15 years of blogging!

My first post

Today marks 15 years of blogging! 

I've done 1,458 posts, 

about two a week.

Total views: 705,735

(And this is no April Fool's joke!)

I've posted about quilts, gardens, hiking, sunsets, friends, family and food. You've been with me through the highs (my kids getting married and my becoming a grandmother), the lows (my divorce), lots of new quilting projects, and the adventures (moving to Tucson by myself during Covid). You've buoyed me with your comments and your friendship. For this 15-year milestone, I'm wandering back through the memories. Come along!

Here's the link to my first two posts on April Fool's Day 2010 (picture above): https://sherriequilt.blogspot.com/2010/04/under-construction.html

________________________________

Most popular post

12,900 views!

My most popular post, which garnered about 12,900 views, is from Nov. 9, 2012: https://sherriequilt.blogspot.com/2012/11/an-easier-way.html

I wrote about how using a sticky solvable stabilizer to make my airy scarves is easier than the non-sticky Sulky Solvy. Who knew it would be such a hit? Here are some of my scarves, which I was selling back then.

___________________________________

Most joyful post:

Baby Juniper

My happiest post was about meeting my first grandchild, little Juniper, who lives in Spokane. That was in January 2024. So tiny and sweet, and now she's a toddler happily exploring her new world.

Juniper at 14 months.

____________________________

Saddest post

Not so happy was the Jan. 19, 2019 post about the end of my 36-year marriage. But that ultimately led to me being able to move to Tucson, where I've wanted to live for decades and where I have made many new friends and find peace and joy hiking in the desert, so all is well now. 

Blogging helped me get through that first awful year. I started collecting quotes that gave me strength, and I still refer back to them often. 

_____________________________

Both kids

got married!

My son, Keith, married Rachel on July 12, 2014.

My daughter, Julia, married Jade on Sept. 23, 2023.

And now they are three.

______________________________

The groups

I had so many groups in the 12 years I lived in Gig Harbor, WA, and you got to read all about the Feet & Forks, STITCH, the Yoga Girls, book club, Woolies, Sew Day, quilt guild, Comfort Quilts, and Harbor WildWatch. I hope I haven't forgotten any. In Tucson I have the Shady Ladies hikers and Book (eating) Club.

We supported each other through deaths, births, divorces, marriages, graduations, cancer, surgeries, diets, and the general aches and pains of getting older. But mostly we laughed!

The Feet & Forks walked twice a month, rain or shine, and then went out for lunch. If sweet potato fries were on the menu, we got them! And now we meet up once a year in the Southwest to keep walking, eating and exploring new places. 

Sew Day was five of us who met every month in each others homes to sew and have a fabulous breakfast and lunch. Here we are on my back deck in 2019, above, and in my sewing room in 2011, below. We looked so young 14 years ago!

One day we experimented with discharging the color from black fabric, below.

The Yoga Girls gathered at a party at my house in September 2018. We met through yoga classes at the Y and then started having coffee afterward several times a week and big parties once or twice a year that included our husbands. 

STITCH, the art quilt group that I started, was so inspirational. Most summers we took the ferry (above) to Andrea's house on Anderson Island to dye fabric or do other messy projects on her deck. Twice we had retreats at Anne's home on Whidbey Island where we spread throughout her house and sewed and laughed for a few days. 

The Comfort Quilters makes quilts for cancer patients, and it was one of the first sewing groups I joined when I moved to Gig Harbor in 2008. I've become fast friends with Carol, the founder. 

Harbor WildWatch, which I volunteered for, educates the public about the intertidal life of the Puget Sound. sea-stars-giant-nudis-and-harbor-lights.html. It was all new to me (I didn't know that live sand dollars were purplish black) because I'd never lived on the water before, except for the Rock River in Illinois.

We introduced beach walkers to the little creatures that were exposed when the tide goes out, like the barnacles and shellfish clinging to rocks and the many kinds of sea stars.

The Woolies meets at Pam's house monthly to work on wool appliqué, but one day Pam showed us how to dye wool with Kool-Aid, with luscious results. (Imagine what it does to your intestines if you drink it.) Check out the post for directions: dyeing-wool-with-kool-aid.html

I documented lots of good times with my Gig Harbor book club, above at a Christmas party, and my Tucson book club, wearing fancy hats for a Kentucky Derby party. The Gig Harbor group actually focused on the books, but in Tucson our meetings are a big potluck where we catch up with our personal lives and might discuss the book for 15 minutes LOL!

The Shady Ladies! I met Beth and Barb on a Meetup.com full moon hike in the Tucson Mountains soon after I moved to Tucson knowing not a single soul here. We were all new and single and they became my first Tucson friends, and we're still hiking together almost five years later. That's us on the Linda Vista Trail, below, half a mile from my house. Then Beth started the "book" club and that's how I made more friends.

I could go on and on with posts about the groups, but then I'd have to keep sorting through thousands of photos! 

_____________________________________

Flowers and Sunsets

The flowers were most spectacular in Washington, but Tucson sunsets are the best. I must've done hundreds of posts with flowers (and now cacti) and sunsets.

__________________________________

Quilts and other art

This started as a quilting blog, so I guess I'd better include some quilting posts! Here are a few:

The post about my trunk show and talk: thanks-gig-harbor-quilters.html

I was a columnist for the Peninsula Gateway, and one column was about quilting: fat-quarters-stashes-and-stitches.html

I blogged about my quilting with painted sheer silk phase in 2010 ...

... and my crazy quilt phase as well as many more phases but I won't go into all of them.

____________________________

Getting philosophical

Sometimes my posts were philosophical, like this one: in-depth-of-winter.html

_____________________________

The blog book

Every year I get my posts published in a book, because I think it's always good to have hard copies of writing and photos that you want to keep. Here's my 2024 book, with my favorite green on the cover.

The publisher, intorealpages.com filled an opening spread with a selection of the year's photos. And that's a wrap! Thanks again to all of you who follow me or just pop in occasionally. I love getting your comments! If you can't leave a comment on the blog you can email me at sherriequilt@yahoo.com. I hope to keep blogging about all things colorful for another 15 years!

Have a colorful day

Another one done

I finished another 16x20 collage today. The colors in the one above look different from the one below because I took the photos in different light.

Here's where I was playing with arrangements of painted fabric around my desert photograph.

Then I pulled out embroidery floss possibilities

The fun part was when I started making big cross stitches. That's the meditative part.

While I was stitching and watching the news last night, a dove perched on the chair outside my window and seemed transfixed with the TV for almost an entire hour! Or maybe she was as shocked as I was about the latest national news and just couldn't move.

Have a colorful day

Desert door art piece

 

As Tucson heats up (96 yesterday), I'm enjoying working with some cool colors like green and blue.

I finished my first 16"x20" piece and stapled it around a stretched canvas frame today! I printed my photograph of a door on fabric and then fused it to some fabric that I painted. This is a style that's evolved over the last year or so as I switched to skipping the quilting and stretching my pieces around a frame so they present more like paintings. I started with 8x10 pieces then upped it to 11x14, and now I'm starting on 16x20 frames.

I'm using this photo that I took at Catalina State Park for my next piece. I printed it on silk twill, then painted more blue and green fabric.

I like the way the fabric paint moves around in response to wrinkles and air bubbles. It makes for a more interesting result.

I was impatient for it to dry, so about halfway through I draped the fabric over some succulents and it dried in five minutes in our 5% humidity desert heat.

Now I'm playing around with different arrangements ...

... the possibilities are endless!

The one thing I have to do is straighten the saguaros before I fuse them down. When I applied the Mistyfuse to the back of the photograph I guess the iron pulled them a little out of shape. If I can't get them to fuse down straight, I'll cover the curves with some collaged fabric and hope for the best.

Have a colorful day