Evelyn, aka Starfishy asked, “Do you have a “landmark” that marks your return home? Evelyn showed us a picture of the harbor near her home. Then Dot of Rantala Rags responded by posting a picture of her landmark; a “Welcome to Montana” sign.

What landmarks stand out from your part of the world?

This is a picture of the mountain that I see from my living room window. (The picture was not taken from my living room window though–I headed to the outskirts of town to get a picture with nothing distracting in the foreground.)

The patch of snow in the middle of the mountain represents an angel. (If you look closely you can see her head, body, and wings.) When the snow melts from this mountain in the spring, this patch of snow is left. This mountain with the angel is definitely something that identifies my town.

I have added a world map to the left hand side of my blog. This map tracks the location of visitors to my blog and plots those locations on a world map. I can not see details of who you are or what your city is; I can just see the map with the pin points representing the home of each of the visitors to this site.

It appears that there are visitors from Australia, South Africa, Norway, Ireland, France, the United States, and Canada.

It struck me today while I was checking the map, just how small this world is. The World Wide Web or WWW has shrunk this great big planet. We can now communicate and exchange information with people anywhere in the world in seconds. Blogging has become a fabulous method of “getting the message out.”

I know that the visitors here include relatives who check in periodically to see what the “latest catch is”, family members who suffer from insomnia and use their inability to get a good nights sleep to check this blog in the middle of the night, members of my own quilt guild who don’t leave comments on the blog but when I see them at guild meetings remind me that I have not posted recently, friends that I used to see on a daily basis who have moved to other parts of the world, including Arizona, Ontario, and Italy, and there are my new friends–the Stash Quilters who track the feeds from my blog using Bloglines so they can read the “latest”as soon as it is posted. To all of you, I say, “Welcome to my small spot on this planet. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you continue to visit.”

No quilting for me today. I went to work and on the way home, I stopped at Craft Night at In-SHUCK-ch. I didn’t take any projects to work on because I knew I would be busy visiting. I was right. Lots of yaking and and laughing–not too much in the way of completion of projects! It was good to see everyone again.

When I got home, I decided to check Bloglines to see if any of the blogs I regularly read had been updated. As I was reading through my favorites, my daughter shouts from the living room, “Dad is home! And he has a fish!” I called back to my husband, what is it? (Meaning what type of Salmon.) And he calls back, “Blog material!” So you heard it, it is a Salmon of the Blog Material variety, also known as a Spring Salmon.

Finally! Here it is–my Bricks and Stepping Stones quilt–completed to the flimsy stage. Now it is ready for quilting.

I stayed up until 11:30 last night putting the borders on. I was afraid if I stopped, I might not finish it the next day. When you are on a role sometimes you need to keep pushing forward.

Today, I had two quilt holders. This quilt is large, 87″ x 107″. However, my helpers are different heights so one corner is folded over at the top. This quilt top is square, it is just too large and cumbersome to get a good picture of it at this stage.

I have seen two different Road to Ireland quilts on other blogs lately. Take a look at Eileen‘s blog to see her beautiful blue version, and take a look at Linda_J‘s blog to see her friend’s pastel version. Both of these quilts are beautiful!

Now take a look at my version:

I know, what happened; right? My version isn’t quite in the same category as Eileen and Linda_J’s.

M’Liss Rae Hawley’s instructions in her book, “Fat Quarter Quilts”, says the following:

“One of my favorite fat-quarter quilts, Road to Ireland was a happy mistake. The blocks came out the way I planned, but not the setting. (My planning consists of marks on napkins, ferry schedules, and the like.) So I rearranged my blocks, and I love the result.

The Road to Ireland setting looks best when there is high contrast between the road fabric and the six fat quarters.”

This seems fairly common sense to me and yet as you can see, I have missed the “high contrast” part. Perhaps I concentrated too much on the planning stage of making marks on napkins and too little time on the choice of my contrast fabric.

The good thing about this quilt is that it was made entirely from my stash–that part of the plan worked. However, if I had even switched the placement of the red and green fabrics I think the design would have shown up better.

This quilt stalled at the unfinished top stage for years and I finally quilted it up in November 2005 as a practice piece on my long arm.

However, all is not lost. This quilt is currently in my mother’s quilt collection. My mother is willing to adopt any of the quilts that I make–especially those that I don’t particularly like. In fact, she watches this blog on a regular basis to scope out quilts that can be nabbed in the future!