Beautiful Autumn Weekend

We finally got our house listed and the For Sale sign out front on Friday.

 

About one minute after that, we left for the North Carolina mountains and some autumn color.  There was a lot of traffic heading that way.  Well worth the trip.

 

 

Some leaves are down from the trees already, but there was still a lot of autumn splendor.  On Saturday, Charlie and I went to town.  First stop was the park on top of Mount Jefferson.  Wow.

 

 

I love when you can see the cloud shadows on the hills.

 

 

Here is one with Mr. Buzzard flying by.

 

 

Then we drove back down and stopped at Welch's Produce Store.  Look what welcomed visitors there.

 

He is made of hay bales, squash, and flexible pipe.  His buddy was guarding over the entrance to the fruit & vegetable stands.

 

I am a sucker for farmer's markets and fall displays.

 

 

We drove back to Laurel Springs along the parkway...the Blue Ridge Parkway, that is.

 

 

We also did a lot of riding around on my sister and brother-in-law's property and through the Christmas tree farms.  On Sunday, the sky could not have been any bluer and the sun was shining brightly.

 

 

 

It makes my soul happy to see the sun shining through the trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seeking Fabulosity

It has been months in coming, but we are just about ready to put our house on the market.  The POD is almost full, the rooms are painted, the closets and cabinets are cleared out, the windowsills are caulked.  Finally I began to look at decorating the rooms to make them very cozy, comfy, and inviting.  I don't really enjoy spackling walls, but I do like to make the rooms look pretty!

Here is my kitchen table, which received sunlight from three directions.  The glass hurricanes are 40% off the sale price at Coldwater Creek, a great find when I popped in there last weekend.

 

People who have been to my house would not believe my kitchen counters, all cleared off instead of covered with appliances, houseplants, and junk mail!  Staging the kitchen means removing stuff instead of adding decor.

 

 

We also have a small dining room that looks larger after removing a tall chest, a side table, hanging shelves, and my quilt rack.  This is the room where I had to remove all the wallpaper.

 

 

Our living room has the same type wall of tall windows as the kitchen. 

 

 

There is a screened porch behind the living room windows.  I added some branches with LED lights to the bouquet of silk flowers on the table.  They are currently on sale at Kohl's.

 

 

Here is a view of the deck.  I moved some of the rockers from the front porch back here, and moved the old adirondack chairs from the deck up to our mountain cabin.  Okay, Charlie and Dave did the actual moving.

 

 

Here is the entrance to the deck.

 

 

I have some terra cotta pots filled with mums marching up the steps to the deck.

 

 

We have a big front porch surrounded by flower beds and shrubs.  This house is perfect for nature-lovers like me who prefer the outdoors!

 

 

Last Christmas, someone sat in this little wicker rocker that belonged to Charlie's mother and broke the cane seat.  I hid the hole with a very realistic cat ornament, but my grand-dog Roo tore the cat to shreds one day while left alone inside.  Now the chair is a plant stand.

 

 

If you look on the other side of the front porch, you see the garden pond with fountain.

 

 

Of course, the real star of our property is the wooded back yard.  The leaves are just starting to turn.  On a sunny day, our yard is very inviting.

 

 

Thanks for going along for the virtual door.  Looking at these photos helps me to see what else I need to do before the realtor comes to take pictures.  Next time I'll show you the upstairs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afternoon Light

Don't you love the long shadows and golden streaks of light from late afternoon sun?  That's our dog Kasey watching over her kingdom in our backyard.

Our trees here in Wake Forest, NC, still have a lot of work to do to reach their full autumn splendor.  But they sure light up in the late sunlight.

 

I have signed up to take two watercolor classes at Art of the Carolinas, both with Tom Jones.  And both deal with painting light.  The first one is Sunrays Filtering Through the Forest, and the other is Painting the Mountain Mist and Clouds.  I am thinking of adding a third class.  It will be great to do some painting again.

 

Anyway, when I walked back to the edge of our woods, I heard something moving around.  Sure enough, a small deer went scurrying past.  (Too fast for me to get his photo!)

 

 

I was reminded of the movie Funny Farm, where Chevy Chase is trying to sell his Vermont farm house, and yells "Cue the deer" when the buyers are in the yard.  They let a deer out of a wire cage to capture their charming environment.  I'm not so sure that would be a plus around here, with deer being so prevalent and eating people's landscaping.  We have not had that problem, probably because everyone has a dog in the backyard and there is so much woodlands for the deer's habitat.  We rarely see the deer near the house.

 

We are about finished working on this house.  I am hoping the "For Sale" sign goes up soon.  We have company this weekend and our annual pig-picking on Saturday...but not at our house.  I have changed gears and spent the past two days pampering myself with new highlights and haircut, manicure, and the most luxurious pedicure at the salon. 

 

Ah, that's more like it!

 

 

 

 

 

Quilting at Hillside Home

Today I had a very fun morning with my friend Jean Houghtby as we presented a talk about quilting at the Hillside Nursing Center right here in Wake Forest, NC.  Jean volunteered to do the presentation on behalf of Capital Quilters Guild of Raleigh, and I tagged along as "Quilt Whisperer,"  helping to hold up the quilts and fold them again.  We had a large group of women filling the dining hall.  Several of them had quilts on their laps!

 

Most of the quilts belonged to Jean, and were made either by her, or members of her family.  She has inherited a lot of beautiful handmade family quilts.  One of her most popular ones that she shared was the necktie quilt she made for her husband.  The silk ties and satin background give this quilt a very unique look.  It was quilted by Nancy Pease.

 

 

It has been cold, rainy, and gloomy here for the past two days, evoking the spirit of January rather than early October.  I think that seeing the colorful quilts brought a bright morning of cheer to the ladies who came to see us do the presentation.  Many of them remembered using feed-sack fabrics to make not only quilts but children's clothing.  One lady was very taken by a beautiful grandmother's flower garden quilt made from hundreds of one-inch hexagons.  She wanted to know how it was made, how the binding was put on, and lots of other details.

 

Here is another resident who came up to talk after the presentation was over.  She had such a good time that she wants me to send her a copy of this picture with Jean.

 

 

I only took two of my own quilts, Something "Girly" and Carolina Woodland Spring.  They were very different from the more traditional quilts that Jean presented, so it gave the ladies a new look at an old American custom.

 

I will show them here for those that are new to my blog.

 

Something "Girly"

Carolina Woodland Spring 

We had a nice lunch of asparagus bisque and pear salad at nearby Girasole Restaurant.  Then I came home and started to put my sewing room back together.  Ever since the carpet cleaners were here, everything in the room was piled up on one side.  Even if I had time to quilt, I would not have been able to access my sewing machine.  Now it is almost all sorted out. I even made labels for my plastic drawers, and organized all my rotary cutters, scissors, needles and other notions.  Still have a little left to do up there, and some stuff to carry out.

 

I have to say that I like having my whole house clean and organized at the same time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autumn Update

We went to Durham to see War Horse Wednesday night.  The puppet horses were incredible!  They certainly seemed life-like.  Each one had three actors who were either inside the armature, or beside it.  One very poignant moment in the show was when one of the horses died in battle, and its three actors quietly got up and left the stage.  It was a very intense performance.

 

Several cows from the "Cow Parade"  were in place on the American Tobacco campus.  Very appropriate, since the big bull from the Durham Bulls Athletic Park is visible as you walk across the courtyard to get to the theater.  Remember the bull that snorted whenever they got a home run in the movie Bull Durham?

 

 

Anyway, Burt's Bees has now made downtown Durham their corporate home, and they sponsored a painted cow which sports a beehive hat.

 

 

I only took a photo of one side of this cow.  I realized after we walked around why it was titled Night and Day.  The side with the sunburst is obviously Day, and the other side is in blues to represent nightfall.

 

 

 

My Gammill is now set up in Clayton at Maureen's house.  I went out there last Thursday night and we set up a muslin quilt sandwich for practice.  Both Maureen and her neighbor Adrienne were very adept at free-motion quilting with the longarm!

The next day we went up to our place in the North Carolina mountains.  Charlie and I had a beautiful ride across the mountain, catching the last of the sun's rays on the fall trees.

 

On Friday and Saturday, we helped move my sister, her husband, and my father into their new home in the mountains.  They had rented a U-Haul truck to take their furniture from their home near Greensboro to their new place "across the pond" from us.  We are so happy that they will get to live in the mountains full time now.  You can just see their driveway going up the hill in the next photo.

 

Tomorrow I am going to do something "quilty"...going to a local nursing home to help my friend Jean with her quilting presentation.  I think I will be holding up quilts for her.  I am taking a few of my art quilts along for the demo.  I will try to remember to take some pictures!

 

 

Get Those Longarm Machines Serviced!

Yesterday, I went back to Fayetteville to pick up my Gammill quilting machine from Loving Stitches quilt shop, a Gammill dealership.  It had been ready for over a week, but life intervened.  (Long story...but all is okay now.)  My mechanic/technician was Mr. Warren Wey, who did an outstanding job for me.

When I brought the machine in, I listed all the problems I was having with it.  The most annoying was that when I stopped stitching, it kept going!  The solution for that was an adjustment to the "min pot."

I was having trouble getting the needle in and out of the needle bar, so he reamed it out for me. 

My machine has a vertical/horizontal lock feature, which sometimes did not hold very well.  OOPS- the connector was broken for the vertical hold magnet.

My laser pointer was in pieces because its connector was broken.  All fixed now!

I knew I had some threads wrapped around the wheels, but I did not know about all this thread wrapped around the shaft!

 

I am surprised it even ran!

 

Besides the problems I knew about, it turns out the hook assembly had a deep gouge, the motor drive belt was loose, there was lint all over the place... in fact, I got a four-page report with photographs of all the problems and repairs that were made.

 

It's a good thing I took it in to an expert to be serviced.  These Gammills are workhorse machines, and I have apparently rode mine pretty hard over the last nine years!

 

We will take it out to Maureen's tomorrow night, where it will stay until I get a new place to live with room for a twelve-foot table.

 

But tonight... we are going to see the play War Horse, part of the Broadway South series at the Durham Performing Arts Center!  Can't wait!

My "Round Robin" Has Found Its Way Home!

I have a lot to catch up on since my last post, but today I must write about a wonderful quilt-related surprise.

Back in the nineties, I was involved in an online book club composed of quilters who "met" in an AOL forum.  We named ourselves The "Yo-Yo Sisterhood", a play on the title of a book we discussed called Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.  We participated in several quilt swaps over the years, including a row-by-row challenge and a four-inch block challenge.  We met in person in Chicago where we stayed in a resort for a weekend and attended a quilt show.  We were interviewed and photographed for the local newspaper with our row-by-row quilts.  The members of the group lived all over the country, from North Carolina to Illinois to Hawaii.  We mailed our swaps to each other according to a rotation.

Our last project was a "round robin," where each participant makes the center of a quilt top, and the subsequent quilters each add a border according to prescribed rules (applique, triangles, squares, etc.)

I never got mine back...until today!  As I recall, there was a problem because the top was not lying flat.  The person who was to add the next row set it aside to ponder what to do...and it has been forgotten in a closet for about ten or twelve years!

Here is my beautiful quilt top, and I don't care that it may be a little wavy!
 

 

I used a Karen Stone pattern for the New York Beauty center, and sent along some hand-dyed fabric for the others to use if they wished when they added their borders.  I love the bright look of this quilt with its contrasting cool and warm colors.  This is one that will get finished one of these days!