Men Should Not Name Quilts

Our little community here is known as Mountain Brook. The Mountain Brook Ladies Club has been in existence for many decades. I am on the board of the Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation, whose mission is to maintain and upgrade the 1927 schoolhouse and Community Center. The two groups work together. Last year, the Ladies Club made and donated a quilt to the Homestead Foundation which we raffled off. They made another quilt this year. I picked up the finished quilt last week and last night, I sewed the label on to the back:

The quilt is different every year. This year, it’s made from batiks and has a large center panel featuring a buck standing on a mountain looking out over a valley. I asked for a name for the quilt and Robin came up with “Mountain Splendor,” which I thought was perfect.

The husband wanted to see the quilt, so I unfolded it and held it up. He looked at the center panel—which also has black birds in the sky—and said, “You should call it ‘Something Died in the Valley’ because that looks like a flock of vultures circling.”

This man says the most inappropriate but hilarious things. He is forever reminding me that quilting is “cutting up big pieces of fabric into little pieces of fabric and sewing them back together into big pieces of fabric.” I have never been able to maintain righteous indignation about anything for long because he’ll make some comment and I’ll dissolve into giggles. It’s one of his superpowers and he wields it mercilessly.

[A thousand apologies to my friends who made this quilt. “Mountain Splendor” is a much better name.]

Now that I have the label sewn on, I’ll take the quilt to the church, hang it up, and get a good photo of it.

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I did not move the babies yesterday as planned because it never got above 40 degrees and snowed intermittently all day. We’ll try again today. Everyone is tired of this weather. It is the topic of conversation everywhere I go. And it doesn’t look like it will change any time soon.

The husband reminded me that I was praying for a long winter so that people would stop moving here. That is true. If I weren’t trying to grow half of the inventory for a plant sale, though, I’d be a bit more patient for better weather.

I spent the afternoon finishing up one of the class samples, although I still need one or two items that I wasn’t able to find in town. I tried to go to the yarn/embroidery store yesterday but they were closed, even though their sign said they should have been open. Shopping here is so frustrating sometimes.

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Episode 56 of the Sew & So Podcast features a recap of the Sewing and Stitchery Expo that Tera and I attended last month. This is a Bernina-sponsored podcast, so the perspective comes from that angle, but I thought it was a nice recap of the event, including a lot of the history. The host is excellent. She did an interview with Kaffe Fassett at Bernina University last summer and that episode is also worth a listen.