Suzanne Earley

Shoulda gone to bed

Instead of going to bed, which is what I said I was going to do in my previous post, I decided to go work on my machine applique project.

I should have gone to bed.

I’m blanket-stitching away, starting work on a new section and…all of a sudden, the machine WON’T.  No matter how hard I mash on the foot pedal, it goes nowhere and…a message comes up on the screen:  MAIN MOTOR FAILURE.

I’m afraid some REALLY BAD WORDS might have escaped my mouth.

One of my first thoughts was “How fricking much is THIS going to cost me???”

The handwheel was sooooper hard to turn.  Turning it off and back on didn’t fix anything, so I lifted the machine up out of its well and start looking around.

It didn’t take me long to see that some portion of a bobbin’s worth of thread got wrapped around the handwheel.  I don’t remember how full the bobbin was, but it’s empty now.

@#$%@#$%@#$%@#$%@#$%

To bed.  I’m pretty sure this one isn’t going to magically be better in the morning either, though.

Reward

As a reward for getting some stuff done over the last two weeks (which is completely boring and the cause of the quiet blog), I pieced a new quilt over the weekend.  It’s the Slideshow pattern by Terry Atkinson, in the baby size.   Super quick and easy piecing.  I even have the backing seamed and the binding seamed and pressed.  Now to get it quilted.

And then…I was reminded that Mark’s cousin’s baby was a year old on Sunday.  And I remembered that I never made her a quilt, so…I started working on another quilt:

I’m following instructions from a Laps from fats book (but I can’t remember if it’s More… or if its L&F for Family & Friends…), she’s calls the pattern Cake Walk.  I think this is very similar to the pattern called Bento Box by a different designer.  People make such a big deal out of “who designed what” but you know what people?  It’s freaking squares and rectangles.

On a different note, the boys are still fascinated by their new yo-yos.  They are even learning (and mastering) tricks like the Baby Cradle and the Jamaican Flag.  Mark and I are getting tired of undoing knots in strings, though.

I don’t know exactly what made Mark think of it, but this afternoon something about strings made him flash on the Cat’s Cradle trick we used to do when we were kids.  Do you rememer doing that?  As soon as he had the strings on his hands, I remembered what to do for some of it.  Freaky.

He ended up looking some of it up on the Internet.  And then taught Will and Joe what to do:

This was the least blurry picture I took.  Sorry.  Too dark.  And haven’t done my lighting homework for this week’s class assignment.

My poor camera is making a really weird sound when I turn it on.  It’s still taking pictures just fine, but it sounds strange starting up and it’s scaring me.  If I have to send it in for repairs, the cost is something like $250.    It makes the sound whether the lens is attached or not, and we don’t really have any idea what could be wrong with it.  I’m worried that it’s probably something I did to it.  I’m not always as careful with it as I should be (imagine that), so I hope I haven’t blown it.

Maybe if I go to bed, when I wake up, the camera will magically be all better.

Can’t hurt, right?

TTFN-

Suzanne

What a great idea I had

And even better is the fact that MOM was the one to execute my great idea.  I am NOT a seamstress.  I can sew, but I cannot sew clothing.  Well, it’s probably better to say that I choose not to sew clothing.  I would guess that with practice, I could do a creditable job, but why would I when Mom is so much better than I at fiddly stuff like zippers and bias bound armholes and hems…

And what a cute job she did, too.  When the skirt fabric came into the shop I just knew it needed to be a dress for my 14-month old niece.  That tiny rickrack was my idea, too.   Aren’t I clever?

Hey Deb, it’ll be in TOMORROW”S mail.  Pinky swear promise.  Matt’s socks will be in the package, too.

Necessity

I can never seem to find my little container of binding clips.  Technically, the ones I own came from the hair products aisle at my local big box store (Have you ever noticed that if a company markets something non-quilty as being a “quilt” product, the price magically increases???)

I can never remember to buy more, either, so I usually can find about 2 and I just leapfrog them along the binding as I work on hand-sewing a quilt binding.

The boys’ quilts needed to have their bindings finished last week, and I couldn’t even find a SINGLE binding clip, so I started thinking.  I wasn’t going to use pins, because that’s just a recipe for disaster (and besides, if I bled on the quilt I didn’t have time to wash it).

I wondered what would happen if I tried using bobby pins, and I knew I could find a bazillion of those.

Worked like a charm.

Rebooting a project

Way back in October, I started making a sock using this scrump-dilly-icious sock yarn.  Over the course of many months, I even got as far as turning the heel and starting the foot.  I even posted pictures of the sock in progress.  Said sock was also the source of Dramatic Exit post

After I got the heel turned I decided to try it on.  Slipped te stitches onto some waste yarn and pulled it over my big honkin size 11 feet.

Many bad words were said and the sock was set aside.

See, I hadn’t made it BIG enough.  It was sort of big enough, but not really.  I could get it on, but it was just too snug.

I rilly rilly rilly want to WEAR a pair of socks made from this yarn, and I was afraid that if I continued on the path of not-big-enough, I’d never actually wear the damn things, and I was NOT going to give these socks away to anyone else.

So I let it sit.

And sit.

And finally, I did what I had to do.  I ripped it out.  Hours and hours of knitting, gone in minutes.  Unraveling knitting is actually quite satisfying in a weird way.  Complete opposite of say, frogging machine quilting.  Hunh.  Hours of knitting gone in minutes, Minutes of quilting, gone only after hours and hours of frogging.

Ironically, I’m finding that this sock is going faster than the previous non-sock ever went.  I think there are several reasons, one, I’m a better knitter and two, I fixed a technical issue I had with the WAY I knit, and now my tension is looser, which makes it easier to slide the stitches.

Also, the fact that I sat at the computer and watched not one but TWO episodes of Grey’s Anatomy last night whilst knitting away might have something to do with the progress being made as well.

One of each color, please

If I could afford it, I’d get one of each color of these sandals.  As it is, I’m happy to have a second pair to rotate with the first.

(Keen Venice H2, in case you were wondering.)

Yes.  I’ve been wearing my blue ones off and on all winter long, with socks.

That’s what I’m talking about

Follow up to yesterday, I give you this morning’s timetable:

6:45 AM  Telltale signs of small boys getting their breakfast out can be heard.

7:00 AM  One boy comes in to ask if he can play Wii.  He is fully dressed, teeth brushed, bag is packed and ready to go.

7:05 AM Other boy comes in.  Same.

7:45 AM Grateful Mom decides to finally get up.

8:00 AM Wii is turned off before Mom even mentions it.

8:08 AM  Out the door and on to school ON TIME.  NO YELLING.

This is not the first time they have proven that they can get ready in a timely fashion, not rushing, just doing it, under their own power, without Mom or Dad cracking the whip.  And they admit that it’s much nicer this way.

The trick, of course, is for Mom to work on not being hypocritical.  How many times have I proven that I can do this or that or the other thing in a timely fashion without rushing around at the last minute???  Funny, that.

Not a morning person

I’m not really a night person, either, but here I am at midnight, still up.  Gee, wonder if that’s part of why getting up in the morning is so hard?

I realized that isn’t morning specifically that I have a problem with, it’s having to be up at a specific time that gets me.  If I don’t HAVE to get up at 7, it doesn’t bother me as much to GET up at 7, if that’s my choice.

A week or so ago, the boys were setting their alarm, and got up on their own for several days in a row.  It was lovely.  Their motivation was having game time before school — which meant they didn’t need me to hurry them along, they were choosing to get ready in a hurry to have more time playing. And so, I snoozed until an obscene time, but still got up in plenty of time to drive them to school in my pajamas.

I’m not sure why they didn’t continue the alarm thing.  I’ll have to suggest it again

For THEIR sake, of course.  No ulterior motives here,  no way.

(picture is my January 9th daily photo.  doesn’t that bed look inviting?  wouldn’t you want to stay in it as long as you could in the morning?  gee maybe i should go get IN it right now!)

Terrible pictures, sorry

The letters are just sitting in place on the quilt top.  Option #3 was the direction I had been envisioning all along.  I’m still not entirely sold on the font for “happiness” — but I definitely want it to be a script.  I just hope I have enough of the fabric in case I decide to do something else…

The log cabin blocks are stolen from another project that I’m never going to finish.

I had to add some some strips to get them big enough.  And now that I’m at this point, I think I want that section to be a row wider.

Luckily I have more log cabin blocks…

Those need additional strips, too, though.

The next trick is to finalize the applique, stitch that, and then quilt it.  And then figure out how to finish the edges.  If I weren’t going to do it on the longarm, I’d actually do an envelope finish, or whatever you call it.  As it is, I think I’ll have to do a facing.

Hmmm, the first thing  I’d better go do is stay stitch the outside edges so I don’t pop all those seam allowances open around the edges…

Or maybe I should quit goofing around with new quilts when I have other things to do…

Choices

After finishing the insanity of the little bitty sashing pieces, I turned back to another quilt project I had been working on.  I stayed up far too late last night finishing blocks, and then the mind turned to what to do about the applique words I want to add to this one.  It dawned on me this morning that I could use EQ6 to do some auditioning, so I fired it up and got to work.  (It was only about 3 weeks ago that I broke down and bought a copy of EQ6, I haven’t used EQ in ages, which is why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to use it for this project.)

EQ6 is a blessing.

I’m able to look at all sorts of options that I’d never be able to do in fabric.

EQ6 is also a curse.

I’m able to look at all sorts of options that I’d never be able to do in fabric.

The images below are all exports of EQ images.  The real blocks are made, and the light ones don’t have this much contrast, they are much lighter.  The red ones, probably look pretty close to this in terms of range of values, but the EQ blocks are all the same, the real ones are all different.

The blocks finish at 8 inches (ish).  That means the quilt depicted in these pictures is 56 by 56.  Yes, the letters are going to be that big.  There will be more to the quilt, but I’m not sure what.  I’m leaning towards something asymmetrical, maybe a band of blue on the left, maybe with appliqued stars.

Here are some of my choices:

All 3 words in Calibri.

Or what about the three words all in a script font (this is CK_Alis_Writing):

Or what about two of the words in Calibri, and the final word in a script font.

Or what about……you get the idea.  I’ve scrolled through all of the fonts on my computer, looking for the perfect one.  I guess I need to go peruse some font sites for more options, since I clearly don’t have ENOUGH options.

I know which direction I’m leaning.  What do all of you think??