A few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,

Silver white winters that melt into spring,

These are a few of my favorite things.

I wish the transient beauties that define spring were not so short. The lilacs are in bloom now here and the scent is totally intoxicatingly sweet (almost as sweet as that angel behind the lilacs!). They don't cut well - wilted before I went to bed, but it's a shame not to have that sweet smell in the house for a bit.
This is a shot from my alltime favorite tree - crab apple. They are really quite ugly, almost gnarly in shape sometimes. But when they are covered with the deep pink blossoms, it is magical. Just magical. And they too are so sweet to smell.
Yesterday was my husband's birthday. My daughter had recently watched an episode of Ina Garten's cooking show, and decided that we just HAD to make that cake for Dad. I told her that either looked like a wedding cake or a girl's cake, but she didn't care. So...Thursday's task was a two-tier pink chocolate birthday cake, complete with sugar pearls on the flowers! Yum!

And since this is supposed to be a quilty blog, I leave you with some of this week's piecings. I have a commisison quilt to make. It is supposed to resemble this quilt. I informed the customer that these blocks were from a swap, and I could not exactly replicate them, nor was I going to try because that is an insane amount of cutting. I am actually making it larger than that quilt, but have scaled down the cutting by making it from a fense-rail 6" block rather than those more time consuming colorblocks. I have all but 7 of the 120 blocks made up and have only duplicated fabrics 3 times! Not bad...I have so many fabrics and scraps in my stash. I really could probably make it 3 times that size without duplicating if I tried harder! It will still be cute, even with a slightly simpler block.

I have been longarm quilting a great quilt. It's made from reproduction fabrics from the 1920's. The blocks were made by the client's 100 year old grandmother! Actually, I do not know if they are authentically from the 20's or if they are repros. At any rate, I cannot wait to take this off the frame tomorrow to photograph. It is out of this world fantastic - I love it a lot! So stay tuned for pics of it next week sometime, along with other goodies!

Have a wonderful spring weekend~