Pomp and Circumstance

This is especially for those family members who didn't get to join us at my daughter Valerie's graduation. There's no quilting content, but I'm happy to share the big event with any of my blogging friends who don't mind wading through family photos. :)

Valerie is now a college graduate!
What a wonderful weekend we had! After Brian and I got off the plane, the kids took us to dinner and presented us with a 25th wedding anniversary book they had made of photos and memorabilia from our wedding and their childhood years. It's an absolutely wonderful gift, and we keep looking at it. Thanks, guys! We will always cherish it.

Here are Val and Jocelyn at the graduation picnic on Saturday.

Sunday was graduation, which always starts with the Wacky Walk. Instead of marching solemnly into the stadium, the graduates carry signs, wear costumes, perform, do all kinds of things as they parade in. There are no lines, no rules, just celebration. (Kind of like liberated quilting!) Here's a pre-Wacky Walk photo of Caley, Brooksie, Val and Nessa in their shades. They each carried a huge balloon (Val's was a champagne glass, maybe because she's from Champaign?).
As you can see, they all had a blast coming in for the ceremony.
Eventually everyone took a seat.
Oprah Winfrey was the graduation speaker, but those of us in the stands found it easier to see her on the big screens rather than on the stage. If anyone is interested, you can listen to her speech on U-tube if you click here. It's half an hour, though!
After the big ceremony, everyone dispersed to departmental ceremonies to formally receive their diplomas. Here's Val getting hers. Yay!!
Someone can't stop smiling.
Of course, we took lots of photos after the graduation. Here's Val with her grandmother.
And with Kim and Craig, Val's cousin and her fiance, who came all the way from Florida to celebrate with us. We were so pleased to see them!
Val's parents were pretty proud of her.
We had a wonderful family dinner that night with the Bay Area family, but the restaurant was dimly lit and my photos are terrible. Sorry! It was so great to see everyone and it meant a lot that they call celebrated with us.

The next day Val and her closest friends had a final get-together. Here they are -- Brooksie and Jenna in the back, and Val, Caley and Nessa in the front.
Congratulations, Val! You worked hard and did a great job!

Quilts in their native habitat

During the first year that I took up quilting (AQ 1, or anno quilting-i I, for you Latin scholars), I made quilts for my mother and both my daughters. I just spent a very happy Mother's Day with all three of them, and over the course of the weekend I photographed each of them with their respective quilts. Wish I had remembered to take a photo of my mother-in-law with her quilt a week ago, but next trip ...
This is my mother, who keeps her quilt on her living room couch. It's the second quilt I made (you can see the full quilt here), in a class where we learned to make pinwheels. We were supposed to work with quilting cottons but I fell in love with a loosely woven Guatemalan fabric (below, shown between the binding and the inner border) and just had to use it. If I were making that quilt now, I would change a lot of things, but NOT this fabric! I love it.
Here's Valerie with her quilt.
Val and her quilt live in a dorm, and the quilt shares honors with some amazing polka-dot bed linens. I have been asked how I could give Val a quilt to take to school, but I have no problem with it. Quilts should be used, and I hope it reminds her of home -- and any stray stains will just bring added memories. I can always make her another quilt when she graduates. Here's a photo of the full quilt.

This is Jocelyn with her African Coins quilt. She wasn't sure her bedroom was up to a photo session, so we relocated to the stairs.
I never got a photo of the back of this quilt, which is made of pieced batik flannels, so Jocelyn obligingly held the quilt open for the camera.

Quilt class

My guild invited Kay Capps Cross of Cross Cuts quilting to make a presentation and teach a couple classes. I like her stuff but almost didn't take her Slaphappy class because I already know how to piece string blocks. Fortunately someone told me the class was much more about color than about piecing, and they were right. It was a great class!

During her lecture, Kay showed two versions each of about 8 quilts -- one version was made with color and one with black, white and one zinger color. Then she talked about the different effects of the quilts and the things to consider when making each version. On her color quilts, I especially liked her "flowing borders" as she called them (sorry, I don't have a photo), where the color/texture change is small but very effective -- it gives a sense of both boundary and background. For blacks and whites, she talked about scale of print, how a mixed black/white fabric reads, and what happens with grey. Translating a color quilt to black and white is not simply a matter of replacing value for value. I learned so much! Here are two blocks I made in the class -- fun, easy, and I loved playing with the fabrics (there were lots of us and we shared). In the blocks below there's a fabric full of 3 Stooges quotes and one with gentle sayings like "If all else fails, pet the cat."

My friend and co-worker Marilyn is not a big fan of blacks and whites, so she decided to make the block with her colors -- creams and tans with yellow and orange zingers. Even though those are not my colors, I think her group of 4 blocks is just wonderful!

It's a constant wonder to me how different we all are in our response to color and design. While I can appreciate and like -- even really like -- lots of things, I would just never want to spend much time working with certain colors or styles that others can't get enough of. Keeps life interesting!

Here's a block I made this week that is definitely not my colors. I often participate in the guild's block lotto for the practice of making different blocks, and it's fun to do. They always provide the background fabric, and it's almost always a tan or cream. As often as not, I don't have much in my stash to put with it. I had to work hard to find fabrics that fit what was asked in this one, but I like the block pattern.

Other quilting things I did this week -- I cut batting for these 3 Linus quilts. Someone donated a bunch of flannel cut into various sizes and I stitched them into tops. It was amazing that we had this piece of batting that just fit them!

And Val was home for a long weekend! She volunteered to make dinner one night (look at how fast that hand is tossing the pasta!). She lives in a coop at school and says it's such a pleasure to cook at home where no one has taken the food you need and all the utensils are put away in the right places!

I kept checking in with her while she cooked to see if I could help, and she kept saying no. I knew she didn't need my assistance, I just liked being told I didn't have to make dinner! And it was a yummy dinner indeed.