Now Can We Put Away our Snow Shovels?

Our big late snowstorm blasted through here on Thursday, dropping about five inches of heavy, wet snow that threatened our trees and and newly planted spring annuals and made the day quite miserable.  The precipitation alternated between rain, snow, sleet and even some hail.  You know that I didn't want to leave the house but I had to run the library at a quilt guild meeting, so off I went.

The meeting was about miniature quilts, a couple of which you can see here.

I was greatly impressed by this little piece which measures 12" square so each animal is about two inches large.  

The patterns came from this book, but in it each block is much larger, somewhere between six and twelve inches.  To make them so much smaller took a lot of resizing and intricate cutting and piecing, which I'm not into but is still impressive.

Besides the speaker the meeting featured a display of about thirty quilts that guild members made for Blue Sky Bridge. a local group that provides support services for victims of child abuse.

It was gratifying to see these quilts, including one this one I had made with pirate fabrics, and know that they would be put to good use. 

When we came out of the meeting we walked into a sleet storm.  It was very unpleasant to dig ice and snow off our cars while the sleet pelted down.  And it was cold!  

When I finally got home I did what I wanted -- spend the rest of the storm sewing.  I got out a bag of batik scraps and began making free-form pieced blocks.  When I got tired of that I found some batik flower fabric and cut them into blocks to alternate with the pieced ones.  After a day of this I had a completed top for a little baby quilt, 24"x30",  just the right size for the guild's NICU outreach program. 

  

Between the snowstorm and the ensuing hard freeze the worry was that we'd all lose the annual flowers we'd just planted in the glorious summer-like days that preceded the storm.   There was a lot of ice and snow about.

But this morning it looked like all my plants had survived with the possible exception of the poppies which were heavy with their big about-to-open flowers.  We'll give them a few days and hope for the best.

This morning the clouds lifted over the Flatirons and it is bright and sunny today, though still fairly chilly.  The snow is already gone from most of the yards and streets, though up in the mountains it will take a while for the thirty inches they got to gradually melt.