Hello-
Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of fall.  I see a few Box Elder and Wall Nut leaves drifting down on my walks this week so I see deviance of  fall’s approach.   I love the changes but there are still lots of flowers blooming and there is color every were.

I did make a button necklace for my friend Chris to celebrate her 75 Birthday.  There are 75 buttons on this necklace.  that was the challenge.

This week was quiet as there was no assignment from Textile Artist Stitch Club and Liz and I  are going to dye tomorrow. I had two Zoom meetings and they are fun but no images of others work comes from those experiences. Susan did challenged us to make flags this week using Robert’s crows shots. This is my solution. I enjoyed it and they are up on the studio now.

Progress Report- Wool Birds I finished this little piece this week. It is 20.5″ X 21.5″. It was a jump off from Susan’s Birds a few weeks ago.

Monkey Dancer-Mayan Series I am doing the quilting on this work now. It is moving slowly along.

Bunk Bed 1-I have finished assembling the first of these quilts. It is ready for quilting and the finishing of the binding.

Green on Green. It is an assembled top now. I think it will become one of the quilts that I donate to the nursing home for folks in wheel chairs.

Wool Rug I could not get the oval rug to do anything I was happy with so I started again. I am trying another approach were I am working on a squared format.

Squares a Dancing There are 161 completed squares now. In my cleaning yesterday I discovered another pair of pants to cut into squares so the end is still a ways off.

Childhood Memories – Farm Summer 4
Many evenings after supper Gene and I would play a game we called “Over the Mountain”. We would go to the garage, a stand alone building. While standing on opposite sides of the building, we would throw a ball over the garage after “Yodeling “. If one caught the ball then, one would run around the garage trying th surprise the other person and throw the ball to hit them. If you caught the ball the throw was worth 2 points and if it hit you, or you dropped the ball it was a negative point. We played that game until the grandparents got new aluminum siding.
There was an old Poplar tree in the back of door yard. There was a great swing hanging from it and we all had a good time swinging there. The one spring the tree was struck by lighting and had to come down. I think our youngest cousin, Mike missed the swing the most.
The house was five miles from town and the view north was across a very flat landscape. On summer night one could see the street lights out the front room on the second floor. Mom and Dad usually slept in that room. Gene took the middle room and I slept on the sleeping poach on the east end on the second floor of the house. It had three windows on three sides. The bed had a brown metal head board that had a flowers painted on the center panel. There was a chest of drawers with all the leftovers from Grandmothers dress making in it. I loved looking through those scraps. Some times I even got to take one of the rolls and make a dress for my Betsy Mc Call with it. I especially love one bit of scarp that had a purple pussy willow print. I made my dolly a K amino with that and I still think it is among the doll clothes in the doll chest. One could hear the windmill turning on nights when there was a breeze. I could also hear the sounds of the hogs as they opened and closed the grain dispenser as they were aluminum and dropped with a distinct sound. Some nights it was very hot with out any wind and Grandfather would sleep out on the picnic table under my north windows. If it was very quiet one could hear the sliding squeak of the corn as it unfurled in its growing process too. There were also crickets and cicada in late summer. Many nights I fell asleep to the sounds of summer there.
In late summer Grandmother’s Gladiolas would bloom. She was always proud when that happened, and took them to Church were they were put in the big vases on both sides of the choir in the front church just behind the pulped.
I helped Grandmother with the laundry sometimes. The lines were quite long and they hung down low, especially with the weight of the wet laundry. But Grandfather had set up two ten foot long 2″ X 2″ boards that he had added a screw eye to at the top of. . He had run the lines through the screw eyes. This meant that one could lower the lines so one could hang the cloths and when one was done, the polls were razed and that pulled the lines up and the wet clothing too. They really flapped in the breeze and one could walk under them as well.
The year that Mom graduated from Greeley and I was ready to begin my seventh grade, Grandmother Ester was fed up with my hair and took me to the hair dresser. She went every month and her hair really was that old lady blue with lots of tight curls that were popular at that time. The shop was in a fellow farmers house and consisted of as sink, a hair drying chair, a chair like in the barber shop and several chairs for others. There were lots of women’s magazines there too. I got a pixie cut and the care of my hair was a lot easier- even I could comb it out. Mom was not at all happy with my appearances when she first saw me. “Thank goodness it will grow back,” she said.

Take care

Keep creating

Carol