more piecing

Yesterday was some piecing of tops. I justify it, saying that I'm just trying to clean up a little bit. You see, I had cut these out about 3 weeks ago and they were sitting on the kitchen table so they needed to be sewn together instead of just put into a plastic baggie and forgotten about. This pattern is called Barney's Blocks. It's from the book Even More Baby Quilts by Ursula Reikes and I checked it out from the library. It is going on my Christmas list because there are about 7 or 8 really easy nice patterns in there that are nice looking. I wrote them out and am going to try them all. I made two the same because I had just cut and cut fabric without really measuring or counting how much and then just made blocks until I had enough for two quilts. I have one block left over. People call those orpahan blocks. I'll start an orphan block pile and when I get enough, I'll make an orphan block quilt. Those are pretty cute too.

I am also working on the Not so Top Secret Project and am almost done. Today I just have to sew the 7 strips together and put the border around it. That one takes a long time to do, but looks so great. I have one more cut out. I like having one of those going to work on while I work on other projects because it takes so long to do in one sitting. The first one took me about 5 hours of sewing time.

There was one more winner in the fair, that I didn't mention yesterday. That was Ariel. She entered 4 poems in the adult poetry contest since she is 18 now. Turns out, she could have entered as a youth one more time, since she was still 17 in January, but we didn't know that. She won 3rd place for her poem about a dead oak tree. She wrote it on the way back from visiting Redlands College this last summer, right before she found out she won the Buck Scholarship. I'll have to ask her if I can publish it here for you to read. It is really good.

As I was picking up her poems, the lady who had won best of show for the poems was there picking up her poems. She asked me if I was a poet. When I told her that my daughter was the writer, she had many kind words for her and said to keep encouraging her to write when the mood strikes and eventhough she might want to be a novelist, to keep writing poetry. I thought that was very sweet.