Marshmallows and Roses

It wasn’t too bad a day for a BBQ yesterday.  The wind was a little blustery to start with, and by mid afternoon had dropped right away and the temperatures warmed up considerably.  It was a bit of a “bon voyage” get together,  with our friends wishing us well on our upcoming “South Island Odyssey Tour”.  We supplied the sausages, bread rolls and tasty roast potatoes, and everyone else contributed with salads.  One friend brought along a lovely big plate of home made chocolate éclairs, which complemented my Boysenberry Marshmallow Dessert.  I’ll share the recipe as it is so easy to make and looks good when you need to a dessert for a pot luck meal.  Do try it and let me know what you think.

Boysenberry Marshmallow Dessert

1 dessert spoon gelatine, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1 pkt soft marshmallows, 1/2 pint whipped cream, 3/4 cup boiling water, 1 tin boysenberries

Dissolve gelatine in boiling water, add vanilla and fruit, and leave to cool.  Add marshmallows cut in half.  Fold in whipped cream, place in bowl and refrigerate.

Boysenberry Marshmallow Dessert

Our friend Trish (of chocolate éclair fame)  brought along a big bunch of roses from her garden.  Trish loves her roses and spends a lot of time caring for them, but told us that the rose bushes were getting rather battered about with the incessant wind lately.  This mixed bunch of varieties not only look lovely, but have a most delightful scent too.

A beautiful bunch of roses from Trish

Pinestream Quilters 1st meeting of the year

It seemed a long time since our last quilt club meeting, way back in November, so that probably explains why there was such a happy bunch of quilters all chatting madly together last night.  The January meeting is always rather informal and we do not have a speaker for this month.  Instead, members have the opportunity to set up stalls to sell their extra quilting goods.  Most of us have plenty of these, don’t we,  - in fact sometimes we wonder if some of our “stuff” doesn’t get together at night and breed!  I shared a table with Jenni F and we laid out our fabric, buttons, orphan blocks and books for members to peruse and hopefully purchase.  We didn’t sell everything, but both of us went home with less than we arrived with, so that’s got to be good.  I noticed that some of the other tables had smaller pieces of fabric packed up in “grab bags”, and these sold very well. 

Then it was time for show and tell, although I must admit that after all this time between meetings there didn’t seem to be an extra lot of quilts on show.  Perhaps everyone was away on holidays and didn’t have too much time to spend sewing.  These two pretty little quilts were made to be donated to  the Neo Natal Ward at Hutt Hospital.  Our Pinestream members are very committed and make lots of little quilts for this good cause throughout the year.

Two quilts for the Neo Natal Ward

Sharon brought along her quilt which will be donated to brighten up the Palliative Care Unit of Wellington Hospital.  Those cheeky looking cats came in a panel, she told me, and then she carefully pieced all those stripes for the sashings.  She completed the quilt with a checkerboard border.  What a lovely quilt, and it will surely be most appreciated.

Sharon’s cheeky cat quilt is hospital bound

Another bright and breezy quilt was this one from Anne, full of black and white spots set off with plenty of colour.  This was a class from Thimbles and Threads, and it certainly looks like it would have been a lot of fun to make.  There’s stars in there, houses, trees and goodness knows what else!  Anne’s quilt was machine quilted by Sue B, who always does a great job.

Anne’s fun quilt

Burgundy and cream as a colour scheme always looks good, and Barbara bought along this lovely quilt.  Very simple, with log cabin blocks in the corners, and a nice restful colour scheme.

  Barbara’s burgundy and cream quilt

Katherine is well known for working with wool, and she brought along three quilts for show and tell.  I rather liked this one with the addition of blue crosses stitched behind sheeting, making it look quite ethereal.

Wool and sheeting quilt made by Katherine

So those are the highlights from our January meeting, and as usual it was a great night out.  The supper was as delicious as ever, especially the hand made chocolates – I was very restrained and only had one!  It was good to catch up with members I hadn’t seen in a while over the Christmas break. 

My Hero

I’m the first to admit that I am not the computer expert in this household, and tend to work on a “need to know” basis.  As long as I have the necessary know-how to do the tasks I want to on the computer, I’m happy.  All this behind the scenes stuff is too much for me.  But then again, I’m not a complete dummy, after all, I do know how to e-mail and write letters, documents and blogs.  However I needed Robin’s help recently, as  I’m trying hard to get my quilt documentation up to date.  There’s no trouble with the more recent projects as the digital photos are stored on the computer and I know how to do that.  But I’ve got heaps of old photos that needed scanning and uploading.  After being shown several times and failing miserably, I asked Robin to do it for me.  We worked as a team, with me running up and down the hallway to place each photo in the scanner, and with him uploading them onto the laptop.  Isn’t this new fangled wireless technology wonderful!  So Robin is certainly my hero.

Robin busy uploading my quilt photos

Writing up the story behind each quilt is quite a slow process, but I’m getting there.  It will take some time to get the whole job done, so I try and do a bit each week, writing then printing off the pages.  Luckily, along with the old photos I have kept details of the size of each quilt, and fabric samples as well.  I’d forgotten about some of the quilts I had made long ago and given away, so it is a real trip down memory lane. 

.Quilt document folder – made by my daughter

Not a single stitch

We’ve just come home from a long weekend (3 day) caravan rally at Opaki School, Masterton.  This is a lovely rural school surrounded by large mature trees, and we noticed a whole lot of scare crows surrounding the school vegetable patch. Most of them seemed to be in quite a state of disarray and were practically falling over, so I imagine they had been on scare crow duty  for quite some time.  There was fun and entertainment arranged for us campers all weekend, from a Dutch Auction, BBQ meal, and a musical evening too.  Then we had morning teas and happy hours every day, so it was certainly all go.  The weather ranged from hot and sunny with us sheltering under a shady tree then changed to wet, wild and windy.  The forecast promised us some hail as well, but that didn’t eventuate.

One of the scare crows seen at Opaki School

Sadly I didn’t have time to do a single stitch of my hand-work which I had diligently packed in the caravan.  .  But I did notice one happy camper doing some stitching in the hall, so went over to have a look at what she was working on.  She was doing cross stitch, and her pattern had been digitally produced from a family photo, some how or other.  I understand that there are computer programmes which can do this.

Am I stitching today now we have returned home?  Sadly again, the answer is no.  But I’ve done a large load of washing, and will be ironing shortly before the day is out.  We’ve unpacked the caravan and cleaned the fridge and bathroom, then vacuumed the floor.  What I really need to do is to get my light box out and trace out a couple of stitchery patterns.  We have an extra  “looooong”  caravan trip coming up soon and I must make sure that I have plenty of stitching all prepared for me to work on.  There’s sure to be some time in between the travelling and sight seeing when I’ll be able to relax over a bit of hand stitching.

Shirley’s Wild Animal Quilt

We met up with two other couples, old friends of many years, for lunch yesterday, and surprise, surprise, the other ladies are quilters too.  We weren’t always quilters, but as the years moved on, we started quilting, one by one.  Shirley had brought along the quilt top she had just completed for us other two quilters to admire.  It is a large single sized quilt, and her husband Lewis is completely hidden behind it as he holds it up for the photo shoot.

Shirley and her Wild Animal quilt

This was a “block of the month” quilt and Shirley purchased it from Grandmother’s Garden Quilt Shop in Hamilton. The fabrics supplied were lovely batiks and Shirley enjoyed stitching each block as it was sent out.  There was an awful lot of work involved in this quilt as every spot and stripe on the animals is appliquéd onto the body fabric.  This will be a gift for her little grand-daughter in Auckland, who is sure to love it for years to come.  Shirley did a wonderful job, and as she commented, she now just has to quilt it!

Aunt Dawn

I had lost touch with my Dad’s side of the family when my parents split up many years ago when I was just 8 years old.  My sister Kathleen had been researching the family tree, and after discovering a formerly unknown cousin, the pieces all fitted together and we made contact again several years ago.  My aunt wasn’t anything like I had imagined.  Everything about her was dainty, from her slight build to her tiny hands and feet.  She had grey hair, cut in a fashionable bob, and her eyes twinkled from behind her glasses as she talked.  I really wanted to know about my father, as my mother refused to talk about him while we were growing up.  “Your Dad really had to grow up early”, Dawn told me.  “He left school at 12 to work in a grocer’s shop and as he was bringing home a wage, he really was the man of the house”.  Dawn told me that she had often wondered about us two girls over the years, and crocheted us both a lovely woollen rug as a “welcome back into the family” gift. 

Crocheted blanket

We called in to see my aunt today and she proudly showed me her sewing area she had set up in the garage - as she doesn’t drive she has plenty of room for her sewing supplies.  Dawn loves to potter around on her sewing machine.  “Perhaps you’ll be taking up quilting next?” I asked her.  “Oh no”, she replied, “I’m couldn’t be a quilter like you”.  That’s all right Dawn,  I don’t know how to crotchet!

Dawn at her sewing machine

Letters from the Past

I was sorting through set of drawers in the spare room and came across a whole pile of old letters which I had kept and tucked away.  I knew they were there, of course, but it had slipped my mind.  So you can imagine just how long it took to sort through them, and then, decide just what I was going to do with them all.  Shall I keep them, or toss them out?  What did I find?  A whole swag of letters from two elderly aunts, one has since passed on and the other one is now in a rest home.  There were half a dozen huge epistles sent from my friend in Dunedin.  She used to start writing a letter, lose it, find it again weeks later, and just carry on where she left off.  I found letters from my sister, and from my son when he left home to go to Uni, and he carried on writing the occasional letter to his Mum when he moved to Auckland.  My daughter was a much more prolific letter writer and wrote very regularly when she was a young stay-at-home young mother. 

Letters from my son and daughter once  they  left home

I’ve decided to keep the letters from my two children and have put them away safe and sound in a box.  They others I will let go after I have re-read them.  So what have I learned from all this tidying up?  That the power of a letter is very strong.  In these days of e-mails, texts and quick calls, there is nothing like a “real” letter.  There is absolute joy of finding a letter from a loved one in the post box, which can be savoured and read again.  I decided to sit down and write to my elderly aunt, as her days in the rest home are no doubt very long, and a letter could well brighten her day.  I will also write a proper letter to my sister, and my two children instead of making contact by phone or email.  Hopefully they will get as much pleasure receiving their mail as I get by putting my thoughts on paper.