I had a whole bunch of things I should have been doing yesterday, but mostly I worked on this:
A few week’s ago, someone posted on their blog that they were going to be starting this quilt (and I wish I could remember who it was, so I knew who to blame…) and just had to have it. The book is from Blackbird Designs, it’s called When the Cold Wind Blows.
I started doing some of this as soon as I got the book, but spent yesterday finishing the cutting, and working on piecing.
That large applique panel with the stars was already pieced, I worked the square in a square blocks yesterday.
I’m still debating about the applique. The debate is hand vs. machine applique. It’s a question of which lifetime I want to have this finished in. This one? Then it had better be machine. THe next one? Yeah, the hand applique would be awesome but I’m notoriously slow at all. I love doing it, but it requires sitting in one place, and I don’t seem to be able to do that lately. Although, that’s really dumb, because I spend plenty of tiem sitting at the sewing machine, so…I’m not really sure what the problem with getting handwork done is.
I do really like the quilt, although I have to say that the Blackbird Designs style of pattern writing is not necessarily for the faint of heart, or for the type that needs to be told exactly what to do. That doesn’t sound right: the instructions are complete, but could be confusing. The way they list the yardage and then how they tell you to cut isn’t quite as…I don’t know. Obvious? Specific? Something. I’ll try to be more coherent tomorrow. I’m pushing my luck on my ability to type straight as it is.
Anyway. That’s what I was doing yesterday.
I also had to make supper for Mark’s birthday, and I had to make him a card. (It was his last-birthday-of-his-30s yesterday. He’s so much older than me, you know. OK, 18 months older, but from now until June, I get to pretend that he’s TWO WHOLE years older than me. Which is way older. And if you can unravel all of that, you can figure out how old (young?) I am, too.)
His card read:
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
You live with some monkeys
They escaped from the zoo.
The light was horrible. I tried to get a good “serious” picture of them as well, this was the best of what I took. It looks better here small than the full-res version does:
As I said, we had lighting issues, but it also didn’t help that they are not very willing subjects.
Our entire town looks like a flocked Christmas tree.
I took these photos at around 1 this afternoon, I didn’t think it was quite THIS gray out there, but…
Yeah. It’s been pretty gray around here. I think we’ve had dense fog for…4 days now? It was a lot better today, but still bad enough this morning that they delayed school by 2 hours. It’s actually kinda creepy. Like a fog from a horror story. Like one of those mists that descends on a town and suddenly everyone in town turns into a zombie.
And I think we’re all going to turn into zombies because of a decided lack of sunlight. Ugh. I’ve been trying to avoide weather reports, because (a) I know that lots of people either have the same kind of crappy weather, or have it even worse and (b) it’s actually not been that bad around here lately. But…I just had to share these crazy pictures. Mark took the camera out yetserday and got some close-ups, I’ll have to try to steal borrow some of his pictures later.
The poor trees — they look so pretty, but some of the spindly ones around our property are looking pretty pathetic. And it’s only going to get worse: the forecast is for freezing rain the next few days. So far the snow and frost collecting on the tree branches has been pretty floofy, but with freezing rain? I’m afraid we’re going to start to see some tree damage here shortly. Hopefully no power line damage, too, though.
I puttered around my sewing room, so that I could maybe have something quilt-y or sewing related to share today, but…I kinda just stared at everything. Dudes. Did I mention that schlepping around fabric is really hard work? Not that I’m complaining (much…), because it’s awesome to get so much fabric cleared out, but wow. I’m really out of shape. LOL
Last night I was in bed, lights out, and fast asleep by about 9:45. Tonight, I think I’m going to beat that…
So, for Katie, that means she ought to spend plenty of time in 2010 cuddled up on someone’s lap on the couch, right?
I just hope the fact that I spent part of the day doing inventory doesn’t give me any bad luck. I did spend time quilting one of my own quilts today, so that should bode well.
This one is a bit of a cheat. I actually thought this several days ago, but that lesson was overtaken by something else. Yesterday was really kind of a blur of painting, sinus headache, and the bag that I’m going to show in a second, so I decided to assign this lesson to yesterday…
The socks are new, and are awesome. And were made by Mom. Who is also awesome.
The Princess and the Pea fabric came from my Mom, who we’ve already established is awesome. It’s been sitting, waiting to be used, and when I got my Once Upon A Mattress music on Thursday, I immediately went a little crazy (crazier…) and started wondering about making a new music bag. The fabric is not really sturdy-bag-making-type-fabric, so I knew I needed to use it as more of an embellishment. I was thinking about using something from the shop, but remembered this brown corduroy that I’ve had forever. Like, it’s older than the boys, forever.
I ended up making things up on my own, sort of, after perusing some tutorials on some blogs and examining a messenger bag that I already own.
There’s a big corduroy pocket on the back, and 2 denim pockets, one on the inside, and one under the flap. The one under the flap was divided for pencils and other small things. The denim came from an old pair of jeans that got hole-y. The denim pockets are doubled, that’s actually the side seam from the jeans at the top of the pocket.
I’m pretty proud of myself for figuring it out. Of course, now that I’ve made it, I have several ideas for improvements, and as soon as Mom saw it she made some remark about hoping she gets one.
Sheesh. Some people.
Oh, and I still have most of 3 yards of that Princess and the Pea fabric. What should I make next???
Thursday night was Open House at the school, and the band director aka director of the musical handed me the piano and vocal scores for this year’s musical. I’m sure that 2 years ago when I got the score for Grease I was freaking out as much as I am now (Holy Heck, What Have I Gotten Myself Into??), but that turned out OK, so this will, too. I hope. 10 weeks from now, we’ll know.
Friday at noon, I got a phone call from the school nurse. Will had been pushed into a fence and had a scraped up wrist. I think it’s pretty nasty looking, but then, I’m a wimp. It didn’t need stitches or anything, but he had tried to go eat lunch and started to feel sick to his stomach, and when I got there, he was pretty pale and sweaty-looking. Kinda shocky. I wasn’t at all surprised by the identity of the young man that had pushed Will. He’s on their football team and Mark said this young man thinks it’s funny to just randomly push his teammates.
An online class that I signed up for last September, but never finished. When you sign up for one of Shimelle’s classes, you are in it for life, and I had forgotten that until I started getting the prompts. I’m going to try this again, as a different take on the daily photo project which I don’t seem to be able to keep up with.
Edited later to add: digital scrapbooking elements, including the page template, from the Life 365 collection at Weeds and Wildflowers. I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and the fonts are Helvetica and my own handwriting font.
Photo of Joe, taken by Will (they were working on the bay window in the background, I left my camera home for the boys to take action shots…)
Peony by our mailbox:
Siding all up, plus the new light fixtures installed. I skipped Friday (camera got left at the shop), but Mark took some pics with his camera, and I haven’t had a chance to get any from him yet.
Only 19 more to go. It took longer than I had thought it would, but I was only doing the one, when I’m working on a bunch at a time and doign some assembly line work, it’ll all go faster. Plus, I was still trying to figure otu what the heck I was doing, there’s a LOT of pieces to keep track of!
I’m still working on a post about half-square triangle units, and how I cut out some of those funny shapes, but it’s like Grand Central Station around here, and my family thinks they need my attention and…you know how it goes.
Yesterday’s photo:
I took the boys to the pool, but had enough sun after about 2 hours. My sister-in-law and her kids were there, so I just left my boys in her capable hands and came home. She brought them home a few hours later and when they tried to leave, look who hopped in the car! (She did go in through the door, they closed the door for the picture. When Mark saw this, he was worried that she had jumped in over the top…)
The boys were playing baseball and I was trying to take some pictures of them in action. Unfortunately, not many of them turned out very well, but one of my furry helpers just about knocked me over trying to get close enough to me. What a face. You can’t really see it at this size, but the darkest spot in her eye is actually my reflection.
It was raining today. What a mess. And the concrete steps didn’t quite come out the way we’d hoped they would. The two bottom layers were poured as one solid chunk. The top layer was separate. They ended up completely demolishing the top layer, and leaving most of the bottom two, but that’s OK, because that gives us room to build a deck over top of it.
We headed to Lowe’s to pick out some new light fixtures to go on eithr side of the door, and we looked at decking material. It’s not going to be cheap, but I think it will all be worthwhile in the end.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a Radiant Star update, but first, here’s some of the results from the poll that a bunch of you kindly voted in a few days ago:
I’m glad to see a few of you voted for that last one. Some days, that’s my answer for just about everything.
