Noriko-san's work

I was so blown away by all the comments on the dress I bought!  I haven't felt so pretty in a long time!  My blog friends have really convinced me that the choice was good and I will confidently attend this upcoming wedding feeling I have lots of friends backing me!  Thank you so much!

I have stayed close to home since the shopping expedition though my mind is still on wedding plans or rather plans for what Tetsu and I are going to do in Detroit AFTER the wedding.  I am really not very good at planning things and I am dragging my feet.  Tetsu frowns and says,

"I don't understand the problem.  We are going to America and you speak English.  Even if there are confusions you can communicate.  Just book some places to stay and figure out how to rent a car..."

But I've never done any of that...  My travels have been limited to going back and forth from my California home...  Ah well.  It will work out.

I met up with my good friend, Noriko-san and we had lunch together downtown.  She lives about three hours away so we don't get together all that much and this time too was lunch and coffee and a spin around the mall.  Noriko-san brought her most recent patchwork projects to show.  She has a private exhibit every couple of years and she threw together this Anne of Green Gables quilt in a hurry...  She said that she's had enough of redwork for awhile!

We could only spread out the quilts in the aisles of the mall so the pictures aren't great...  This Anne quilt was from a kit that Noriko-san had bought and she also had given Mrs. Furui and me the patterns nearly 30 years ago.  Well, at some point the patchwork group Mrs. Furui and I lead made the quilt for the Children's Hospital, but I know I don't have the patterns anymore...  And it has taken Noriko-san this long to finally make use of the kit she had!  She said she didn't use one pattern and instead redworked the Bible verse Psalms 90:14 which is one of her favorites.

"Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives."

This was another quilt that Noriko-san brought to show me.  These are McKenna patterns that a blog friend had sent to me years ago and though I had made a couple of the patterns with friends, I hadn't made all of them.  Last year when Noriko-san came to my house to visit I asked if she thought she'd have time to make all the patterns and she jumped at the chance!  I also raided some of my batik fabric stash and handed scraps over to her and she went home and made up the whole quilt!  Actually however, that pattern for that poppy block got lost somewhere in my sewing room and I never was able to find it though she asked me to look through my bookshelves...  We finally gave up and Noriko-san made up her own poppy block pattern! 

Noriko-san and I go back to before Leiya was even born when we started doing patchwork together with Mrs. Furui.  Noriko-san has gone on to have her works published in well-known Japanese quilt magazines and quite a lot of her work contains Bible themes.  It was good to see her latest work and also share about our families and faith.