted by Connie of Quilt Qua about being added to her directory of Etsy merchants and quilting blogs. She has compiled quite the collection of quilt related links and resources, and she is still adding to it. There are links for blogs, fabric shops, 'missing fabric' resources (for when you need just one more yard to finish that project, but its been discontinued), guilds, supplies, giveaways, you name it!

From her website:

And welcome to Quilt Qua (definition of qua: In the character of or capacity of). I invite you to enjoy the web site. There are many resources to explore, avenues to advertise your business, and articles to read.

Win: 1 Frosted Memories Fat Quarter Bundle by Holly Taylor for Moda Fabrics !
To enter simply "tell a friend" to spread the word about Quilt Qua. You can send an e-mail to people, post on your blog, comment on someone else's blog, put info in your guild newsletter, etc. Then send an e-mail to: quiltqua@gmail.com and let me know what you did. Enter as often as you wish. Random drawing for the winner will be at 10 pm July 31st.
Check it out! I'm sure to spend more than a few hours poking around her site.

To err is human...

But when you really foul things up, it usually involves a PC.

I installed a new hard drive in my machine, and in the process of getting it set up, managed to screw up the old hard drive. I was able to run a data recovery tool, but I have to go through each file by hand over the next few weeks to figure out what is worth keeping and what is junk.

Which means that I lost all of my photos from the past 7 years, at least until I can locate my photo archive disk, and then I will have only lost a year's worth of photos.

Unfortunately, that's quite a few photos. I was worried the old drive was ready to die, which is why I bought the new drive. Of course, it was user error that caused this to happen, and I have no one to be mad at but myself, which, I suppose, is better than being ticked off at my darling husband.

Here is a photo, however, from my LiveJournal blog, CattailsQuilts. This is Blue Danube, a bargello wall-hanging quilt in blues & whites that was sold through my Etsy shop.

From Cattails Quilts

I am quite happy with how this turned out. It was the first time I ever attempted a bargello, and I will admit, I was concerned about my seams lining up, but they all came out perfect!