Suzanne Earley

You’re as cold as ice

The front step and sidewalk LOOK like they are wet, but it is actually a sheet of ice out there.

And the picture looks sort of cloudy because I was taking it through the storm door, which started to fog up while I was trying to get Katie’s attention.

I was going to go downtown and try to finish taking inventory, but opted to stay home.  Mark offered to drive me, but…I was OK with staying home.   (It meant more quality time with my sewing machine, resulting in TWO quilts that are now bound and washed) and some 4-patch posie blocks I was playing with awhile ago are now assembled into rows.  I can’t sew the rows together yet, because I need to get some more fabric from downtown for setting triangles…

Two years ago I tried this Daily Photo thing, and lasted until the end of February (Actually, that surprises me, I didn’t think I had made it that long…).  I’m hoping to keep it going the entire year.  I am planning to print them and somehow put them into a binder or album and include the journaling/explanation so that 50 years my boys will know why I took a picture of the dog staring up at my through the window.

Oh!  After I took that photo of Mark last night, EVERY time I wandered past him for the entire rest of the evening, he was most definitely asleep (no matter what HE says.)

Later!

Suzanne

Having a Heat Wave

I was singing to the boys last night.  They hate that.

It’s especially obnoxious when I don’t actually know all of the words to a song.  And when I’m really trying to annoy them, I sing as loud as possible and try to go slightly off-key, too.  (Which is harder than you might think, if you are trained to sing ON-key).

Supposedly it’s 25 (F) out there today.  I think that means it is going to snow again.

I know I’ve said before that I had found my Holiday spirit, but apparently that was short-lived.    I have to spend some quality time wrapping gifts tomorrow, so maybe I’ll catch it by then.  In the meantime, I’m going to go quilt.  One of my own, of you can believe it!  I’m always so much harder on myself when I’m trying to quilt my own projects.  I’m just…this…close…to pulling this one off because I don’t like what I chose to do…but.  I’ve decided it’s too late and I’m going to soldier on.  And once it’s all completely finished I’m sure it’ll be fine.

The boys did get to go to school today for one final day before their winter break.  They took the quilts to their teachers, I hope the boys will tell me what their teacher’s said when they got unwrapped.  Today was also the day that they were supposed to walk their food donations to the food pantry.  I’ve seen 2 school buses drive by the shop, so I’m kind of guessing that they stuck them all on a bus instead of making them walk…

The quilts we gave the teachers this year are Double 9 Patches. Katie was my quilt tester a few days ago:

I just posted a tutorial for how I made them on  my other blog.  It’s nothing exciting, but I figured that after doing the math, I might want to (a) save it for future reference and (b) share it with anyone else that didn’t want to have to do the math themselves.

OK.  Back to work.

Hope you are warm and safe wherever you are.

Suzanne

Gratuitous cuteness

Why are you making me stay home alone all day?

It’s about time

Well, in an hour it’ll be time:  I’ve managed to go for many (many) weeks longer than usual without a haircut and it’s dire, people.  So dire.  It’s so long, I can use a single long barrette to pull back both sides and only need two bobby pins to keep the strays in place.

Dire.

I’m tempted to have her shave it completely off.  But then my husband would complain that I spent good money when he’s perfectly willing to shave it for me.

I’ve been taking gazillions of pictures of yarn (to put on my shop website) and actually filled up my 2GB memory card the other day.  Now, of course, I have to spend the time to process all of those lovely files.

Here’s one to make you drool.

And the photo doesn’t even do it justice.  It’s that gorgeous.

In taking all of these photos I kept finding myself thinking that a particluar color was my favorite.  No wait, this one is my favorite.  Or this one.  I want to make something out of every single skein of yarn. Even the orange is yummy, and I’m not a huge fan of orange! Seriously.  My addictive personality is…in trouble.

Speaking of being in trouble.  Mark and the boys brought this amazing cart down to the shop from my Mom’s house yesterday.

It’s a South American Wedding cart, circa 1950.  I need to take better pictures of it.  It’s really amazing.  Take note of the little head in the window on the right, though.

Katie came down to the shop with me for awhile.  I was in trouble with her, though, because she could see all of these people!  And Cars!  And activity!  On main street — but darn it all, she was stuck inside.

She came down over the the weekend, too, while Mark was hanging curtain rods.  Every plastic package he opened, or anything either of us carried around in our hands, she was certain was FOOD.  She sat in her beggar mode or jumped up to try to sniff or get a look at whatever we hadn in our hands.

Yesterday I caught her chewing on the bits of cardboard the boys have been leaving around.  (They are cutting up boxes and making various…things…mostly weapons, I think.  Don’t you love boys?)  I guess I need to take some dog toys or bones to the shop with me if she is going to be there.

And don’t worry, she is NOT going to be door greeter.  She will likely NOT ever be at the shop if there are customers expected.  Or if there are customers, she’ll be closed up in a room.  Where she’ll be barking and whining, so pretty much…she’ll stay home most of the time.

Time to quit procrastinating and get some more of those yarn pictures processed.  Have a great day!

Oh, and I need to count the minutes until my haircut!

Suzanne

farewell to maggie. and jake.

Went out to the farm last night.

The grass was so gloriously green.  The field on the left had just been cultivated so it was a nice deep brown.    It likely got planted today.  Mark is out farming today and said it was mostly dry.  They’ve been pretty antsy to get into the field.  I think my mother-in-law is the one that is the most relieved, I’m sure my father-in-law was starting to drive her a bit nuts.

Over on the right, at the top of the picture, just beyond that dark lump (which is a pile of old fence posts:  that’s where the Bunny Tree can be found.  Well, tree(s) plural.  Where the bunnies live.  And where our family pets go to eternally chase the bunnies under the bunny trees.  For those that don’t know, my puppy Maggie unexpectedly passed away in March, she had only been with us for 2 months.

It has been so wet, we haven’t been able to take Maggie out to the bunny tree.  Unfortunately, my in-law’s 15 year old rat terrier Jake died over the weekend, which meant that it was time to put Maggie to rest as well.

It was an absolutely gorgeous evening.  We took Katie with us, it was her first trip to the farm (we hadn’t taken her before because Jake is very territorial and he would not have liked her one single bit).  The boys got to run the excavator a bit, Mark is much more patient than I would be with that sort of thing.

That thing takes a lot of concentration to remember which lever to push in which direction in order to make the contraption do exactly what you want it to do (and where you want it do it!)

After the burial, they played in the mud some more and Katie and I wandered around the farm a bit so she could sniff out all of the new smells.

And so that I could take some pictures of interesting things.  Actually, I put my camera away before I saw some of the really interesting old farm stuff, I’ll have to go out again with a camera, the pile of old clay tiles was pretty cool, and would make for interesting art quilt inspiration.

This old cultivator was pretty neat:

At least I think it’s an old cultivator.  I probably should have checked with Mark before I started talking about farming equipment.

Katie and I are waiting for the boys to get home (they stayed at my sister-in-laws after school) and for Mark to get driven out of the field by rain.  We don’t really need anymore rain right now, but it’s coming, it’s just a question of when, exactly, it’ll hit.

Thank you to all of you that provided hugs and support when we lost Maggie.  I still really miss her, but at least she is now chasing the bunnies with Jake, Toby, Sarah, and Elmo.

Suzanne

Quilting assistants

Of course there is Katie, who generally sleeps through any quilting I do (she climbs up on the back of the couch in my sewing room and you should see how misshapen that couch cushion is). I think she started going up there because Toby would sit on the couch itself, and she was trying to get away from him…)

This picture is from a year ago, but I’m almost ashamed to admit how many pictures of her in this position we’ve actually taken.

Yesterday, I was trying to take some in progress pics of the quilt that I just finished quilting and unfortunately those pictures didn’t turn out that great, but I did get a really good shot of another quilting assistant:

This little guy rides along on the handles of my A-1 Quilting Machine.  He has magnets in his paws.  Mark and the boys got him for me somewhere, but I can’t remember where now.  Isn’t he cute?

I’ll try to take better pictures of the quilt I was working on tomorrow when the sun is shining.  At least, I hope the sun will be shining.  It looked beautiful today, but looks are deceiving:  it was cold and extremely windy.

TTFN-

Suzanne

Heartbroken

I’ve not been posting, because I haven’t had the heart to do so.

My poor sweet puppy Maggie passed away last Friday morning.

I spent most of the weekend in a daze, at least in part because the vets could not explain why.  It didn’t make sense.  We do now have an answer, and there’s nothing they could have done, nor could they have known this would happen.  I still don’t have all of the details straight, but it was related to her thymus gland.

I will miss that funny little underbite and those bright shiny eyes.  She wasn’t here for very long, but she sure made a huge impact on us.  I’m trying to remind myself that at least the 2 months she had with us were about the happiest I think a little dog could have had.

And now, I must stop because I’ll start bawling again if I don’t think about something else.

Back soon,

Suzanne

Leap day

February can’t go away soon enough for me. I have high hopes for March.

School was delayed 2 hours this morning, but that was it. We are over 20 days of no school/early out/delayed start due to weather. Crazy.

Sun is shining today: but it is windy, which means that there is probably some drifting going on.

It’s easier to be cheerful about the weather when it is sunny. This morning the dogs were laying in the sun by the door again and this time, I actually decided to get down on the floor and enjoy some of the sunny warmth with them.  Felt good.  I should do that more often.

The scenery outside my windows is actually quite beautiful to look at today.  Look at the color of the sky.  This is taken out my back windows, which face west.

With the sun shining, there is a fair amount of melting happening on my roof (and on the roads, too, I hope).  I need to go check the basement again, to make sure there isn’t any water down there today.  I can hear the water running in the gutters, so I don’t think it should be a problem.

Mark e-mailed and asked if there were any drips in the basement.  I couldn’t help myself.  I told him no:  because he wasn’t down there.

So far today I’ve made good progress on continuing to get my bookkeeping updated, plus some more sewing on my Blooming Nine Patch.  Not much to show, because it doesn’t look like much, but look who was helping me earlier:

My sewing table is right next to the couch.  She is half on the couch, half on the sewing table in this picture.    At one point she was standing up on the arm of the couch and getting her nose close to the fabric coming out of the machine.  I’ve sewn through my finger, I would have hated to catch her nose!

Right now, Maggie is curled up in lap asleep.  She’s not going to like me very much when I move here in a minute or two.  It’s time for a break from the computer, though.

Mom and I are going to see the movie 27 Dresses tonight.  I told her I’d go as long as she was willing to watch the boys tomorrow night so that Mark and I can go out on a date.  She didn’t think it was a completely even trade, but she had forgotten WHY we wanted to go on a date.

Sunday is our 12th anniversary!  I’m wishing we were taking a trip and going somewhere warm….

I do know that I’m going to insist that we do NOT do any shopping, or at least not any grocery shopping on our date….

OK, time for a computer break.  Hope are you having a fabulous Friday!

Suzanne

As promised, quilt content

My assistants were helping me while I was trying to take some photographs.

They were fighting over this bone.

I showed a little bit of this quilting the other day, you got a glimpse of how close I had come to running out of thread.

I’m only showing the back, because the front is busy enough that the quilting is really hard to see in a photograph.

Don’t look too closely.  My backtracking isn’t all that great.

This was my second try at a freehand design on this particular quilt, and I wasn’t 100% happy with the choice, but when I realized that I might have preferred something different (namely:  something less dense…), I was really too far along to actually undo the stitching I had already done.

It’s done, now, and that’s what counts.  Well, done quilting, it does still need a binding.

This is a terrible picture, and I apologize  for that.  The pieces are just slapped up on my design wall and it’s not really bright enough for a good picture in there.

For better for for worse, this is what the Blooming Nine Patch is looking like.  The rainbow stripe is from my shopping excursion over the weekend, and the two inner fabrics are out of my stash.  I wish I’d had more of either one of those:  if I had, I would have put things in a different order.

The Nine patches are all made, the plain pieces are all cut:  now to sew it all together into rows.  The original pattern calls for 8 fabrics, I’m only using 7.  I’m not sure how  wide I’ll make the bug border, I just pinned the yardage up on the design wall to give an idea of what it will look like.

My Wednesday piano students are here, gotta run!

Suzanne

At least the sun is shining

The dogs have found the best spot in the house, don’t you think?

For those of you counting along at home, that would make 10 9 days this school year. They were only at school for 2 hours yesterday, but I’m pretty sure they get to count that as a full day.

(Edited later.  I thought it was 10 days, but my sister-in-law, the school board members, says it is only 9.  We were going to make up a day last week, but it snowed.  That means it didn’t really count for anything since we weren’t supposed to have school that day anyway.)