Dear Deer....

While we love to see you out in the wild, we would prefer that you keep off Route 590 at 5 in the morning, especially when you come from the left across 4 lanes of traffic to miss our car by mere inches! A pastoral setting like Marcia's is a much better place for deer and here is one of two we saw this morning shortly after arriving at her house!

It was a very productive day to get started and finish up many things that have been put off for some time by trips, quilt shows etc. First on the agenda was photographic the four quilts I own that were made by Lena Mae Cooke. I had purchased them from her granddaughter some time ago at an antique sale. Three others are owned by the local Rochester Museum and Science Center and of course the most beautiful ones are still owned by the family -- pictures of most of these were in the quilt show slideshow from several days ago. Mrs. Cooke was the second president of the Genesee Valley Quilt Club. I ran into her granddaughter at the quilt show and she indicated that her children were very interested in her grandmother's quilts and that she was putting together a book about them and wanted photos of the ones I had (which she didn't realize I had). So today I took pictures. Imagine my surprise when I spotted dates on two of the quilts in the quilting!! I closely inspected the other two and couldn't find any dates though. One was a lot earlier than I thought.

These first two are a pair of Carolina Lily quilts which are twin bed sized with lovely green swags. These are the two that don't have dates.

This is the detail from one of the two Carolina Lily quilts.
This is my favorite of the four quilts and is appliqued tulips with a blue ribbon swag. It has lovely quilting and a date of 1941 on it.

Detail of the center of the Tulip Applique quilt.

A closeup of some of the quilting as well as the embroidered 1941 date.

This is a fairly utilitarian scrappy basket quilt. This has a date of 1936 quilted in one corner. I had never seen it before today and it took a little inspection to finally see what it was!!

This is a closeup of the basket quilt pictured above.

This is a closeup of the 1936 date I found quilted in one of the corners of the above quilt. It reminded me of similar finds in the RMSC quilt collection! Always fun to find things like this.

Besides getting pictures of the quilts, I also managed to make my new granddaughter a little hat and cut out a dress for her. The hat will definitely go with her grandfather when he visits the family this week. I also managed to cut out four aprons for another family member (Gail, don't tell Bill). I will be dyeing and marbling at least a couple of these.

My last task was trying out a cute little pattern for a purse that I found. It is called the Potato Chip purse as you supposedly can't make just one. Hmmm, we shall see about that!