Vintage Photo Friday (and some other random stuff)

This is a photo of my grandmother on my dad's side. Her name was Oneida (pronounced "Oh-nee-da", not the other way like the silverware company). Actually, her first name was Grace, but she went by Oneida. She was born and raised in Indian Territory, on a small farm just outside a small town in our great state. She is the grandmother who inspired me to quilt -- I have several of her quilts in my possession, and, although she didn't pass it on to me directly by teaching me, after she passed on I realized that if I didn't carry on the tradition in our family, no one else was going to. What a little firecracker, that Grandma of mine.

Today was a great mail day -- two fun packages for me. Here is the first one, fresh from a recent swap through Paperback Swap. A brand new hardback copy of a Kate DiCamillo book -- Border's sells this one for $18 or $19. I think that rounds out my hardback collection of almost all of her books for my son's library.



And then this fun little package arrived! Last week I was reading through some of my favorite blogs, and this little beauty caught my eye on The Farm Chicks. When I clicked through to the Etsy store, I was quite surprised that it was so affordable, so I ordered it. I love vintage bathing beauties, and being a bathing beauty is somewhat of a little inside joke between my husband and I. Eventually I hope to put up a collection on one wall in my guest bedroom of all my favorite Etsy art purchases.



I also whipped up another block for our quilting bee, this one for Edith. Edith requested circles -- yipes! I don't know about other quilters out there, but curved piecing scares me a bit. I was about to just applique a bunch of circles onto a square of fabric when I remembered that we had already tackled some curved seams with the "drunkard's" path block we did earlier this year, so I made a much smaller version of that and added a border all the way around with some squares. Um yeah, those little drunkard's blocks are much harder the smaller you try and make them, lesson learned. Maybe that's one reason they are called "drunkard's path" -- maybe a little swig of somethin' somethin' helps ease the fear of curved piecing, haha.



Yesterday my boy and I were in the front yard when we found this ginormous bug in the grass. He was so big (surely it's a boy bug, right?) and actually surprisingly strong as well -- he had quite the grip on the blades of grass when I tried moving him to a piece of mulch. My husband was brave enough to hold him on his hand for us to get a better look. Our neighbor told us that it is a cicada bug -- one of those loud bugs you can hear in the summertime making long sort of hissing type sounds. Pretty cool.



I just have to give a shout out to GOD for giving us some GORGEOUS weather today. We have had a really long nasty spell of upper 90s, low 100s (with high humidity) that has been miserable, and today is the first day of upper 80s weather!!! It feels so refreshing to stand outside and feel an actual COOL breeze instead of the hot furnace winds. So enough typing -- I'm going outside!