Cohie Boy

This darling puppy is now almost 4 years old, and lives with us. His name is Cohen, and he is actually belongs to our daughter, Emily - but due to his incessant barking whenever she would leave the apartment, he has lived with us for the past year.

Emily adopted him from the local Brew Beagle Rescue group, as Cohen is part Beagle.

LOTS of dogs are part Beagle.

Isn't he precious? Doesn't he look like he'd be no trouble at all?

Looks can be deceiving! Sometimes, I call him "Mr T" - as in, Mr Trouble, or Mr Tinkles. Although, he is much better on the second thing now!

Cohen is obviously part Beagle - just take a look at his pretty, pretty coat.

Yes, he IS pretty - even though he is a boy. Pretty boy!

But he is also part JACK RUSSEL TERRIER. Have you heard of this breed? SUPER high energy, SUPER high intelligence - which means he is very smart about finding ways to get into trouble. Hence the Mr Trouble part.

He has been known to get UP ON TOP OF THE DINING ROOM TABLE, if something up there is very interesting. Once, he dug in a potted poinsettia. Thankfully, he didn't eat the plant.

Recently, Scott left a partially eaten pizza on the table while walking Dora (our other dog). The pizza was GONE when he got back into the house. Also thankfully, Cohen suffered no ill effects.

This IS Cohen - a fun, free-spirited doggie. Yes, trouble sometimes - but he is so sweet, and charming, and we love him to bits.

Concert May 6!!!

This is the FUMC 4 - a GREAT men's quartet from my church, Downers Grove First United Methodist Church (FUMC, get it?).  Left to right - Ward Feste, Mark Kostelny, my husband Scott, and Brett Goad. They are great guys, one an all, and their music is TOPS!

Come out and support a good cause - and hear a great concert! They rock!

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!