This is a little quilt I made Spring 2000. Our Wednesday morning quilt group was meeting at Nancy's, outside Platte City, MO, pretty open country.  It was an incredibly windy day...60mph straight-line winds with gusts much higher. Four of us got to the house at the same time and they were teasing me, thinking I was sitting in my car finishing up the blocks that were due that day.  Anyway, we all struggled against the wind into the house. The house was groaning from the straight-line winds and the uplift forces hitting the roofing. It was awesome. Nancy's cat insisted on going outside and we joked that we'd see the cat come flying by the sliding glass doors any minute.

About this time, Dorrean, one of the group that had arrived when I did, realized the project she'd been working on was missing from her basket.  None of us had seen it fly out so we hoped she had forgotten it at home.  She scoured the neighborhood and couldn't find it.

On my way home, I stopped at a quilt shop & found a pattern of a girl raking leaves. I immediately recognized that I could change it into a story block...The Very Windy Day! I had it ready by the next week and Dorrean about cried! She had searched when she arrived home and the quilt was gone...it probably ended up in Iowa!

So the cat in the top left is Nancy's black cat blowing away, Dorrean's basket is empty and the quilt is flying off over her head without her seeing it. There are leaves everywhere, just like that day and on the bottom left is a fabric that looks like children's writing paper (someone's school work was floating around the neighborhood). Dorrean quilted the block and has a swag of leaves hanging around it in her sunroom.

And why do I believe in Karma? On my way home that very windy day, after buying the pattern and deciding to make this little quilt, I walked into an Antique Mall and found a Singer Featherweight FREEARM sewing machine at an incredibly reasonable price.   But I made sure to finish the little quilt BEFORE I played with my new machine.

This little quilt is probably the most fun and rewarding one I've ever made.