Grab Bag Challenge from 2006

Gary had his surgery a week ago yesterday. I'm exhausted. Everything went well, although there was more infection than the Dr's thought so he will need more surgieries than they thought. We are looking at 2-3 months if everything goes well. Last week, I would work 8 hours (work for me starts at 5:30 am), travel to the hospital (1 hour one way) see Gary and then come home eat dinner and go to bed to start it all over again. Gary came home on Monday and I am still trying to catch up on rest.

I don't have anything new to show but I don't think I ever showed this piece that I made for the 2006 Grab Bag Challenge, hosted by Tomme Fent. I really enjoyed making this piece and it was really hard to send it back to the owner.

For this challenge, we put together fabric and embellishments that would fit in a priority mail envelope and then we each recieved someone elses "stuff". With this "stuff" we needed to make a quilt. We could add some of our own to it.

I never would have picked the black background on my own but it was one of the biggest pieces and I was trying to use as much as I could from the envelope. There was some shiny sheer fabric that I use as a cloth for the vase to sit on. I love how that came out.

Close-up of the flowers

I added random cross stitches on the batik borders. Included in the bag was some shiny bluish black thread which I used for quilting in the black. I used big running stitches.

For the vase, I fused small strips of fabric together and overlayed them with some sort of purple sheer. It reminded me of a dryer sheet but slight different and it was bigger. This purple sheer helped to go with the batik border. I cut out gold leaves from another sheer fabric and sewed them to the top.

For the center of the flowers, I took all the scraps of orange, red and gold pieces and cut them up, added pieces of thread that was included in the bag and covered them with netting and quilted them down. There were also some beads that I used on the leaves.

I was trying to use as much stuff as I could from the bag. But I kept wondering if I was just adding some things just to use it or if it really added something to the quilt. We had to use a certain percentage of stuff from the bag, I forget what it was. I finally decided enough was enough and stopped here. My daughter thought it was one of my best pieces and wished we could keep it.

Out of 80 some quilts, 41 were chosen for a travelling exhibit and mine was one of them. It was really exciting. They even travelled to an exhibit in Costa Rica. The odd number of 41 came about because we all insisted that Tomme include her quilt.

Not Much Quilting Going On

Well, I haven't had much time or energy to work on anything quilty. I have worked a little on my journal quilt but of course, I can't show you that.

Last monday Gary, Kara and I went on a hike looking for a geocache. To learn more about geocaching, go here.
It was a nice cool, breezy day for a hike. The cache was half way up a mountain not too far from our house. Miss long legs (Kara) was way ahead while I was taking my time so I didn't kill myself. Bet I saw a lot more than she did!! We brought Ginger with us - she loves hiking in the woods. Here are Kara and Ginger near where we found the cache.

On the way down, I saw something jump out of the corner of my eye and found this little guy. If he hadn't jumped, I wouldn't have known he was there. He really blends in with the ground.

I saw a butterfly I wanted to get a picture of but it just wouldn't land where I could get a picture. It would have been a good picture for my idea notebook.

Hopefully I will have something to show you soon but I'm not sure. Gary goes to the hospital on Tuesday for some major reconstructive surgery. He had had radiation and surgery for cancer and now areas around his nose and sinusses are deteriorating so he needs surgery. The Dr's are planning for an 8 hour surgery - it all depends on what they find when they actually start. They are planning for him to be in the hospital 7 days and it will probably be a least a month for recovery. Since I don't have anymore time off, I will be working 40 hour weeks during all of this!

And I think I'm tired now!!!