The June auction for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative includes two of my small quilts.  This incredible volunteer organization has raised more than $916,000 for Alzheimer’s research since January 2006!  AAQI will stop its fundraising efforts at the end of this year, and has a goal of raising at least $1,000,000 before then, and this is one of the last auctions they’ll be having.

Both my parents died from Alzheimer’s, and I wrote a bit about why I make quilts for AAQI in this blog post and also this post. Continue reading →

I’m trying to finish up all the small quilts I was working on for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative since 2013 will be their last year of fundraising.  This one is in memory of my father who grew thousands of daffodils.

I started with this photo of some daffodils in a mason jar. Continue reading →

Here’s another small quilt I’ve made for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.

I started with this photo I took at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s annual Art in Bloom exhibit.

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Last year Spoonflower.com had a contest to design a fabric based on a recipe.  I chose to do a design based on one of my grandmother’s recipes, and I wrote about it in this earlier post. My grandmother, who we called “Gockoo”, did lots of cooking and baking, and kept a handwritten journal of all her favorite recipes.

The fabric was designed to be a repeating design, but I thought it would also be fun to make a version that I could turn into a small quilt. Continue reading →

Daffodils mean the arrival of Spring, but they also always remind me of my father.  Every year he would divide and replant the daffodils forming the border of our yard and the adjacent woods.  Over time there were literally thousands of daffodils which would welcome us each Spring

We’ve had crazy weather in northern Illinois this winter–warm and no snow–and I’m almost surprised the daffodils aren’t already blooming.  I took this photo this weekend (mid-January).  These flowers (I don’t remember what they’re called) are usually one of the early bloomers in Spring.  I’ve noticed that they’ve been trying to bloom since mid-December (which can’t be a good thing).  After a particularly warm, wet few days, the weather turned back to normal for January and the poor flowers are coated in ice.

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Each spring the Milwaukee Art Museum has a 4-day exhibit called Art in Bloom which pairs amazing floral arrangements with the museum’s artwork.  We went to the show last spring, and I took tons of photos of the flowers.

Continue reading →