Welcome back!

     Hello to my past followers, and maybe some new ones. I have been very lazy about sharing what I'm sewing on here ever since I moved in July 2018. And here we are at the end of 2019! I saw a post a month or so ago from Cheryl at muppin.com about a 31 day blog post challenge for the month of December. It seemed like a good way to try to get going again. And then I missed starting yesterday. Oh well, better late than never, right?

     To introduce myself, my name is Mary and I have been sewing as long as I can remember. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut that still had a 5 & 10 cent store. They sold individual stamped blocks for embroidery that my great-grandmother started me on. I still have them somewhere and will share when I find that box. As a side note, I moved last summer from a large Victorian home in Portsmouth, NH, back to northwestern Connecticut, near where I grew up. I am now in an 1,100 square foot ranch and still have lots of boxes I haven't unpacked. I am planning a studio addition but didn't get it started this summer; next year, for sure.

     As a teenager I had fabric available that my grandfather had saved from the factory he worked at in New Milford, Connecticut. He would bring home bolt ends and strike offs and they were in a metal cabinet in a barn at my grandparents home. By the time I was sewing clothing for myself the fabric choices were pretty slim, but there were still lots of solids. My grandmother, mother, sister and I all sewed so competition for the good stuff was stiff. Once I started working after school and during the summer I bought my fabric. I started quilting in college, on a used machine I bought from another student.

     I also owned a quilt shop in New Hampshire from 2004 to 2011, called Little Lamb Quilt Shop in Barrington. It started with a partner and the plan to carry kids fabric and wool. It was the best job I've had, combining so many of my skills, including accounting and web design. Unfortunately I began to have health problems that made the physical side of the business too much for me.

     Now, I am retired and try and sew some every day. My current project is the Quiltville Mystery Quilt that Bonnie Hunter starts the day after Thanksgiving and continues for several weeks with clues on Friday. I collected the weekly clues for 2013 to 2017 before actually making one of the quilts. I still have them saved and hope to get back to make them. This is my 2017 On Ringo Lake quilt made with controlled scrappy reproduction fat quarters.

I have all of the parts of the 2018 mystery, Good Fortune, made and the blocks are assembled. It has several pieced borders that I am finishing between other projects.

Here is my step 1 for this year's mystery with one of my cats, Seamus. I look forward to the clues coming out each week. Be sure to visit Bonnie Hunter's blog for her daily posts. Since I'm a quilter I have lots of other projects in progress. Plus, I'm just now thinking about any Christmas presents I want to make. So this will be a busy month, with lots of things to share. I hope you can stop back again. The suggested topics for the blog hop are below.

#31dayblogchallenge2019

Thanks for visiting!

Mary