Rest Easy, Sweet Spirit

My very dear friend Sue died somewhat unexpectedly in early September.  She lived in Florida, and in the last couple of years I hadn't seen her much.  We did talk on the phone, but it had gotten more infrequent because I was busy and distracted, and she had been busy helping her mother quite a bit, until she finally put her foot down and told her mother she could not continue to be at her house all day, every day, that she just didn't have the strength or stamina for it.  Sue was quite a bit older than me, only 15 months younger than my mother.  We met in the early 1990s when we both worked at the same hospital on night shift.  She was a nurse in the cardiac Critical Care unit, and I worked in the laboratory as a Medical Technologist.  We didn't have a phlebotomist at night, so I had to go to the floors and collect blood samples myself.  That was how we first met, and we eventually got talking, and hit it off.  I don't know if I've ever had a best friend as an adult, but if I have, Sue was it.  Even though we had been in contact less frequently recently, we could always just pick up right where we left off, and it was always comfortable.  She was the one person I could always be completely myself with, and know that it was okay.  And she could do the same with me.

About a week before Sue died, I had started knitting this hat for my DH.  It's in a lovely bright turquoise.





Sue loved cool colors, and was especially fond of turquoise, teal-y greens, and purples.  So after I learned of Sue's death, I renamed my project of this hat "Sue would have loved this color."  Does that seem a bit macabre?  Well, she was friends with my DH too, though more my friend -- still, he feels her loss also.  He didn't mind me naming it that, so I did.  As I worked on the hat, after I knew of her death, I was thinking a lot about her and all she'd meant to me.  So it was a healing project, to some extent.  So many times in the last few weeks, there have been things I've wanted to tell Sue, and I'll catch myself saying "oh, I've gotta call and tell her..."  And then I remember.  And I miss her all the more.




~~~Susan Jane Becker, 9 January 1946 - 8 September 2012.  Rest Easy, Sweet Spirit.  You are loved and missed.~~~


Thanks for letting me share a little (mostly "non-crafty") piece of life.
 

Super Quilt Seminar

While I was in Florida, my friend Sue and I attended the Ricky Tims Super Quilt Seminar in Jacksonville, January 13-15. I didn't really know what to expect, all we knew was that it was 2-1/2 days of lectures and demos, with a big screen so everyone could see the demos.


Ricky talked about his Caveman quilts
























And his Harmonic Convergence quilts


























And his Rhapsody quilts













and a lot more I'm sure I've forgotten about, or don't have pictures for. We didn't really know what to expect, or how we were going to feel about it, but it was magical and amazing. If you have the opportunity to attend one, you should go!


Libby Lehman and Alex Anderson also presented at the seminar. I'll show some of their quilts in upcoming posts, and tell more about the seminar as well.


For now, I'm going to go sew something. Thanks for coming by to play. Come back again any time.

A Long-awaited Finish!

I can't remember exactly when I started these placemats. I know I got a kit from an online store for the green ones, which are completely "me," but I had enough of the applique fabrics to make another set. My friend Sue loves snowmen, and blue, so it was obvious I needed to pull some blue fabrics from my stash, and make her the other set. I got the two fabrics sewn together and the appliques fused down very soon after the kit arrived. I did the blanket stitching at a retreat some time later, which must have been in 2004 or 2005. And since then, they've been languishing. Now, here they are -- most of the set of four of the blue (you can only see the top part of the last one):






















One blue one close up:



















And one of my green set close up (there are three more just like it):


















The colors aren't great in these pictures -- the blues are a nice royal kind of blue, and the green homespun stripe and plaid in my set are a lovely hunter green color. I'd originally intended to quilt swirls and snowflakes all over these, but I decided if I finished them more simply, they'd be done, and if I waited until I felt like quilting them with swirls and snowflakes, it might be more years until they got finished. So I just did some channel quilting. I'd hoped to finish these before I went to Florida to visit Sue, or at least while I was there, but neither of those things happened. So now I'll have to entrust them to the USPS to get them to Sue. But it's still snowman season, so we can both use these for a while before it's time to break out Spring things.


I'm pretty pleased with how these have turned out. But the biggest thing is that they're done and no longer languishing on my shelves. Now I'm going to go sew something else.


Thanks for coming by to play. Come back any time.

Yarn Love Delivered

The Annual Cherry Tree Hill January Sale is over. While it was going on, though, I admit that I succumbed to some SEX (Stash Enhancement eXperience, for the uninitiated ;-) Except that if sock yarn doesn't count as stash, then my stash hasn't been enhanced at all. Not even a little.

Yesterday the kindly man in brown (UPS driver) brought me this:

And I had to just leave it like this in the box, because I'm on my way to visit my friend Sue in Florida. But just think of the fun I'll have when I get home! Look at all the amazing colors in there. I can't wait to dive in and play.

I'll check in when I get to Sue's, and maybe introduce you. Thanks for coming by to play. Stop back again soon.

Design Wall Monday

I'm back! I was in Florida visiting my friend Sue, and we went to the Ricky Tims Super Quilt Seminar in Jacksonville the weekend before last. Then I was in Ohio, checking on our house there. While there, I put together blocks from my last Design Wall Monday post (two weeks ago):

They're ready to sew together, now that I've decided I'm not going to sash them. As I was making the blocks, I thought I would, until I saw just how nicely they play when set block-to-block. The photo's sideways, but you can still get the idea. I need to figure out what I want to do for borders, and get this top finished up.

Today I hope to finish up a little something that I've been planning to finish for some time now. Pictures tomorrow, I hope! Some photos soon from the Ricky Tims seminar, too.

Thanks for coming by to play. Come back again soon.