Today was Mark’s last day of work here at the Los Altos Rod & Gun Club.  We now have two weeks to pack up and hit the road.  It’s somewhat bittersweet for me.  I’m excited about my new job coming up in March and seeing my family and Oregon friends before that, but I have made some really good friends here that I hate to say goodbye to.

One such friend is LaVern from my quilting group.  She is a prize-winning quilter.  I had heard this from the other women at the quilt group.  I was having difficulty with a project I was working on, and everyone in the group said, “LaVern is the best person to help you.”  A week ago she came up to my place and looked at the mess I’d made and offered to take it home and fix it.  This last Friday she invited me to her home in Redwood City to see what she’d done, and also to see her quilts.

When I got to her house we worked on my project for a while, and then she asked if I’d like to see her quilts.  I said I’d love to.  She had them on the walls in several rooms in her house, but the guest bedroom was the most amazing quilt storage I’ve ever seen.  There were quilts on the walls and a quilt on the bed.  Then she flipped back the top quilt and there was another.  She kept flipping back one quilt after another; quilts of all sizes, shapes and colors.  She said that when she gets tired of the quilts displayed on her walls, she trades them out for some of the others on the guest bed.  A few are quilts that were handed down to her from both sides of her family, but most had been made and hand-quilted by her.  She told me about the various quilt shows she had won prizes at.  I was dazzled!

She fed me lunch and we continued working till mid-afternoon.  Then she gave me a huge amount of fabric, a 3-dimensional pot holder she had quilted that I can’t ever conceive of putting a pan on, and a couple kit projects.  She also gave me some pieces of hard plastic that I can use for cutting edges.  Her generosity was overwhelming!