Valentine's Day/Weekend Celebration

Mr. "Live Well" surprised me and took me away on a wonderful trip for Valentine's Day. When I walked into the hotel room, I found rose petals scattered on the floor!

Rose petals on the bed and dark European chocolate scattered on there as well...does it get better than that?!

Oh, yes it does when you also have a box of Rocky Mountain Chocolates...loaded with ALL of my favorites...dark chocolate toffee, peanut butter cups, and cream filled. YUMM-O

The most stunning bouquet of flowers from Bloomers. I think that sweet husband of mine thought of everything!

Besides all that love, Nedra from Cactus Needle hosted a beautiful Valentine dinner for us on Sunday. We had a wonderful dinner with family and friends!


While we were on our trip we had the opportunity to watch our daughter play basketball a couple of times. When we drove up to the gym, the first thing we saw was a large pole out front that has her photo wrapped around it. How fun!

After every game she has to have her ankles wrapped in ice from her injury I showed you back in November. She walks around with ice bags on her feet, freezing to death and dripping every where she goes. It's uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing as water runs down in a stream from her seat.

When the players leave the locker rooms and come out onto the floor to play there is a tunnel that they run thru...the tunnel is wallpapered with this enormous photo of her dribbling.

During the game when a time out is called or there's a media break, they have fans come out onto the floor and perform funny tricks. People toss frisbee's, try to shoot the ball with a bungie cord keeping them teathered to someone else and hula hooping. Our oldest daughter tried her hand or should I say hips at the hula hoop. She won an hour massage for beating the clock and her embarrassment! Needless to say we had a wonderful Valentine's weekend and enjoyed every minute of it! Live Well

2nd Installment of February's Girl Gang

Gail Berry is a member of our Girl Gang and she brings the most stunning antique quilts for us to enjoy. This one just may be my favorite. You'll see a close up below of the little flower print that the quilter used as her background and it is such a charming piece. Also, if you look in the bottom right hand corner of the photo, the quilter used different blues in the corner blocks as she must have run out of the original blue. Maybe she felt like we do sometimes that her quilt wasn't perfect and might not be fit to show and now all these years later, we LOVE it and admire her work and want to duplicate it! One thing I learn from seeing these beauties, is there isn't a 'wrong' way to do it, so I need to be kinder to myself.

This photo doesn't show the true color of this quilt. It is the exact color of cheddar cheese and gorgeous!

A couple of years ago our local quilt group copied this antique quilt and traded the cross blocks with each other for more variety.

Lori showed this darling bird quilt and it's high on my list of the next little beauty I want to make. I took 3 pictures of it! I wanted you to see the designer herself. She is super creative and I love everything she shows!

Lori's daughter got married last year and she designed this quilt for the new couple. It's an heirloom. Am I the only one who remembers being lucky to get a tied flannel quilt for their wedding?!

This is Lori's current Girl Gang flimsy. She used a newspaper print fabric behind her trees. And changed her bee skips to more of a hive. She's made the most charming quilt. I need to sit by her and maybe have some of that creativeness rub off on me!

Janice is one of our leaders at Girl Gang and she made this Valentine quilt a couple of years ago. She used about every red in her sewing room and I've been wanting to make it ever since. I've decided that I am going to make it even if it's not ready until next Valentine's Day.

First Installment of February's Girl Gang

I took so many photos the other day at our quilt meeting, that I'm going to show you part of it today and part of it next time. I have been trying to download these since Tuesday and for some reason the photos would not upload into blogger. I decided the best thing to do would be to start over on an entire new blog post, so I tried that today and it worked! The quilts below are by Wendy Nabhan. She's a new attender to our meeting and we found out rapidly how talented she is...and prolific! She has mastered the art of making quick quilts and has lots of ideas on how to speed up a project. She is a machine quilter who gets your quilt completed and back to you in one week! I've decided the woman doesn't sleep. The quilt below is a quilt for her family room and the back of it is a smooth minky. I haven't seen that before, but it is lovely and so warm and cozy.

This is a quilt I want to make for sure! I love how she put those picots on the edges and it goes perfect with the zig zag pattern of the quilt. I am crazy about the fabrics she used too.

A great use of layer cakes and you can see that picot edge again.

This quilt is a quicky. Wendy's family are BYU fans, so she made a football field quilt to cuddle under while watching the games on tv.

A whole cloth quilt made with wonderful fabrics and made even more special with a scalloped border.

A red and white beauty with large ric rack on the edges.

This is another layer cake. She cut the squares on a diagnal and then sewed the red strips inbetween. There's a close up below to explain more. She made the entire quilt in 5 hours!

Our fearless leader Flora showed some of her beauties. This is a darling Valentine quilt made simple with a panel printed with the wreaths and letters.

This is another one I'd like to make. I'm confident that my friends RaeAnn from Cutie Pinwheel and Nanette from Freda's Hive will be drooling over this one. They LOVE these grandma prints! She's teaching this class at Ruby's Inn this month girls!

This one would be a good one to use up bunches of scraps on! Or that fat quarter pack you don't have a plan for.

Flora's also teaching medallion quilts at Ruby's. This one is stunning!!

Gail is a member of our Girl Gang group and she is doing this quilt out of wool. Flora has been working on it in fabric. It's beautiful Flora!! I love your fabric choices.

African Peanut Stew

When I was on my trip last week with my new girlfriends, I did some of the cooking. They all had recipe requests and asked if I would post more recipes on my blog and maybe a little less quilting. So, here is the soup that I served our first night together. I forgot the recipe, so I adlibbed, but it seemed to work out fine anyway. I made this soup and a salad and some yummy chocolate gluten free cupcakes. My friend RaeAnn struggles with some gluten sensitivity, so I tried to make food that she could enjoy with the rest of us. Tomorrow I am going to my Girl Gang meeting and I'll take a big pot of this soup for them to taste test too.

This photo shows most of the ingredients. It's a very easy recipe and takes only about 10 minutes prep time and 20 minutes to cook. I got this recipe from a friend, who got it from "The Biggest Loser's Plan to Win" by Cheryl Forberg.

African Peanut Stew
* 1 T. olive oil
* 1 medium red onion, chopped
* 1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
* 1/2 c. chopped carrot (I use about 1 cup)
* 1/2 c. chopped celery (I use about 3/4 c.)
* 3 garlic cloves, minced
* 2 t. minced, peeled fresh ginger
* 1 T. curry powder (I use a heaping T. of yellow curry paste instead)
* 1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
* 1 bay leaf
* 4 cups vegetable broth (I use double the broth)
* 1 sweet potato, peeled and cut in 1/2" pieces
* 1 1/2 c. shelled edamame
* 1/4 c. creamy or crunchy natural peanut butter or almond butter (I only use almond butter)
* 1/4 c. chopped fresh cilantro
* 1 (5 oz.) bag baby spinach leaves, torn into bite size pieces
* 1/2 t. salt
* coarsely ground black pepper

Method: Heat olive oil in a 4-quart saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, bell pepper, carrot and celery; saute until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, ginger and curry and saute until fragrant, about 1 minute; do not brown garlic. Add tomatoes and bay leaf; cook, uncovered, until tomatoes are slightly reduced about 3 minutes. Add broth and sweet potatoes and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer about 8 minutes. Stir in edamame and almond butter until combined. Cook until thoroughly heated, about 2 minutes. Stir in cilantro and spinach until it wilts. Season with salt and pepper. Serves 8 (I cook the soup until it gets thick and creamy like a stew. Takes slightly longer than the recipe.)

Superior Threads

I just returned from a trip to St. George with some new friends and we had the BEST time. RaeAnn from Cutie Pinwheel, Susanne and Jackie all invited me on this wonderful trip with them. I felt sooo lucky! Nedra from Cactus Needle fame took us on a tour of Superior Threads. I have been there before because I went thru the school of Threadology, but my friends had never been there and Bob and Heather, the owners have built on an entire other wing that I hadn't seen before. It was so fun to see the school and to learn about all the advances that they are making.
This is a Kimono you see in the entry way and is what inspired Heather in the first place to begin to create thread that didn't break for American quilters.
This is a sewing room where you can learn all the techniques, play with all the threads and you don't even have to haul your own sewing machine! How awesome is that?! Brand new Berninas just waiting for you to play on!!

This is an upper room where there are long arm machines to learn all the machine quilting techniques and try the threads on a variety of long arms. If you already have a machine you can practice on the kind you own, or you can try out all kinds and see which one you'd like to purchase. They got in two more machines that were in boxes the day we got there.

There was a big pile of quilts that are the 'show and tells' that Heather uses when she teaches different techniques and different threads. I just had to take photos of some of them to show you!

A close up of the above quilt.

The 3 D parts of this quilt are done with thread! Her hair is different threads and is so beautiful. I should have rotated it for you before I posted it, but you get the idea. The fabric choices are also perfect for the texture of this quilt.

A close up of the above quilt.

A close up of the hair that I was telling you about. And those lines you see around the figure are all quilting lines.

This is neon bright varigated quilting thread and I think it makes the entire quilt. Heather is amazingly creative and then hires the most talented quilters to put it all together. So Beautiful!

A close up of the above quilt. I can't believe how talented some people are.

Still Feeling Tired from the Holidays?

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't talk to someone somewhere about their adrenal glands. It seems that as we live in such a high stress, go, go, go society, even the young are struggling with adrenal exhaustion.

The adrenals are small glands that sit on top of the kidneys in your back. Everyone knows the adrenaline rush you get from riding a roller coaster or finding the perfect piece of fabric :) or that achy feeling you get from the flu when you can't make enough cortisol. When you need to have a quick boost of energy, the adrenal gland releases adrenaline to increase blood flow and pressure as well as heart rate and the amount of light the eyes let into the brain! The cortisol smooths out the rough edges of this response and limits the pain and inflammation that come with excited biology. When the adrenal gland is rested and restored, sleep comes more easily, waking in the morning refreshed is a normal expectation and mood swings become much less of a problem. If you're concerned about an energy crisis, take a good look at your adrenal glands.



Though food is always the best source of vitamins and minerals, supplements are almost always required to reach optimal function. Adrenal support starts with good antioxidants and omega 3 fats as a foundation, but specific herbs and key vitamins and minerals have a more direct effect on function.

* Adrenal Support

* Pantothenic Acid (B5 about 100 mg. a day)

* Vitamin C (500-1000 mg. a day)

* Magnesium Complex

* Ginseng (I personally LOVE Suma as it is an adaptogenic herb...meaning it knows how to adapt to what each body needs)



As always, you are welcome to contact me and use my name or account number to receive 35% off all of your herbs. Live Well, Judi

I needed it, I had to have it, I couldn't sleep without it!

The only thing I asked for Christmas from my children and parents was a gift certificate to Broadbent's, our local quilt store. I set out the other day to begin a new quilt for my bed as the one on there is threadbare. But while shopping for that fabric (I'll show you that on another post), I passed this fabric by Phillip Jacobs called Delphinium and my heart began to beat wildly in my chest! Oh, fellow addicted to fabric friends, tell me you know exactly what I'm swooning about! I saw this on the shelf and dreamed about it for 3 days in a row. I HAD to have a quilt made out of it. No it wasn't a WANT...it was a NEED. The best news of all was that I had plenty of money on my gift certificates to make two quilts.

This lovely pile will grow up to be "Pastel Italian Tiles" by Kaffe in his new book, "Quilt Romance". Who needs sleep when all this fun is waiting for them?

Here's what is done so far. It's still dark this morning to be taking this picture, so it doesn't look as beautiful as it does in 'real life', but you get the idea. I have fussy cut the centers and the quilt just pops right off the display wall.