Sew Many Villages

A few weeks ago, Cheryl was honored to do the quilting on a project Dorry made for her sister Kerry in New Zealand, on the occasion of Kerry's wedding anniversary. It couldn't be posted until Kerry received her gift.


The quilt started with fabrics Kerry had purchased on a trip to Africa and a pattern by Kitambaa Designs called "It Takes a Village."

The pattern had a dark, night sky studded with golden stars, but some of the African fabrics that were to make up the houses and their roofs were dark. For contrast Dorry changed it to a daylit scene, but that left us with what to quilt into the upper right part of the quilt. We settled on a giraffe nibbling on acacia trees. Hard to make out in the photo, the giraffe and trees are one of those surprises you get when you inspect a quilt up close.


Then a few other animals native to the plains of Africa found places among the houses at the bottom edge of the village -





The border was the area that was treated with dimensional quilting in a design Cheryl borrowed from African textiles

Christmas Snow

Looks like our Christmas snow is starting to wind down as the sun is trying to come out. The prediction as of Christmas Eve was for "up to 1 inch of slushy accumuluation." I think we did much better than that. Here Cheryl makes the official measurement on our deck. I think this might top our old "layer cake" picture from when we lived in Reston.

16 inches is what we measured before the wind started blowing it around.

The view from our living room.

Cheryl shows us that the snow is literally knee deep.

The bird feeders and bird bath are all wearing impressive snow hats today.

The view up our back slope. Its a wonder our satellite dish is still working with this much snow on it.

White Christmas

We started getting snow about 8am this morning and had about 4 inches by 3pm, with another 4 inches still expected today. Before the Christmas snow got too deep, Lu got to go out and explore the snow for himself. He wasn't entirely sure that he liked the snow under his feet as he opted to come back in the house after a few minutes.

Christmas Visit to Georgia

We went to GA to visit with Norris' family for a few days before Christmas. Here we see Norris with his mother, sister, and brother in law.

Norris' grandnephew is infatuated with firetrucks. Grand uncle Norris was happy to indulge Kason with a new firetruck for Christmas

Lu's Portrait

A portrait of Lu, taken on December 8th when we had snow on the ground. I just noticed we hadn't posted anything for almost a week.

Skies over the cove

Because we sit in the shadow of the mountains, we don't get much in the way of sunrise or sunset here in our protected part of Barrett's Cove, but this morning, Norris went out to refill the sunflower feeder and was taken by the dawn.

Turkey Tracks

Not the quilted kind. We've posted many pictures of the wild turkeys we see regularly in the spring, summer and fall, so this time, here are some tracks in the snow under the deck, taken from the living room window. We usually don't see the turkeys during the winter - we figured they don't come up on the slopes. They must be really hungry in this sub-freezing weather and made their way here to clean up the sunflower seed under the feeder. That's o.k. by us, but it will undoubtedly upset the local field mice or voles - whichever it is that burrows tunnels out there.

Candlelight Stroll

Friday evening was Weaverville's annual Candlelight Stroll. The downtown merchants stay open later than their usual hours, and there's always live music and clogging for Christmas shoppers to enjoy. We went early, before Santa was scheduled to appear.
One of the local businesses added candles to their street entrance - most of the others just used strings of lights.


Horse drawn wagon rides were available.

You got on the ride at the downtown service station. (Sorry these pictures are so dark.)


Though we like to support our downtown businesses, we were not the best shoppers. We did come home with some dessert from our excellent downtown bakery - a peppermint chocolate mousse cake, and a caramel cheesecake.


We savored every bite.

Our forecast for yesterday called for a 30% chance of a dusting, up to possibly an inch of snow. Those forecasts were for the nearby town of Weaverville, but as we have learned, those snow forecasts don't pertain to conditions on the side of our mountain. We have 5 inches of snow so far and its still coming down. Fortunately we don't have to be anywhere till tomorrow so we are content to be snowed in for a day or two. One of the joys of being retired.

Christmas Past

Yesterday, Norris and Cheryl went to the Zebulon Vance Birthplace, the State Historic Site about a mile from our house. Zebulon Vance was a wit and politician who started as a pro-Unionist, but when NC seceded, he organized a regiment and later -- still during the Civil War -- served as very popular Governor. His father David Vance was one of the original American Revolutionary land grant owners in the Reems Creek Valley.

Every year the staff decorates the house for Christmas and hosts candlelight tours. We thought we'd get there before it got too dark to take pictures. The weather was on the frightful side yesterday, with some freezing rain earlier in the day, so we didn't count on a crowd, but we were wrong.

While we waited for our tour at the Visitors Center, we watched some of the local Junior Tarheel Historians at their crafts -

Weaving "tapes" at small table looms -

Spinning and spool knitting -

Most of the Jr. Historians were young ladies wearing fur trimmed wool capes, but there was one young man busy weaving, visible in the coonskin hat in the above photo.

We also heard the local group Primrose playing Christmas music on harp, two mountain dulcimers and (we think) two psalteries.

It was very dark by the time our guide took a group of twenty of us to the Vance house to see if they had room for twenty travelers to stay for the night. The guides were all reenactors, who took our plight very seriously on a cold night. They let us warm up by the fire where we were told about mountain Christmas decorating traditions -


...and the cook told us about the dishes she and Mrs. Vance had been making -

We were not allowed to use flash during the tours. It is very dark at night in a log cabin lit with only the fires and a few candles, so we were surprised these pictures came out at all - the shutter probably remained open for 3-4 seconds and we had no tripod with us. The people were moving and look like the Ghosts of Christmas Past.

New Skills

Norris had surgery on his right hand today to correct a trigger finger that has been bothering him for years.

Norris is busily trying to solve the daily Sudoku, using only his normally less adept left hand to write his notations in the edges of the tiny squares. So far so good -- but the local anesthesia still has his right hand pretty numb. That means he's feeling pretty lively, not yet on the strong pain medication prescribed.

He'll be wearing that thick bandage on his right arm until a week from today.

Thanksgiving in Chattanooga

For Thanksgiving this year, Norris and Cheryl traveled to N. Georgia to spend the holiday with Norris' mother. Instead of cooking at home, the three of us had our Thanksgiving feast at the Chattanooga Choo Choo, a hotel and restaurant located in the former Chattanooga train station. Here Norris and his mother pose in front of the namesake Choo Choo.

It was a balmy 75 degrees that day as we walked thru the gardens surrounding the old station. Here Norris' mother is seen next to some of the many roses that were in bloom around the station

Although it was Thanksgiving Day, the decor in the train station had already shifted to a Christmas focus.

name that quilt....

Cheryl has almost finished this quilt -

The quilting motif in the setting squares and triangles is one Cheryl came up with -- adopted from a jewelry ad.

Wool batting makes the design pouf nicely.



We don't really know why quilts need names, but we do know why they need labels. We've just ordered the hanging device for it, so Cheryl has a few days to make and attach a label. But the label should include the quilt's name. Any suggestions? There are some fancifully colored birds in the fabric of six of the twelve pieced blocks, a subdued floral in the other six.

Veteran's Day

Fall ends abruptly - not so fast!

We had a hard freeze this weekend, and watched blustery winds blowing leaves about while the snow fell (but didn't stick). We figured that was the end of our fall color show, but we were not really taking into account a few holdouts -

Most of the maples are bare but there are some tall ones in the neighborhood - and this skinny one in our "wildflower meadow"- that are still brilliant red.


Our early blooming rhododendron came out with a few blossoms recently and they are hanging on. You have to look hard to find them.


All the annuals were hit hard by the freeze, but we still have the Autumn Ferns, and these Dusty Millers on the front walk that survived last winter and thrived.


But the most special plants currently are our American Beeches - here is one showing mostly brown but still some yellow.

And a little lower in the yard, this one still has bits of beautiful green mixed with the brown and yellow.

And just a few more feet away, across the road, is one that is still entirely rich green, tipped with a bit of yellow on the upper branches. This is truly a "four season" tree - it holds onto its brown leaves through the winter, though they will turn paler and end up a light tan shade. Come February, when the sun shines on it, those leaves will glow like flowers.



And then there's our Tiger Cat, who likes to remind us of his good looks.

Placemat anyone?

Sorry we haven't been posting much - Cheryl has been down with a cold. We had our (unseasonal) first snowfalls this week, but none of it stayed around for photography.

But Cheryl has just completed final touches on a project she made in a class on collage and monoprinting about 6 weeks ago. The instructor was Bernie Rowell, the artist who did the Bluebird collage quilt we have a print of (see a photo of her quilt here). We used Sherwin Williams interior latex paints to apply paints to commercially printed fabric, then cut that up to make a small "art piece".


The instructor provided all the raw materials - not too much and not a wide variety of fabric and paint - so students could concentrate on the techniques. Class members had to use their imaginations to come up with shapes to work with. Cheryl's quilt is pretty tame, with none of the metallics that Bernie uses in her quilts to add life. (They were available but students were all running out of steam by the time they came out.) The two white and two orange fabrics that make the background were left in their original state, but all the other fabrics have paint. Even the binding (the striped outer edge) is made entirely of little squares cut from the few remnants of the painted fabrics. The piece was already bound when it came home, so it took a little ingenuity to figure out how to get it onto the quilting machine so that Cheryl could finally do what she's comfortable with - a lot of additional quilting! It always looks funny to put such a tiny quilt on the 12 foot table of the longarm.

The piece was made as a learning experience and has no other purpose. It's exactly the size of a placemat. Bernie mounts her pieces and has them framed. This one is more likely going to serve as a cat-mat.

Training Fire

Today the RCFD burned down a hundred year old farmhouse that is on land that will be turned into a housing development. The house was used as a training burn, which means that fires are lit in the house, then extinguished and re-lit. Each time the fire is re-lit, a team goes into the house, finds the fire, and puts it out with a minimum amount of water so it can be lit again. The object is to get as many fires lit and extinguished as possible before the structure becomes unsafe. In this picture, the first fire has just been lit off and is already spreading into the attic where it wasn't supposed to go.

2 minutes later, heavy smoke was pushing out the whole length of the attic and it seemed like we might lose the house on the first fire. The 100-year old wood was very dry and really wanted to burn. Fortunately, the first fire was brought under control and the firefighters were able to re-light it 33 times after that.
This picture was taken from a different side, where the fire fighters would make their entrance into the house. Most of the cloud coming out of the house at this point is not smoke, but is steam from the water that had been put on the fire
In this picture, a team is entered the house to find their way up the stairs in the dark to get water on the fire burning on the second floor.
After 34 fires (and 3 hours later), it was determined that the structure was no longer safe so the house was set ablaze for the final time.
The water being put on the fire at this point is just to try to control the amount of flaming embers that were being carried around the neighborhood. The spray coming from the top of the fire truck on the right is just being used to cool the firetruck itself, which was being exposed to a lot of radiant heat.
By lunchtime, there wasn't much left.