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.