Quilting Cousin

I just spent a fun day of chatting and quilt sharing with my cousin Mary from San Diego. My poor parents had to put up with a day of "quilt talk". They seemed to enjoy our show and tell and my mom kept us well fed. Here we are with our current handwork. I love that deep pink heart in her wool work, a new love.

I have another quilting cousin in Oregon. We all hope to meet someday for the Sisters show. I'm a little jealous because they keep in touch via Facebook. So far, I've resisted Facebook because I'm worried about the time I'll spend with it. I already spend more time than I "should" reading blogs. Are you on Facebook? and do you find it very time consuming?

Mary showed me her beautiful quilts on Facebook. She also had a file full of dozens of antique quilt tops that were GIVEN to her by a genealogy friend. The quilt tops were made by her grandmother, Daisy. While the woman had interest in her family genealogy, she was not interested in the quilt tops. Lucky Mary! They were mostly early 20th century quilts and an uncompleted, but still beautiful, crazy quilt. This quilt was my favorite. I love this setting and the bubble gum pink is irresistible.

I hope those of you suffering from these high temps in the states are faring well. Last Friday night the Washington, DC area was hit by a derecho. Derechos are very damaging wind/thunderstorms. We were watching tv and there was a warning at the bottom of the screen about severe thunderstorms. All of a sudden the power went out and we could hear the wind. I wouldn't say it was like a train, though some in the area did. It was loud and scary nonetheless. We lost power for 49 hours. It came on late Sunday night and we realized our AC wasn't working. Temperatures were around 100 humid degrees all days so we were really sweltering. Our neighbor hooked us up to his generator some so we didn't lose much food and had a fan going at times. When the service people came Monday afternoon to fix the AC I had to turn them away because the power had just gone out again. That lasted just 6 hours so it wasn't too bad. We had every window and door open and every fan going overnight. I was so hot I didn't care if we got robbed. I made sure the 3 dogs were on the ground level with the hopes they would scare anyone away. Though I expect they'd more likely welcome them in. ; c ) All in all we were lucky. Several lives were lost and many trees and limbs caused severe damage to homes. One large tree in our neighborhood fell smack dab over the bedroom of the neighboring home. I'm sure those people won't be in their home any time soon. We also heard of a young family in our neighborhood who had just settled on their home and moved in that day. They had a large branch fall on their car and lost power for days. What a welcome! We've had record setting heat all week and this Saturday we are expecting the mercury to hit 104 degrees. Ouch! Looking forward to next week when temps are forecasted in the cool 80's.

Stay cool!