Me, a Blogger?

Well, here I am giving this a try. I will start by introducing myself. My name is Bren and I am from Northern Illinois. I am married 28 years in July and have 4 children. One son (I call him Bud) is married to my daughter in law Rachel and they have a beautiful little guy named T.J. (short for Tyler James). They all live about 4 miles down the road from us. I have 2 more sons, Kyle 21 who is developmentally delayed but only mildly, and Zachary who will be 6 in July. My daughter Charlotte will turn 10 tomorrow, her golden birthday. My husband and I adopted Charlotte and Zach several years ago. I homeschool them both. I will not pretend it is easy but I will not complain about it either ;)

My love of quilts and quilting helps keep me sane and I thrive on being around other quilters. The downfall to that is, my friends who quilt live rather far away, so I get little "quilt interaction". I recently joined a couple of online quilting groups which are fabulous. Nice ladies! Through them I was able to connect to some blogs by quilters and feel such a connection to these ladies who do not even know I exsist! That is the bond that quilting brings.

I machine piece and will occasionally machine quilt a table runner or placemat, however my true love is hand quilting. I do everything else to get to that point. I also love to hand applique. I am a Thimbleberry lover and the colors that are drawing me lately are dark purples, mustard gold, pumpkin spice and cinnamon. I plan to invest in some yardage of those colors very soon.

This is my current handquilting project. It is a Jacobs Ladder Variation. The pattern came from a quilting calender my son and daughter-in-law bought me for Christmas in 05. It is queen-size and will go on my bed. Here is a detail of the center (excuse the orange basting thread)

I am also working on an applique/pieced quilt for Charlotte's bed and Eleanor Burns Underground Railroad Sampler, which is now a top, but I am putting on hand appliqued vine and flowers along the boarder.