mother’s day – Juanita Collins

Dear Vi,

Today I’m going to share a very sweet little story that I wrote it for my mother on Mother’s Day, 1971, misspellings and grammatical errors included. I hope your laughter is full of delight. Mine was!

One day Jane was in school sitting in her desk waiting egrley for the surprise Mis Cod had promesed them the day before. So now Jane and the rest of the clas were waiting for Mis Cod to tell them.

Finally Mrs. Cod came into the room. As usual Mis Cod had them sing good morning. After they had finished singing good morning, Mis Cod told them the surprise. Now was the time Jane had been waiting for.

Now Mis Cod began, “now Sunday is mothers Day so we are going to have a mothers day play. It will be called, Mother I Love You. It will be a story on mothers. Now Bob you will be the bear. Sue you will be one of the mothers. Sally, Misty, Karen, and Colleen will be mothers and Jane will be the mother who saves the mothers and their babies from the black bear. Bob, Joe, Jim and Mike and Terri (a boy), will be the animals who lead Jane to the mothers.

[next week: play begins]

Jane was surprised when she did her lines right. Now the play was over. Everyone was talking at once. After everyone quited down, Janes mother said “O, what a wonderful mothers day,” she said, almost crying.

The End

By Nita Luton, age 9

My goodness…I opened up the website to write a mother’s day post and saw that this will be post number 201! Now how did that upcoming milestone get past me, I wonder? I think I better start planning ahead a bit better because surely a prize would have been appropriate. Well, never say never, and I will put some thought into that!

Meanwhile, Happy Mother’s Day to everyone, whether you are a mother or not! I have had a wonderful Mother’s Day. Look what I was served for breakfast!

I adore French toast. And didn’t he set a beautiful table, oh my! I must have raised him very well, if I don’t say so myself!

Chef Michael:

And on the sewing front, I picked up Heidi’s quilt for the first time in too long and did some hand quilting whilst we watched a movie on TV last night.

Yesterday I worked on my 3×6 bee blocks. I decided to make disappearing 9-patches this time around. Sometimes I feel badly that I make such simple blocks for this group, but everyone makes the best of their ability, and you are placed in a group by first-come, first-served. So there are very experienced quilters making some very advanced blocks in the group, and then there are the beginner “me’s” who make simple blocks. So anyway, I felt that the disappearing 9-patch was going to be a challenge – and it was, but in a different way than I had expected. The challenge wasn’t in the sewing, it was in the fabric selection. A couple of the blocks I made over because while the colours looked like they would be perfect, when the block was actually sewn, they just didn’t cut it.

So what is a disappearing 9-patch, all my non-quilting friends are wondering? Well, you start off by sewing a straight-ahead 9-patch block that looks like this:

Then you cut it into quarters, like this:

And then you twist and turn the quarters around until you like the pattern!

Pretty cool, eh?

What I learned is that strong colours work best, especially a contrasting colour in the center of the original 9-patch. All of these squares are the same pattern, and the colours I used are according to the chosen palette of each person in the bee. See what you think: