Cathy (cacnurse1) said:

This morning I went grocery shopping without my phone.  Guess who wanted to reach me? 

ROTGL!!! I did a similar thing, went on a quick trip to the PO, truck wouldn't start coming back--forgot my phone!  Had to borrow the Postmasters phone to phone home so hubby could come in and jump the truck!  Do  you think I will live it down? No, but there is no sign on the door!!

I think that's a case of getting older and wiser.  You take your phone with you 999 times and it's the 1000th time that you need it.

I have my credit cards & drivers license in my phone case, so I pretty much remember it.  DH not so much - whenever we leave I ask him where it is, he's left it so often.  And it's difficult to find him (wandering around) in a store without his phone.

Yes, I make sure my DH has his phone in stores. He goes all over in those carts! 

Well, while the forum's party animals are having a good time in Phoenix I will settle down here at my keyboard and try to entertain the other stay-at-homes (Dee, Lynne, are you reading?) with the tales behind these new blocks I am going to add to my Kresge Kid project.

DD visited and she made some suggestions about removing a couple of blocks and changing a few of them. (For example, the lumpy popcorn block for Marion is gone and she wanted me to change her brother's block ... said it was too dark and gloomy.)  She suggested improvements and I agreed.  The daylilies and kitty hearts are cuter than the popcorn bowl.

The three fabric squares with daylilies on them represent the hundreds of cultivars of daylilies I have grown at three of our addresses. Some people go nuts over roses (which take too much meticulous care IMHO) and some grow marvelous vegetables to share with friends and family. Me, I grew daylilies for their easy care and exuberant colors. I started out at our Michigan house with perhaps 150 cultivars, then at our first house in Marion I had over 350, and at this last house I had maybe 75 but I got smart in my old age and made sure all of those at this house were  at least 30 inches tall (or taller) so I did not have to bend over to deadhead them. (Found the pretty daylily fabrics at Spoonflower.)

The green square with the yellow patch represents the first national Girl Scout Round-Up held in 1956.  Yours truly was one of 4000 teenage girls who traveled to Michigan to participate. Unlike the boring Boy Scouts who always go to Philmont (sp?) the Girl Scouts did not have a permanent camp site and moved around. Anyhow, note that I sewed that patch on a bit crooked; that's because we had a tornado pass within a mile or so of our campsite. Blew our kitchen fly a long distance from our kitchen tent and we had some scary moments as we held on to our slackened tents. I now know for sure what a greenish tornado sky looks like and am not scared when local news calls for tornado warnings. It was exciting meeting girls from Norway, Texas and Florida at this huge encampment even though I got one heck of a terrible sunburn.

Found a fabric with Scrabble® tiles and made a block to show my attitude towards the game. My DF brought a new game home from his Kresge store in 1954 or 1955 and said "Here's a game we got in today and I think you girls will really like it."  Like it?!  My mom and I pounced on it and I've been playing it ever since. I've never played in a national tournament because I do not have a "killer instinct" so to speak ... I play to have fun. (I still have not memorized all of the two letter words. LOL) I have a pair of two other senior citizens that meet at my house twice a month that have the same spirited attitude; we play with wicked senses of humor and cheerful insults but are well matched and have a good time.

Next to the Scrabble® tiles block is my memory of the fifth grade, my horrid year I spent at the school on Grand Island, NY (suburb of Buffalo). I don't recall the name of the school or the name of the teacher but I do recall that I was bored stiff and I got in a lot of trouble because I passed notes and talked too much. Therefore I always had to write "I will not talk in class" 500 hundred times on many, many days. This punishment was after classes were over and so I would miss the bus that took me home. My mother did not drive and so I would have to walk home and sometimes my dad would be driving home from work at his store and he would drive by me walking home and would shake his finger at me ....  so I would walk more slowly. 

The experience at that school had one good outcome; it's the reason when I was at Kent State that  I resolved to become a fifth grade teacher and to be a better teacher than that horrid woman was.

Jigsaw puzzle block is obvious. I jigsaw puzzles big time! 

Next to the puzzle block is a block to commemorate our two kitties, Pooky and Misty. They were actually DH's kitties and I joked that if a cat could do his laundry and cook his meals then I could leave and no one would miss me. Pooky came first as an adult stray about three or four years old and lived with us for about eleven or twelve years. After she died the house was too empty and so six months later we went to the Humane Society and found two year old Misty waiting for us. 

I am here.  I love your stories.  But I hate scrabble.  Perhaps because I've not played enough to really learn it, but basically I don't like word games (hate crosswords).  My DD likes them tho.  I have been working this week, 2nd week at new job.  I'm out of practice and have been so tired at the end of the day I haven't sewn much.  One night I did quilt a donation quilt that turned out pretty well.  I was having problems seeing the thread so I got to pushing various buttons on my machine and discovered I could turn the lights off.  viola, I could see the thread without the direct light.

I love your stories and how you are finding quilt blocks or fabric to express them.  

My quilt mojo is still only operating on every third beat or so.  I have made one flimsy this year, that was only because I want the group of ten inch swap square gone.  Jo

That's interesting that you could see the thread better without the "glare" of the direct light. Maybe the shadows were important in this particular combination of thread and quilt?

Part of being successful with Scrabble is the luck of the draw; if  you have a string of bad luck when you pull letter tiles out of the bag then you can't have much fun. Nothing worse than looking at a rack with seven letters like C C I V R R X.  Some people would sit and fume at their bad luck, clever people would dump most of the letters back in the bag and draw new letters thus losing a turn but maybe getting nicer letters to play with the next time.

My quilt mojo will fizzle out once I am done with this Kresge Kid quilt top which might happen pretty soon.

DD is coming to visit this weekend for another look-see at the blocks. I think I have run out of block ideas which means it will be time to rearrange the ones I have on the design wall and then think about how in the dickens I am going to assemble this thing.

I have a nice-sized box of "strings" (mostly jelly roll leftovers) that I can use for spacers, etc. like the original Gypsy Wife pattern ...

Well let me tell you Judy we are not the party animals we used to be. It is a much smaller group this year. I asked about the Zoom and they said there was no TV to use and nobody that had the computer savvy to do it.

Love you stories. I remember having to write sentences like that 100's of times.....all it taught me was that the teacher was mean. Ha!