A Quilter, A Fiddler, and Ireland

I taught both of my daughters to sew when they were in middle school, never dreaming that my quilting passion would be so contagious. (Although I have no idea why not. After all, our kids easily pick up our bad habits, why not good ones? :) My girls started out making dresses and baby quilts. Since then, both of them have made full-sized quilts, though Rissie tends to be a little busy these days with my very active grandson, and hasn't had much of a chance to get back to her sewing yet.

Nutmeg, on the other hand, has become quite the prolific quilter. Her first major project was a marvelous sampler quilt, which she created as a senior project. She did a beautiful job, and even entered it in a county fair, winning second prize. I'd love to inherit it some day...except that's backwards, isn't it. Oh well. Here's a picture of that sampler. She has a great picture of it on my bed. It looked very nice on my bed, Nutmeg, so when you get tired of looking at it, you can put it right back on again. :)

She has created quite a few quilts since then, and I definitely have my favorites. I'd like to share a few more of them before I tell you about my fiddler and Ireland. Nutmeg made me a beautiful wall hanging called a Carpenter's Wheel, which is pretty nifty given that her dad is a carpenter.

Another one of my favorites was a kind of marvelous memory quilt that Nutmeg created to commemorate her brother's tenth birthday. It is a bookcase with shelves full of jars containing various items special to TBear, his favorite books from that year, and other odds and ends. He loves his quilt as much as I do.

Here is a close up of some jars on the front. Note the jar with the fishing theme, and the one with the escaping butterflies on the shelf below it. The back of the quilt is black, and Nutmeg quilted neat things into the jars too. It's very cool.

Finally, the quilt Nutmeg recently finished piecing is the one I am hoping will help get TBear to Ireland in June, where he will play his fiddle with his teacher and her group of Pineland Fiddlers, and learn some Irish fiddle tunes too. Raffle tickets are being sold by the fiddlers. Not only will someone be blessed by Nutmeg's beautiful handiwork, but it will help defray the cost of traveling overseas. I'm not sure what a trip to Ireland is going to do to our haying season, but I guess we'll worry about that in June...

Nutmeg told me this rainbow-colored pinwheel quilt is her favorite...except for the gorgeous wedding quilt she's currently working on for a dear childhood buddy who is getting married in February. In case you're wondering what Nutmeg does in her spare time, she's working on getting a master's degree in secondary education.