My best friend, Marie J., is spearheading a project to make a Centennial Quilt to celebrate a double centennial celebration: both the San Juan County (Washington) courthouse (where she works) AND the County Fair (the absolute best country fair in the entire US of A) turn one hundred this year. She put out a call for one hundred blocks, to surround a central medallion. She’ll then assemble these blocks into a top which will be quilted by Orcas Island (part of San Juan County) long-arm quilter Keri Leighton Stone.

Even expatriates like me (we moved away from the island in summer ’04), are allowed to make blocks, so I finally got one done today. I hope to have another one done by Monday, and send them both off to Marie. Anyway, I used to enter all sorts of stuff in the fair….flowers, fruit, jams, baked goods, knitting, quilts, photographs….it was always so much fun to see who had made what (with 7000 year-round residents on San Juan Island, you knew a lot of folks, and more by name) in any given year. “Food Preservation,” for beer, wine, jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, pickled or canned meats and canned veggies and fruits was a favorite division, and I was able to help the official judges every year for about five years, so I elected to do a block with some of my jams:

The jar on the left reads “from Sarah Ann Smith’s ’04 kitchen: Skagit Valley Strawberry Jam,” and the one on the right is “Hannah Heights, S.J. Isl. Wild Blackberry Jelly, September 2003.” The blue ribbon is one I won for my strawberry jam the last year we lived there.

Every year the Catholic Church would send a flat-bed truck over to the fertile Skagit Valley, on the mainland, and come back with buckets of washed and hulled berries, sold as a fund-raiser. I’d buy 15-30 pounds every June and July and put up jams for the coming year. Then, in August the blackberries would ripen on cue with the local saying: when the blackberries are ripe, it’s time to go back to school. The berries are very seedy, so jams could be rather chewy; I decided to try jelly making for the first time, and oh heaven! The only thing better is fresh island blackberries plucked warm from the sun on an early autumn afternoon.

Now…..having given up on kleenex I’m taking my roll of TP to the sofa to hack and wheeze….

Got an e-mail from my friend Janet this morning saying “no new entries on your blog, so you must be sick.” She’s right. Joshua was down with a “stomach flu” (fortunately of the flat-on-your-back, achy gut variety, not the hugging-the-toilet variety) last week…I mean the un-stoppable kid was out for three days, plus the weekend. Hasn’t been that sick since pre-school germ-sharing. Which he did, with me, then Eli. On Saturday, I started feeling yucky. It is THURSDAY, and I still feel yucky, albeit less bad than yesterday. So not much doing…except…

Drum roll….the silver lining is that this week I’ve lost more weight than the past two months at Curves! If I can keep most of this week’s loss off after returning to normal eating, that’ll make a total of 20 pounds off since June 1, 2005! Yeah! I think maybe celebration, in the form of a hot fudge sundae (one scoop of French Vanilla or Coffee, or maybe a 50-50 scoop, with hot fudge no whipped cream, please) when the ice cream place opens for the season. And only another 10 pounds to go!

As for art…I was supposed to be working on Tableau. Have I babbled about that here? Well, I’ll have to check the archives, but anyway here’s a scan of the initial sketch for the nativity Tableau quilt (and yes, some of it is thin pencil so it won’t be all that easy to “divine”…pun definitely intended LOL):
This quilt will be for my old school, San Domenico School (thank heavens they dropped the “for Girls” when they admitted boys to the lower school, K-8; upper school, 9-12, is still all girls), and will celebrate the annual Christmas program, based on the paintings of Fra Angelico. More about it, the school and preliminary sketches in coming days. Since I want to have it finished in time to enter into Houston (which means done by May 15 or so) I’d REALLY better get to work! At least Monday and Tuesday, though I didn’t feel well, I was able to sit at the computer and sketch composite images. I’ll share some of those in coming days….

I taught a class on bindings today, and it went really well….I think there is good hope for this class, and we covered a lot of territory. However, I’m whupped, and really REALLY hoping the general achiness is a result of being tired and on my feet all day and NOT catching Joshua’s flu-bug which kept him home for three straight days (the first time since, I think, pre-school he’s been out for three consecutive days. In the meantime…Spring!

I bought the tulips for the Frayed Edges lunch on Monday last as a special treat. Then, walking down the street in town (“downtown” Camden is about two blocks long), I spied this bunny casserole in the window at Stonewall Kitchen….$7.18 later, it was mine! So spring is definitely coming…..Eli discovered the tips of the daffodils about a half inch above the ground, and I noticed on the way home from teaching today that the trees have that fuzzy look about them when the buds begin to swell!

The last photo is of the Godspeed, the replica sailing ship built at Rockport Marine for the Jamestown Plantation in Virginia. Last weekend when we were at wrestling and karate tournaments we missed the launch of the Godspeed. It is now at anchor at a floating dock on the far side of the harbor next to the Rockport Marine building where it was built. They seem to be doing more work on it before it sails South next month. Hope they announce in the paper when they will hoist the sails…I wanna take pictures! Once in the water, it looks MIGHTY small for having sailed across the Atlantic. Thank you, I’ll take a jet!

Well, last Saturday was a two-fer: Joshua had his first regionals wrestling tournament in Belfast (half hour north of us…Paul went there), and Eli went to his second karate tournament, the Battle of Maine in Winslow, about 80 minutes north-northwest of here–and came home with something almost as big as he is…read on!

Joshua lost both his matches, but he went out there and tried his best, and we are very, very proud of him. He gets really nervous before a match (who wouldn’t?!), and he does it anyway! His dad told him that when he began wrestling in high school on junior varsity, his first season he 2 wins, 7 losses. He got ticked and decided he didn’t want to get pinned ever again…and didn’t! His next season was 10-1-1 and won 2 of the 3 school wrestling trophies….and his record improved after that when he moved to Varsity.

So, Joshua wants to go to wrestling camp this summer. One of his teammates, Angus, who looks like Ichabod Crane when he walks out onto the mat, went to the camp last summer, and was undefeated in the regular season. He lost one match in the regionals, and placed Third overall in the Maine Eastern Regionals, and will go to States tomorrow. Paul, who has been helping coach the team, Joshua and Eli will make the trek to Rumford (in western Maine on Route 2 on the way to NY state) tomorrow while I’m teaching Fine Finishes (a binding class). We’re both happy Joshua has found something he loves so much!

Eli found tae kwon do, a Korean form of karate, in Sept. 2004 after we moved to Maine. He now takes classes 2 or 3 times a week, and has progressed from rank white belt, to yellow belt, two TWO stripes on his belt! At the Battle of Maine tournament the age 7-8 year old yellow-belts (boys) group was so large…26 boys!…they divided it into two groups, and awarded trophies to each group. As luck would have it, some of the most able kids were in Eli’s group. Even with that, Eli placed fourth in forms (set routines) and second in fighting (the same boy who won first in both forms and fighting was really good!). Adam, also in 2nd grade with Eli, was in the other group and he took a second place trophy in forms.

At the beginning of one’s forms, the kids introduce themselves to the judge, tell them which school and method of martial arts they practice, and ask permission to begin their katas (the “forms”). That’s what Eli’s doing here, holding the correct beginning, respectful stance:

This photo is of Eli still in his fighting gear, right after receiving his 2nd place trophy:

Here are Eli and Adam:

We had a great meeting today, but really missed having Deborah…so we called her and put her on speaker phone! Previously, we met at Deborah’s house because she had Benjamin at home and he (and mom) were most comfortable with him in his home surroundings, with familiar computer games, toys and such like. Now that (boo hoo, again) Deborah has de-camped to the wilds of Dallas, we will be rotating meeting locations. I got lucky–we had it at my house first! No 3 hours of driving (even though I love the get-away days)! AND, as always, having guests forced us to *really* clean house and tidy, so our house is nice for once!

Hannah is new to the group (Deborah met her shortly before she moved, and introduced us all–thank you!), and we urged her to bring her “stuff”. She is very much a mixed media artist, and newer at the art quilting thing–this is going to be great for all of us. She brought all sorts of totally cool collage pieces and fabrics which she basically created from scratch….silk screening, stamping, surface design. So we decided NEXT month, we’re meeting at her house and gonna play with silk screening! Welcome to the group, Hannah!

Here’s a picture of her (gee…I hope this is OK…..I didn’t ask her if I could share a picture of her…well, I’ll ask after I hit “publish” and if it’s not I’ll delete…) with a fantastic piece of cloth she dyed.

This next picture is a piece of fabric she made that is so cool we all told her not to do a dang thing more except maybe add a border, layer it up and quilt it, and possible add a few beads or doo-dads…..the color in this photo somehow seems lighter, brighter and not as rich as the original…which is definitely better than the photo!

Wish I had taken a picture of her collage about “Home”…way cool. And she found some great, LARGE foam alphabet stamps at Target for all fo $9…guess what I’m looking for the next time I’m in Bangor (the Target nearest to me..about 80 minutes away)….

Here’s Hannah (on the floor), Kathy (center) and Kate on our new sofa in the morning….

I took a picture of us at lunch, but haven’t figured out the “backlighting” on my new camera, so we’ll have to check Kathy D’s blog for pictures of our repast. I fixed minestrone, Hannah made beer bread, Kathy brought coffee cake (still warm when she arrived!), and Kate brought pineapple….don’t know how she found a ripe on in Maine, but she did…I never can! YUMMM. Oh yeah…and in honor of Deborah, I dug out the latter maker (no counter space in our kitchen here) and we had lattes. Here’s a picture of the coffee table with detritus during the morning:

DEBORAH BOSCHERT–STOP reading here until you get your envelope!

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Those of you who surf into Kathy’s blog, Studio in the Woods, know that she just (as in less than 72 hours ago!) returned from a trip to Ireland (we want MORE PHOTOS, please!). Sweet thing that she is, she not only brought us each a goodie from the Emerald Isle, she picked colors special for each of us, mine being my favorite pool aqua blue. Inside the little bag, was another surprise, an envelope Kathy made with little treats. There weren’t any fabric stores in Ireland that she could find, but she did find the one bead store, and found little green beads with shamrocks on them. Then she went to a beach that had no sand, but instead was made of bits of coral. She brought some with her and shared…how totally cool is that…these little bits of branchy white coral…PERFECT for embellishing! Thank you thank you thank you!