April Showers -- Rocky Mtn Style

Hi all -

Well, it's been a pretty wet weekend up here. For us, that means a lot of wet, heavy snow. We got over 2 feet of snow at my house Thursday afternoon through Friday morning, and it continues to add a couple of inches more each day. Here's an idea of what I got to deal with on Friday:

I had started shoveling, then realized that I should take some pictures to share with you. I think you can see that this was the type of snow that was so thick and heavy that I had to shovel in layers to get to the ground. Ugh! Luckily I actually enjoy shoveling snow, but this was pretty exhausting. Here's the driveway once I was finished (I saved the cleaning off of the car for Saturday):

Since I'm right-handed, I always shovel the left side of the driveway on the way down, then the right side on the way up. In the picture you can see the couple of new inches that fell on the left side while I was shoveling the right. The neighbor was nice enough to come over and help me with the end of the driveway where the snow plows left the big chunks. Even so, I spent 3 hours shoveling on Friday. Then I took a 3 hour nap.....

Now don't get me wrong. We really need the moisture so this is a very good thing. But it's so hard to look out the window at all of this snow, when just a couple of days ago it was all melted and looked like spring. You know how you get into that spring mindset.

But on the bright side, all of this will be gone again before we know it and then we can enjoy the May June flowers (we are generally a bit behind everyone else up here)!

On the quilting side, even though I have a lot that I need to get done, I felt the need to do some mindless piecing for a while. So I got out one of my UFOs -- a Judy Martin log cabin quilt with some changes to the pattern. Here is the plan that I mapped out in EQ7:

This is Judy's "Summer Lake Log Cabin" pattern from Judy Martin's Log Cabin Quilt Book, but I changed the coloring a bit and added stars to some of the blocks. I got the idea for the stars from another one of her books, but I had to draft the blocks myself because of differences in the underlying log cabin blocks. My version required some partial seams, but the result is pretty cool and worth the effort.

I had already pieced about 2/3 of the blocks, so I finished piecing the blocks and then assembled the middle of the quilt. Here's what I have so far:

If you look carefully, you'll see that I screwed up the center block a little bit. There was supposed to only be one red log around the center part, but I ended up with two. It's the right number of logs, just the wrong colors. That's what happens when you think you know what you're doing and don't look at the plan! I think it would look better with just the single red log, but it wasn't worth taking out and I absolutely love how this quilt is turning out! The colors are much more vibrant in person that what they appear in the photo.

As usual, I have other stuff that I need to work on, so this will be put aside for a little while again. April will be over before I know it, so I need to get the April FMQ Challenge pillow finished (I started it yesterday) and then I want to make a little bag for my niece that I can put her high school graduation money in. Her graduation is May 19th, so I need to get cracking!

Nancy