Some of my favorite quilts

One thing about being married to a quilter is that it seems there is never enough time to get all of the quilts done and never enough material. Okay, there may be enough material, but I've yet to meet a quilter who believed that. The nice thing about being married to a quilter is that I get to see all of her work. And in truth, all of her quilts are my favorite, but I have some that carry a little more weight. We missed taking photos of some of JoAnn's early quilts. As we have gone to visit family we take photos of the missed quilts when we realize we don't have a photo. It goes in our flickr collection. In fact, as I was searching through our photos I realized one of our favorite quilts - at least one of was not present. Thank goodness it's one of the few we kept. We have had it hanging up for years.

I can't possible, in a single post, share all of the quilts that carry a little more meaning, so I will spread these posts out over the next several weeks/months. We shall see.

The variety of quilts is almost daunting. The above right quilt was made for our oldest daughter and is a departure from what JoAnn usually does. It took a long time and a lot of debate over colors, layout and the like. I'm amazed at how much learning goes each and every quilt.


The quilt shown above was the one I alluded to earlier. It is one of her first and remains one of my favorite quilts. I love the colors, the bees, the flowers, and the little quilting pin on the lower right hand corner. The quilt below is my personal favorite because she did it for me. It hangs right above my corner desk in our bedroom where I can look up at it frequently.


Finally, at least with this post I finish with another piece that JoAnn just completed for our youngest daughter, now living in New Mexico. When we went to visit this summer we took time to do a little quilt material shopping. That means I dropped JoAnn off and went looking for a Dairy Queen. No luck with the Dairy Queen, but you can see from the quilt below she found some great material. I love the way the colors go together.


Please note that there are no grandchildren quilts in this selection. That will be in a later "Quilting Grandma" blog.

Why We Shoot Photos

David Pogue in his New York Times Blog recently wrote about "Why we shoot home videos." He identified 5 reasons including (1) for our older selves, (2) for our descendants, (3) for pleasure, (2) for historians, and (5) for posterity. Read David's post to enjoy his discussion.

It got me to thinking about why we do shoot photography. The collage above represents our family photo historians. Each of us has shot thousands of photos - many of those in 35 mm slide film. In the back is Robert Merriam (yes there are 2 of him), who began taking slide photos almost from the very beginning of availability of Kodak 35mm slides. He was an early adopter and he took copious notes on every slide including date, location, subject, time, speed, and aperture. Jean (Merriam) McLean followed in her father's passion shooting many 35 mm slides documenting our family. Both were gone before digital photography became available. I'm sure they would have loved it. I began shooting shortly after I was married 40 years ago and have amassed a large collection of slides of our family. I also have many of my grandfather's and mother's slides. I almost forgot. In the left upper corner are 2 of my sisters and my nephew. They are late adopters, but they are making up for lost time - especially my nephew.

We love to sit and watch slides as children and have fond memories of doing so. Okay, the truth was, we did watch slides, but at the same time we didn't want to do it too often. Now that we are older it is more fun. Flickr and other photo sharing technologies allow us to see the photos anytime we want, instead of waiting until the whole family gets together. Technology has changed the way we view photos and the availability of photography. Where I would once shoot maybe 4 or 5 slides, I now shoot as many as I want and hope to get a good one. Okay folks, why compose when I can hope for luck.

While this is a hobby, it is also important to me. When we lost our grandson I gathered photos from multiple family members and put together a 208 photo video for the funeral. No one person in the family had sufficient photos, but together we did quite well. In addition I made DVDs for the entire family - over 30 at this point, and while we may not watch it much, we have it and it is a reminder of someone we will always love, remember, and appreciate.

So, why do we shoot photos/videos? I think because we all like to think of ourselves as a part of history and a part of a larger family. It keeps us closer together. It allows us to be a part of other membes lives who may not be so close. When Joshua was born his Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) already had a blog going and we felt like we were part of his first few weeks. The blog was liberally sprinkled with great photos and videos. This helps to strengthen the family unit.

Well, I'm off to do some more family history recording - or as a former colleague said, "I'm 'making history.'" Well spoken.