Her Husband Thought She was Crazy

OR

Proof that Denniele is a good listener in class.

I taught a class a while back, about improvised quilts. One  lesson was "No Scraps Too Small." To prove our point, myself and my teaching cohort saved the scraps from everyone's projects - we all worked with them to improvise.

Denniele Bohannon was in the class. Since that class, she made a quilt that became a book, "Where Poppies Grow." It's the Kansas City Star block-of-the-month quilt book for 2014, a great achievement. What that means is that Denniele's blocks and the stories about her quilt, which honors the memory of her great-grandfather who fought and died in World War I, were featured in the paper once a month all this year.

The book is now out. It contains patterns for all the blocks. Recently, Denniele sent me a bag of scraps:

She saved ALL HER SCRAPS FOR ME. Does that explain why her husband thought she was crazy? Yep, every single scrap, I can tell. large ones right down to shards.

Well of course, i am delighted! I will make all kinds of things out of these scraps. Some will go immediately into two small improvised quilts in progress. Even smaller ones will go on cards I make and my business cards:

Ruler added for scale.

I must admit, the shards are too small for even me ... check out Denniele's excellent book, written with co-author Janice Britz, when you can. I love the stories about her great-grandpa.

Pure Thrift

I like to blog! But somehow I've been distracted for the past month ... however, blogworthy events have continued to happen to me, so look out, I have some things to show you.

Gotta start with this - a hot pad acquired at a local garage sale. We've had a fine time garage sale-ing lately. We stopped at one and found a woman who made crocheted dishcloths. I like to have those on hand so I chose several and complemented her on her color choices and lovely work. For some reason, the woman said I have something to show you and dashed back into her house. She emerged with THIS and explained that she used to work at the local cleaners. When they sent package of clothes, they would be tied up with white string and she hated to see it go to waste so she saved it. This is one of the hotpads she made from the string.

You'll notice from the detail that she had to tie string together to keep going. Oh how i love this. it is very soft and so dear to me. Isn't it wonderful? She GAVE it to me, it has a good home.