Sunday at Lake Louise

It was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning so we decided to get our exercize doing some laps around Lake Louise in downtown Weaverville.  

We noticed some large turtles swimming in the lake.  Some of these guys were a foot or so in diameter.

This seemed to be one of their favorite sunning spots.  There were a bunch of baby turtles hanging our nearby too but they took off when we tried to take their picture.  We're used to seeing the common 6 inch box turtles but these guys were BIG.

While exploring one of the side trails off the lake we discovered the ruins of an old mill and waterfall on Reems Creek.  

We came home and looked in our Weaverville history books and found that this was the Biffle/Coleman grist mill.  Mills have operated from this site since at least 1793.  The mill operated here until 1947.  This is a postcard picture of the mill from about 1910.

Rainy Day Rug Buying

We had a rainy day on Friday so we went out to do some rug shopping.  We had been looking for awhile to get an outdoor rug for the screened-in part of the deck since Norris' mother got us the money to buy it for Christmas.  We found one that went well with the wood colors on the deck and was a good size for our space.

While we were there we decided to get some other rugs for the rest of the house.  Here Little Lu is shown illustrating the size of the Khazak rug from Pakistan that now sits at the top of our stairway.

We also got an Indian rug for the hallway.

And a large hand-knotted rug from Nepal for the bedroom.  Here Little Lu shows how well he coordinates with the color.

The morning after the rain, we had fog in the valley which we usually look down on from our spot up the mountain.   But this particular morning the fog had a dramatic shape where it slanted up to the right.

This is how far Cheryl had progressed by Saturday morning in cutting away the Trapunto batting on the quilt she is making.  

fun to quilt

This is a quilt I had a lot of fun working on. The pieced blocks that make the border are Log Cabins. I used different textures on the buildings - shingles and rocks and bricks where the fabric or the design suggested it.



The trees and fanciful flower (you see it upper left in the first photo - it's as big as a tree) are made from wool and hand appliqued.


Here's one of the back that shows how I filled in between the trees and the houses

a different sort of quilt for a baby

I did the quilting on this for a local client - the quilt is for her grandbaby. Not your typical baby quilt in pastels, this one has a panel in the center showing a map of the world and animals we identify with different areas of the globe. Another thing that makes it different is the complicated pieced border.

This is what always happens...

when I try to work on the studio floor.

The quilt-to-be that Lu wants to play with is going to be shadow trapunto. Rather than explain that now, I'll take pictures of the process as it goes along over the next couple of weeks/months. I'm making it to enter in the Asheville Quilt Guild Show this August. The drawing you are seeing does not represent the detail that will be in the quilt.



At this stage, you are looking at the sheer fabric overlay, on which I'm tracing the outlines of my design with a washout-marker. I'm hours from even beginning the quilting.

Rosie the .... Quilter!

This is a quilt I recently did for my friend Annabelle. She has been serving the Marine Comfort Quilts (MCQ) organization for years. Their goal is to provide a quilt to family of each of our fallen servicemen and women. The quilt is not a comfort quilt - it commemorates the effort and includes a patch from the MCQ organization. Among the fabrics she used is Yellow Ribbons so I cued from that for quilting ribbons around the pieced blocks and to frame Rosie where she appears in the circle.

First blooms of Spring

This is an early blooming rhododendron specimen. It's right next to the house behind Chester bear as you approach our front door. The flowers showed up as buds a couple of days ago.

a quilt from a few weeks ago

I should have posted these pictures yesterday, as this quilt is very appropriate for St. Patrick's day. A few weeks ago, I posted one with a large swan that was part of a Reston challenge designed by my friend Dorry. This is her own entry in the challenge, "Riverdance." She gave herself some green fabric, one of which had a bit of orange in it. The original version of this quilt was called "Peppermint Twist" and it was made in pinks.





Nice quilt, I bet you're saying -- but look at the size of the floor tiles and the size of the quilt. It's only 36 x 36 inches - the little pieced blocks are only 4 inches square. Those are tiny tiny pieces.

But then, Dorry is always a perfectionist about precise piecing, so her personal challenge was to include the needle-turn applique block.


However, reading her emails as she was putting the top together, I think getting that sawtooth border just exactly right (and it is) was the biggest challenge.

Dorry found the nice shamrock with Celtic knots motif we used for the blocks - I just had to figure out how to size and transfer the image to her fabric to quilt it.

Above the Clouds

We got some rare rain here Saturday.  This picture was taken as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway at a spot where we were above the clouds.

Turkeys Come to Visit

Cheryl had just commented this morning that we hadn't put anything new on our blog for awhile, but then minutes later we were visited by a roving band of turkeys who pecked their way up the mountain. We couldn't get them to pose for a group photo as they were somewhat spread out, but we counted at least 13 of them as they passed through. We have seen only a few small groups of adult males during the winter, but this group is typical of the larger flocks of females we see in the spring when breeding season starts. We'll probably start seeing babies in a few weeks. The males can get up over 20 lbs, but mature females like some of these get up to about 12 lbs.

More Snow Pictures

Here are some more snow pictures Norris took on his way to work this morning.  The first picture was taken from another street in our development looking back toward the mountain we live on.  For some reason, it looks like an extra heavy coat of ice and snow formed on the trees on one particular part of the mountain.  You can click on the pictures for an expanded view.

This was also taken from another street in our development, but looking back toward the Craggy peaks.

This panoramic shot was taken from about 5 miles away from our house looking back across the Reems Creek valley towards the mountains where our house is.

An Even Bigger Snow Storm

Our posting on Feb 4 had pictures of what was the biggest snow we'd had since we moved to NC.  The snow we got yesterday topped that as we measured 4 inches on our deck this morning.  Although its still snowing a little, the streets have already started to melt off, which seems to be typical of our NC snows.  The snows here usually disappears within a day.  (That might not be true on the south side of Asheville where they got 7 inches.)