Tis a Puzzlement

When I arrived home Saturday evening after a wonderful few days in Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, I found a very large carton in my living room. (My friend Cathy had taken in my mail, packages, and fed my fish while I was away.) Inside the package was a "Puzzle Magic Tabletop Puzzleboard" from Herrschners .  I am not a jigsaw puzzle fanatic, but during the warm months I  usually have a puzzle on the table on my sunporch. The large piece of felt and cardboard tube used to roll up puzzles in progress never worked well, so I was searching for something better. This is it!!! As you can see, you may change the working angle and if company comes and you need to move it, there is a board which fits over the puzzle and the board may then be closed, locked, and slid under the sofa. What a great idea!!!
 

It's awesome. I love being able to tilt the top to avoid the glare from the many porch windows and look . . . I have only about 850 pieces to go on my current puzzle! Below are my two most recent finishes. "And the Blue Ribbon Goes to" had only 300 pieces, but I couldn't resist the expressions on the contestants' faces. It made me smile the whole time that I was working on it. :-)

The peonies bloomed while I was away and the knockout roses are spectacular.

Paris Time Capsule by Ella Carey is a light but enjoyable read. In 2010, the apartment of Martha de Florian, an actress and courtesan, was discovered after having being abandoned for seventy years. The owner had fled Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion and never returned. You may see actual photos of the contents of the apartment here. Amazing but true, the apartment remained locked and untouched all of those years. That part was all true, and Ella Carey who had read about this apartment used it as the basis of her fictional account.

Finally, I posted a photo of this quilt when I was working on it a while back. In the post, I had mentioned that it was for the group that provides quilts and pillowcases to the children of service men and women in the National Guard who are being deployed. At the last meeting of the Herring Run Quilt Guild, Anne one of the organizers of the group asked about the quilt. She had seen my earlier post. Oops! The quilt was in a pile of items which were not quite finished. After the meeting, I went home and added the final rows, layered, and quilted it. I presented it to Anne this morning at the Crosstown Quilters Guild meeting. Gee, evidently all that I had needed was a little gentle prodding. :-) Isn't the fabric adorable!

My trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park with photos and tips will be in my upcoming posts..