APPLIQUE PAINTBOX-I LOVE APPLIQUE

IN WHICH WE FIND SWEET SURRENDER ASSEMBLED AND SQUARED!

Ta-Da!

Well this battle has been won against all odds!  Assembled, squared, and only a little wafflely which I think I can ease in if I carefully baste down each row when making the quilt sandwich.  I have abandoned making triangles for the border.  The pattern did not have the dimensions of the quilt body so I do not know if the above quilt body will coincide with the size of the triangles-I could end up with and inch hanging over or an inch under and why give myself this sort of headache?

After some re-thinking, the border will be made of the background material with the lines going all in the same direction.  The best quilt shop in Kansas City, Quilter's Station, the orginal source of this fabric, has more and has set it aside for me.  We will be in KC this week and I can pick it up.  Once this decision was made, I began constructing the stems and 1/2 edging around the quilt body.  About 10 yards of stems-maybe I overdid it.

The stems are the same colors as the stems on the appliqued diamonds and I will add some leaves and maybe some flowers.

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Have you made a contribution to The National Quilt Museum in Paducah?  This is more important than ever as Congress is about to eliminate the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts which will reduce income for all museums as well as other forms of the arts.  Here is the link for Info on how to donate:

 http://quiltmuseum.org/quilts-for-quilting/

I am donating 2 quilts and some quilt patterns.  Here is my package ready to go:

And here are the quilts I donated:

The left one is made of Kansas Troubles fabric and the second was made about 8 years ago as a BOM.  I hope they have lots of donations and raise some funding.

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I read a funny thing the other day:  

We are having such a nice spring this winter!

That is certainly the case here.  All the optimistic flora and fauna abound.  We have had robins in January.  The squirrels are frolicking about in a suspicious manner. AND daffidols, forsythia, and japonica are all budding and even blooming as well as all the buds on the trees.

 This has been going on since mid-February!  It is pretty eerie!  In the past, the daffodils poked their heads up about the end of March at the earliest and did not bloom until April.  I received some blow-back last week indicating that I did not take climate change seriously. That is not the case!  Probably climate change is the most serious long term problem facing us (there may be more dire ones in the short term).

AND NOW......

YOUR MOMENT OF ZEN

 There are little gardens all around us.  This particular garden grows on a large tree stump in my front yard.  The stump is about 3 feet in diameter and is covered with a

pretty gray "rose" garden.

Only the first photo is from my tree stump garden.  The other photos I googled under "tree stump fungus".  The beauty of fungus.

When we lived on our farm we collected and ate some varieties of fungus-puffballs, morels, oysters and coral.  I believe the above is edible.  But then we lived without electricity, phones, or running water for 5 years also.  Off the grid as they say now.

SO LONG AND HAPPY QUILTING!!

I am linking up with:

Slow Stitching Sunday, Bambi's Blog,

Patchwork Times,  Em's Scrapbag,

Esther's Wow, Let's Bee Social,

Free Motion by the River, Whoop Whoop,

and Off the Wall Friday.