NEW'BEE Block for April

I enjoyed creating the lime green made fabric, and the hot pink made fabric - this is my bee block for April (over at 15 Minutes Play). The resulting block is on its way to my bee buddy, Janet, in Yukon Territory, Canada!

Ochre Color Challenge

Victoria, over at 15 Minutes Play, has been issuing a weekly color challenge. Here is just a selection of my ochre fabrics - I have lots of ochre! Our COUCH is ochre!

I found lots of fun fabrics to mix with the ochres - lots of them pretty old!

Finished ochre block - this block turned out pretty busy, but I learned that lots of colors do mix well with ochre.

New Garden Beds

Last summer, we pulled out ALL of the old, tired evergreen hedges in front of our 1950 house. They have probably been there the entire time - and the roots were bothering my plumbing. So - they had to go!!!

Pretty new iris from dear friend Peggy - although not blooming yet, the leaves are so pretty alongisde my tulips. Lots of buds on my clematis (on the gaslight post).

This shows both side of the front sidewalk - all the plantings are coming in nicely, though it still needs some tweaking. The three spirea plants next to the porch are looking good.

Love the pansies for spring! The little plants nearer the house will be tall oat grass, and the taller plant in the back is an oakleaf hydrangea. After a few years, it will be much larger. We love hydrangeas!

Easter weekend

It was a beautiful weekend here, in more ways than one! The weather was glorious, high 60s and sunny. On Friday, after dropping Scott at Midway Airport (for a quick trip to Minnesota to visit his mom), I drove to Chicago. First I got to visit daughter Emily, then Gen dropped over too.

Then Gen and I have an adventure! We drove to the Wicker Park area of Chicago, on Milwaukee Avenue. She showed me a couple of great stores for clothes - we had lots of fun shopping! So many great colorful clothes out there now! And then we went out for tapas at People, a great little bar/restaurant in the neighborhood. Fun fun fun!

I was going to make lemon meringue pie for Easter dessert - but found that I had no Crisco for the crust. So, lemon pie became lemon cupcakes instead. And lemon cupcakes became LEMON PEEPCAKES! How cute are these? (They were delicious, too! I found the recipe here.

Mad about Mauve?

My friend, Victoria, over at 15 Minutes Play, gave us all a challenge - to create a block using mauve - probably not a favorite among today's quilters!

I used to have plenty of mauve - I've been quilting quite a while! But all I could find were these:

The center piece is actually mauve, while the batiks on the left and right have some mauve in them.

Then I chose fabrics which were lighter and darker tones of mauve, pinks down to deeper purples, and then added some blue and orange, colors in one of the prints.

Finished product! I made a Scrappy X block, seen previously on the 15 Minutes blog - made fabric for the main piece, sliced into 4 triangles, and X'd with deep purple, and a dot of mauve in the center. Victoria plans to issue one color challenge a week for 12 weeks. I wasn't going to "play" - but it looked like too much fun not to!

Hannah's Junior Recital

Hannah is a music major at North Central College, and is required to present both a Junior and a Senior Recital, as part of her graduation requirement. Hannah presented her Junior recital yesterday, in a shared program with a soprano, Amanda Aguayo, accompanied by Barbara Vanderwall. We are so proud of Hannah!!!

Of course, Hannah's sisters were there - Emily and Genevieve!

And her mother couldn't be prouder - or love her more. Hannah, you stole the show!

Talented, and beautiful - that's my Hannah!

Dinner at Hub 51

Genevieve treated us to dinner at Hub 51 this past week - fun fun fun!

Emily and Hannah - cuties!

And obviously very excited about their dinner! The food was amazing!

Gen and me - we are soooooooooo glad that Gen became part of our family, almost 7 years ago - one of the best things to ever happen to our family. We love you Gen!