Soon to be a "birthday girl".....

Our youngest grandchild will be 8 tomorrow. Where does the time fly?  These are some of the photos taken recently of her by a photographer friend of my daughter.  (If any of you live in the south Jersey area....suburb to Philadelphia and would like someone to take special pictures for you, let me know and I will put you in touch with this gal. She does a terrific job and has a dynamite personality, too.)
By the time of the last of several photos, Jessi had enough......put her mom's sunglasses on and showed some "attitude" and the photographer realized that was a great photo opportunity, also!  I agree....don't you?   LOL

MEMORIAL.....

Memorial Day is a day in MEMORIAM of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for us!  BBQ's are nice, but please always remember the reason for this special holiday......and pray that they have not died in vain.   Thank you, also, to all the family members who gave their brave young men and women for the freedoms we treasure in this great country of ours!

WOW...2 posts in one morning here!

I have finally gotten around to reading blogs and see that the Bloggers' Quilt Festival is occurring now.  I didn't want to miss out, so here comes post # 2 for today!   Some of you have seen this quilt.  It is a simple design....just squares on point....but it has a lot of meaning for me.  I made it for my daughter this past Christmas. She had been going through some tough times after getting out of an abusive marriage. She and her daughter were living in one rented room in a friends' house and I wanted to give her a gift from the heart for Christmas so she could wrap herself in my love during the times she was feeling sad.  She has always loved salad and many times we'd take her out to eat and all she would want to order was salad. SO...I spent some time seriously collecting veggie prints and made her a quilt I called "I Just Want Salad".  Jackie, a quilting friend with a long-arm, did a wonderful job of custom-quilting it for me and I was very pleased with how it turned out.  You can see she was pleased with it, too, as she was reading its name on the label.  (The second photo is of the quilt before quilting and binding...so you can see the full design more clearly.  Now go click HERE to see the other quilts in the Festival.http://amyscreativeside.com/2012/05/18/bloggers-quilt-festival-spring-2012/

Thanks......

Thanks to those of you who had a chance to look at the photos in the contest and vote for my husband's (see previous post if you don't know what I"m talking about).  We still haven't had any official word on the results but if numbers are any indication, it looks as if he is the winner.

Not much sewing-related stuff here.....kind of been in a sewing "funk" but am cutting up scraps with my GO! cutter and putting them into baggies to make the random blocks I find such fun to do.  I will be getting 3 new dies on Monday.....WOO-HOO!!! I can't wait......two of them are additional QuarterSquareTriangle dies (which I love the one I already have and am thrilled to be getting them in other sizes now....thanks, AccuQuilt for listening about that)!!!  I think the sewing funk will end soon!

I have been trying to learn more about EQ7....specifically, how to design a quilt top with blocks in mixed sizes.  I am not catching on too quickly with this, so if any of you have some good suggestions, let me know! I have so many ideas in my head and want to be able to get them "on paper" with EQ!

On Mother's Day weekend, my daughter and granddaughter made a quick overnight surprise trip here...showed up at 8:45 on Friday night and stayed until Saturday afternoon.  It was fun...we did breakfast out at a restaurant on the bay and then lunch at a restaurant in downtown Lewes on the canal. The weather was gorgeous and it was a very nice time looking around the little shops there!  This is a picture of my granddaughter at breakfast. She selected chocolate chip pancakes for her meal.

This is a picture of the 3 of us taken just before they left to head back home.   (Gosh......I hate seeing myself in photos....do most of you feel the same way when you see photos of yourself??  *sigh*)

The other big excitement around here is that we have been watching a robin's nest that was built in a large bush right outside our living room window. We can actually sit on the sofa and watch the activity there.  On the Friday of Mother's Day weekend, the first 3 eggs hatched and the 4th hatched the following morning.  It is amazing to watch all the feeding and nest "cleaning" that is done by the parents....about every 10 minutes. The babies change in size so quickly.  I understand they will leave the nest at about 12 days but won't yet be flying.  I don't see how they will FIT in the nest for many more days....and every time they squirm around, I fear one of them is going to fall to the ground.   Here is a photo of one of the parents watching us as we watch the nest!  This was taken 3 days ago and the babies have lots more feathers now and are even flapping their wings around in the nest.  They aren't very "cute" yet.......but I'm sure they will look better once they are out of the nest and acting like birds instead of hungry little piggies that eat every 10 minutes!

Need a favor....

I need a favor that has to be done quickly.  My hubby has a photo of 4 Amish girls at the beach here in Delaware that is in contention for a contest right now.  If he wins, it will be placed in a collectors' edition of Delaware Beach Life magazine that is due out soon.  If you click HERE, you should be taken to the picture and then all you need to do is click "LIKE" for your vote to be counted.  Thanks!!!   When he took this photo, we found it amusing that the girls had their shoes lined up neatly since our kids and grandkids throw their shoes all over the place when they arrive at the beach. This photo was a runner-up in an annual contest the magazine had in 2010, but now it is contention for their 10-year "best of the decade" edition!  We are excited about this and appreciate all the votes we can get. (NOTE:  Since this voting is being conducted on Facebook, I believe only those who have a Facebook page themselves are able to vote.)

Back to vacation photos.....

Okay....back to some vacation photos.  Quilty things have taken place but I want to go through more of the vacation photos in the next few posts instead. Sorry for the interruptions in that.   The photos today were all taken at a really pretty place in Sarasota, Florida......Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.  I am not going to write captions for them, but just let me tell you that their display of orchids and tropical plants is amazing and there are many other beautiful things to see there.  It is right on the bay and there are benches to just sit and enjoy the atmosphere. The day we were there, they were setting up for a wedding that was to take place later that afternoon....what a location for it!  (I'm sure it costs a bundle to have a wedding there, but.......it sure would be dreamlike...as long as the weather was nice, of course!)  So......here are some of my favorite photos from that day.  I think you should be able to click on them to enlarge them...and maybe even click a second time to have them show up GIGANTIC sized.  I have about 200 photos from there, but I restrained myself from showing all of them!!!  We really enjoyed the time we spent at this pretty place and I hope I captured the peacefulness of the gardens for you. I have no clue why Blogger is putting a big space after this written part and before the rest of the photos...sorry about that...just scroll down to look at the rest of the pictures.

Where do I begin?

In my last post, I told you I was taking a break from posting about my vacation while I had my granddaughter here for part of her Easter break....and I showed you a wall-hanging she was very happily making with me for her room. We finished it and it is hanging on her bedroom wall now...and we had a few fun days of baking and going to the movies and all that fun "grandma" stuff.  But....I still can't get my head back into posting about my vacation and here is why.....

The day before we took Jessi home, a 32-year-old neighbor of theirs (who was a doctor) was shot and killed in the parking lot of their complex.  This is a very nice apartment complex in a very nice area of Voorhees, NJ.  (The news media actually described it as an upscale area.)  It turns out the killer was another doctor who held a grudge against this neighbor.....believing the neighbor had caused him to be dismissed from a medical residency program.  Of course, that isn't true.....the murderer wasn't doing well in that program, but he was looking for someone to blame...and this unlucky doctor was "it".  (Additionally, it turns out the shooter also murdered his girlfriend in NC a few days earlier.)   As you can imagine, this was all very upsetting to anyone even remotely acquainted with the man who was murdered and it is very sad that he left a young widow and an 18-month old child.  If there was any luck at all that day, it was that the neighbors were quick to react and got a description of the shooter's vehicle and a license plate number.  He was caught a mile away from the scene and....when the police approached the car and told him to get out, he took that same gun and turned it on himself and he died a short time later in the emergency room of the very hospital from which he had been dismissed as a resident.

When we took Jessi home and watched her the next day while her mom was at work, we witnessed the raw and heartbreaking grief of the young widow as she stood in that parking lot and sobbed and cried as her family was overseeing a moving company remove her furnishings from the home so she could go elsewhere and get away from a place that will forever hold such painful memories for her...and as family and friends set up a flower memorial in the parking space in which that young doctor was murdered.  At my age, I have witnessed many grieving people...but this was the first time I was exposed to the grief of someone who lost a loved one in such a violent (and premeditated) way.....and it was absolutely bone-chilling.  I am still trying to grapple with it all in my mind.  To compound this is the fact that my daughter had walked to her car to leave for work at the very moment the killer was sitting in that parking lot waiting to commit that murder of her neighbor.....and I realize if the timing had been different, my daughter could have become an innocent victim of this crime.  I also realize how....in one instant....so many lives can be changed forever.

So...please excuse this post for not having any pictures...and please excuse me for needing a bit more time to get back to talking about my happy vacation.  I can't quite do much with "happy" right at this time.