...back in the saddle again...(with apologies to all of you REAL Cowgirls out there!)

It's so exciting to be a Bloggeress again! THANK YOU, one and all, for waiting for this next entry so patiently. I'm determined not to let three months pass by again between our happy conversations, but lemme tell ya, these ol' brains have been smokin'! If I could make a truthful excuse and even blame just one Wonderful Person for such a lengthy lag, it would be Miss Valerie Bothell. Yes! It was her mind-blowing Victorian Fancyworks Retreat that made me spend the last two months, almost to the day, working on the "Mommy's Ties" Fancy FAN Blocks WORKBOOK (in order to have it ready for Saturday's class). Having lost almost all traces of my ability to "multi-task" in a coherent way, I knew I had to put away just about all other important things if I hoped to finish the 50-pager on time. Well, lo and behold, with more help from dear Lynn and Charlie and young son, Pete, the Workbook is a done deal and was debuted at the Retreat on Saturday morning. The ladies bought 23 of the 25 copies that we made, without even previewing the pages!, even tho' somehow two pages of the master copy got lost in space and time and thus didn't get printed. So in just a little while I must send the new owners of the book their last pages -- oh, and maybe a last few corrections or better-phrased descriptions of things. We'll see how well the dear ol' brains are behaving.

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What can I say about the Retreat in Wichita? In the first place, it was much, much too short. It needed to be at least a week long. I really feel that we were under a special Blessing from Heaven. Almost everything went better than smoothly, from the time we entered the host hotel (which served a full breakfast every morning and which was surrounded by an 18-hole golf course!) 'til we went to classes and learned all of our new things, I gave the experience ten stars out of ten. Of course, hotel management could have been more understanding on the nite the ladies frolicked a little too boisterously. THEY must not have been used to concentrated joy in their common area. Still, the classrooms were so large and beautifully lit, and the shopping was wonderful, and Miss Betty and Miss Judith were very happy that they said "yes" to Valerie's early request to come to a first-time-ever event. That's a hard decision to make, you know, as it is for prospective students, when there's no track record to enable anyone to gain positive information about a conference or other gathering. Having ladies come from all over the country -- from Oregon to Georgia and Tennessee -- as well as locally/regionally is such a super thing, and I will never forget the gorgeous crazyworked items that the participants brought with them. So much talent came to Kansas! I really hope Miss Valerie will host another three-day-or-longer event in 2009, and I hope, hope, hope that I can come "play" with Miss Thelma and Miss Lonna and Miss Ginger and the extraordinary Lake Jackson Crazy Bee ladies, among the other amazing stitchers who shared our time together.

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Today's quilt portrait is offered in keeping with my promise earlier: to show you one of my very favorite old crazyquilts in the whole world. Please click on the Tamar North Mourning Quilt to enlarge the picture and see the quilt's overall structure and the perfection of the its coloring and decorative details. Can you spare the time it would take to apply the "profiling" proto-cols that I discussed to the quilt? When I first saw this, it was on a postcard from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I fell so hard for it that I took it to a commercial photocopier and had it blown up to fit an 11-by17-inch sheet of paper; then I laminated it and began my studies. This was the first crazy-quilt I'd ever seen with so much organization, not to mention being the first one with this particular palette -- a color combination that turned out to be very traditional to the times.