It’s been a busy, difficult few weeks. My uncle, who was diagnosed with throat in August (see this post about the week from hell), passed away. He declined rapidly in the last few weeks, and I’m both sad that he’s gone and glad that he didn’t suffer for long. Over a ten-day period Mom and her sister, Mickey, made a couple of matching hug quilts for my uncle and his wife. I don’t have a picture of Mike’s (we were in a hurry to get it to him), but this is the one we made for his wife. Mike’s quilt has a light gray background and is in shades of blue, green and brown. His daughter has claimed it, which makes us happy.

It’s based on this quilt from Needle in a Quiltstack, though I didn’t follow a pattern, just made it up in EQ7 and started cutting.

Before that, I committed to an art project that nearly did me in. I play with other artistic things – I enjoy drawing, and have slapped paint decoratively on furniture several times. I’m just good enough not to embarrass myself. You can see some of it in this dresser:

(See the Botanicals BOM Rosebud block on the table?)

A local botanical garden (Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville, WI) is celebrating their 25th anniversary, and they are doing an art fundraiser. Their volunteer made Adirondack chairs, which the Gardens sold to local artists, school classes, dilettantes like me – basically anyone who wanted to participate. We painted the chairs then returned them to the Gardens. They had them clear coated by a local auto shop and the chairs are on display throughout the Gardens until September, at which time they’ll be auctioned off. Here’s my chair:

And since it isn’t quilting if a cat isn’t involved:

If you look closely at the girl’s arm, the edge of the quilt, and the arm of the chair you can see a row of ants marching. They continue under the arm and down the leg. I do face painting at the Gardens when they have children’s events, and the ants are my favorite thing to do for very small, fidgety children because they’re super fast. They’ve sort of become my trademark, so of course I had to include them here.

Finally, Mom has been working away at the Fractalish quilt for my cousin’s wedding. I can’t lie – I really haven’t done much on this, though it will be up to me to quilt it. The thing is so large, the only place we had room to lay it out was the garage. The yard was just too wet. We put a tarp down on the garage floor, but even that wasn’t quite big enough. This photo is before all of the sections were sewn together – it’s a top now, measuring something like 108″ or 110″. Really, really big.