Thanksgiving 2009

People started arriving for T-Day on Tuesday: my stepdaughter and her husband, daughter aged 7 and new son aged 9 mos from North Carolina, then my sister and her husband from Missouri, my niece and her husband and barely one-year-old son from Chicago, my daughter Annemarie and her husband from Summit County, a cousin and friends from Fort Collins. My husband was ecstatic that we had 19 people for Thanksgiving Day dinner. He fried the turkey, I cooked everything else with the help of my daughter and sister, including a vegetarian entree and 4 pies. My brother-in-law served the wine and led the charge to clean up the kitchen.

I showed the book of Mariner's Compass patterns to my sister in the evening while turkey and football torpor set in for the rest of the family. After some consultation and perusing of the patterns, we settled on the cover quilt of Judy Matthiesen's book. The pattern is called "Starfire" and has a 16 point star with an outside ring of another 16 points. On the cover and inside the book, a photograph of the quilt showed gradations of color from purple through blue to red. My sister isn't that fond of blue, so we decided to grade the color from dark purple to red-purple to red. OK, off to the quilt shop on Saturday.

Saturday my sister and I stole off to the Fig Leaf in Fort Collins. I hastily perused the book, looking for instructions on how much fabric to buy. I would have to approximate anyway, since the quilt in the book was only 84" x 84", and my sister wanted a king-size quilt. I couldn't quickly find any specifics, but wasn't concerned since I had "upsized" patterns before which I thought were a little small. In our hurry, we just decided to buy fat quarters of everything, and 1/2 yards of fabric we really liked.

My sister paid for the first round of fabric, a little over $80.00. The next week I added more fat quarters to the stash from another favorite quilt shop at 136th St off I-25, Tomorrow's Heirlooms on a trip back from Denver.

Finally, after pre-shrinking, ironing and starching, it was time to get started!!