A visit with Lee Anna Paylor

Yesterday I had a delightful visit with Lee Anna Paylor of Not Afraid of Color. Her husband was in town on a business trip and she and her poodle, Cole, came along. It turns out to be a win-win situation because he has a traveling partner and she gets to sample all the local quilt shops. I directed her to my favorite, Fabric Shack, which, of course, she loved, too!

It was so nice to spend the morning with Lee Anna. She is a very friendly, talkative quilter so it was lots of fun to show her some of my new quilts and quilt tops that I’ve been working on since taking some workshops with Nancy Crow. I got to show her the quilt that I just finished this week. Sadly, I can’t show you, too, because it will hopefully be in an exhibit which prohibits showing the quilt on any blog before the exhibit begins. That quilt is one of the reasons that my blog has been so quiet. It goes against the grain to not blog about what I’m working on, but there you have it. By the end of our chat, my quilts were in a huge, happy mound. I think that’s better than having them neatly packed away any day!

I also got a sneak peak at a beautiful hexagon quilt that Lee Anna has been working on. She is positioning the hexagons in a unique configuration so it is more like a landscape. Very beautiful and colorful.

Other than my short reprieve with Lee Anna, I’ve been very busy with two renovation projects.

The first has been at our church. It is a beautiful structure that was built in 1850. It is built into the side of a hill so both the main floor and the basement have ground-level access to the outdoors. As such, we have had some difficulties with water in the basement when we get heavy rain. The heavy rains we got in May and June finally motivated us to take action. We decided to rip up the old flooring and replace it. But before it was replaced, we decided we should get a waterproofing company to install more drainage. And, since the flooring was gone, I thought this was the perfect time to repaint. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to worry about the floor, right? And, the guys decided that they should finally deal with the awkward downstairs bathroom, so that was totally gutted, a new floor was poured so it was level with the rest of the basement, and new storage cabinets and fixtures were installed. More painting there, too, of course. Yep, it’s like the old story of when you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to want a glass of milk… Renovation projects tend to snowball.

The second renovation project is the house that DD#1 and her husband just bought. It was built in 1940 so it needed a little renovation, too. We’ve been cleaning, refinishing the kitchen countertops, papering the cupboards, and repainting the whole house. They’re also having the bathroom redone and the house will be carpeted. There were some other repair projects that had to be done, but happily I didn’t have to do any of those. They got the house, which sits on an acre lot, for a great price, so that’s always nice, but they really bought it for the fabulous view! The only downside is they are about 30 minutes away from us. At least there are good roads between us.

Earlier this month we got one more piece of fabulous news — DD#2 is expecting again! She’s still in her first trimester so we’ve had the pleasure of spending a bit more time with little Miss Hazel so Mamma can get more rest, or sometimes so Mamma can actually get some work done and answer emails for Purposeful Gift. Hazel, now 14 months old, calls Sweet Hubby “Baa-pa” (she can’t quite say “gr” sound yet), and he’ll tell you that he is her favorite person in the whole world. That’s probably because he gives her chocolate. 😉 Pretty soon we’ll have another little one to spoil!