Birthday Placemats...a year long project.

As you may imagine, my family has lots of birthdays from the oldest, William, to the youngest, Willa Rose, we manage to fill up calendar pages, month after month with reasons to celebrate.  I think the only months we get a breather are February, June and December.  But, if you agree with me, December definitely does not qualify as a "breather."  I decided I wanted to make individual placemats, celebrating what makes each of us unique, so I began in May with Max and Sam's 11th birthdays and followed in July with Larry's 35th! Molly is next, the end of August and then I charge head on into the fall months with celebrations for Chaja, Willa, Marcel, Dylan, Rachael, Scott, Ivan and Olivia.  I'll be so glad to have December "off" for January brings four more birthdays!  I'll be posting pictures of the placemats as I finish them.  Since I'll be doing the little grand daughters closer to their 3rd birthdays, Willa and Olivia will have a wait.  I think this will be a  very long, drawn-out adventure in figuring out how to capture each person's personality in a placemat.

The Best of Dandelion Wine

Queen replacement bee

I'm listening to Ray Bradbury's semi-autographical recollection of a small-town summer in 1928, Dandelion Wine.  This quote is magical  "...searching out the smell of the gold fuzzed bees that hung around our back-porch grape arbor.  Bees do have a smell you know and if they don't, they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers."

Placing the queen in the frames.  The bees will eat through the candy nougat plug and release the queen.  By then they will accept her because of the pheromones she releases.

The Backside Offers the Best View!

Now, I guess that really depends on what you are looking at, doesn't it?  For me, the backside of quilts typically offers the best view of the quilting and the work I enjoy the most.  Rachael, when she and her family visited over spring break, worked on a disappearing nine patch for her mother-in-law, Ellen.  She ended up taking it home to rework the squares and when Bill and I were visiting Seattle in June, she put it together and sent it home with me for quilting.  By rights, the only side I can claim is the backside of the quilt, for that is where my creativity hides.  I finished my part and am returning the quilt to Rachael so she can bind it and prepare the label for this warm and cozy Christmas offering.  And so I offer you the backside of Rachael's quilt.