Spring Has Arrived!

Actually, it felt a bit like summer on Saturday with temperatures in the 80's! It was a beautiful day! Me and two of my girls went to the shower for the newest family member, Ashley. Well, I actually call her "white" Ashley because have three Ashley's and it can be confusing. There is my daughter Ashley, who is 24 and very brown. :o) There is Little Ashley, my pretend Granddaughter and now we have white Ashley. White Ashley is such a good sport and has a great sense of humor so it's fun to play "Which Ashley are you?" LOL
The shower was beautiful. It was at Ashley's mom's house. She has a beautiful home and pretty backyard. This was the table where we sat and had lunch. Look at all those pretty spring flowers!


Here's Ashley with her mom, Jenny, reading her card from us. She seemed excited that it was a homemade card. Don't you just love giving cards and gifts to people who appreciate them? Yeah, me too. :o)))
Kelley, dd#1, did a drawing for Ashley and Blake in pink and black and it shows the boy kissing the girl and says, "Kiss the Cook". Cute huh? I didn't get a picture of it other than this one.

It was a fun day. Ashley got lots of wonderful gifts and a nice start to their lives together.

Underexposed Potholders

Flash on.....
Flash off.....

Well, I decided it's better to have a dull pink than an over exposed pink. I'm sure if I would've kept trying, I would've gotten some good pictures but it was late and I was tired. I got the potholders made for my niece-to-be Ashley's shower on Saturday. We've got our Crate & Barrel gift but wanted to add a little something homemade. Her kitchen will be in pink with black accents. How girlie huh? :o)

I found quite a few blogs and websites with good instructions for making potholders. My favorite was this pdf link by Kelly Hogaboom. As a quilter, I didn't really need detailed instructions on grid quilting but wanted some guides to size, etc.

I used a new ruler cutter thingie (that's a technical term, you know?) that both me and my friend Sherrie bought at Road to CA last year. I bought this ruler in January of 2008 and in March of 2009 I used it. Nothing like rushing into anything huh? lol With rounded corners I wanted my binding cut on the bias. I've never done it before but thought this was the project to try it. The ruler worked great and yes, I could've probably done it with any ol' long ruler but this did make it easy. I searched all over the internet to find the name of it but couldn't find any info. I'll post later about the ruler. Here is my miserable picture of the pink "and black" potholders.

And this is what I have so far for her little pink kitchen gifty. I just need a cute bag or basket to tuck it into. :o)

Okay, I turned on the flash and here's the 'brighter' picture. I think Ashley will like the goodies plus the other gift we got her.

Quilter for hire - retired!

I finished the quilt in record time!!!! Now I'm going to retire. LOL The pictures don't look much different than my last post but it is quilted and bound.


This quilt took me 16 hours, start to finish. It probably would've taken longer but I already had the fabric in a bag for a "someday" project. I didn't have to try and match anything from my stash.

I took some pictures of the back but they didn't really photo too well. It's mottled red flannel and I just stitched in the ditch on the entire quilt.

I have a bridal shower to go to for my nephew's fiance. We bought some goodies off of their Crate & Barrel registry but me and my girls want to make some potholders or something more personal too. I'll be back in a few days. Can you smell the sewing machine oil? :o)

Quilter for Hire?....No!

I'm making progress on the quilt project I took on. And as I was sewing tonight I was wondering, what the heck was I thinking? LOL I got all the blocks finished Wednesday night and because they're fairly small (7 1/2"), I decided I needed three more to make the quilt a little bit bigger. Then I raided my stash for the sashing and cornerstones. It's a simple setting but I don't want to spend too much time on this because I'm trying to keep track of my time so I'll know what to charge.


Tonight I added the last sashing strip at the bottom and the two borders. This came out way cuter than I thought it was going to. I hope I'm not sorry I used up this fabric when I have a little grandson of my own. :o( Maybe, just maybe, there will be some other cute fabric by then. Do you think they'll still be making fabric in 200 years? LOL


I love the stitching fabric on the small border. And I was thinking I would use flannel for the back but I'm going to wait til tomorrow to see if I have enough of something so I don't have to spend any extra money.

I don't have any plans tomorrow so I should be able to sandwich the quilt and get it quilted this weekend.

Triangulations

I received some comments about the Triangulations paper so here's the scoop. It's a cd you can buy from Bear Paw Productions. I think the cost was around $28.00. I have used the pages enough times to have paid for the program a couple of times already. I have done quite a few swaps and blocks that are all the same size and fabric so I can print the size sheet I need to make multiple units. It's very easy and I have it at home and don't have to worry if I run out. It wouldn't work as good for scrappy sewing of hst's and qst's unless you cut the papers up into smaller sections.

I loaded the program in my documents under my "Patterns" folder. I think both programs, Half Square Triangles and Quarter Square Triangles, are less than 2MB's. Okay, that's my infomercial for today. :o)

And if I didn't have enough to do, my husband's secretary asked me if I would make a quilt for a family friend of hers. I made her a quilt a few years ago when she had her first grandbaby. Well, if you've read my blog for very long, you might notice I have "finishing issues". LOL So last night, with nothing else to do (yes, my nose is growning), I dug into my stash for little boy fabric. Cheryl, the prospective client, said the daddy loves baseball. I came up with these blocks.

The fabric is extra since I made my husband a quilt (top) at a retreat several years ago. I used different fabric and the pattern was a mystery project. Here's a link to a picture of the ahem, unfinished quilt I made. Anyway, I'm thinking if it's for a baby, this isn't quite juvenile prints but I think I could get away with 6 or 9 blocks, simple sashing and maybe grid quilting. Now all I need is a week off of work!!

And the Queen of Unfinished wants to share what on her design wall!!! Anyone have the number to a therapist?

Quarter Square-Bonus-Half Square-Bonus

Last week I posted that I was working on quarter square triangles or QST's for a swap. I got my sets done and did a few extra in case there are some no-shows. They were so quick to sew together, a few extras was easy as could be. Here they are in civil war reproductions and shirting fabrics.

And on each Triangulations paper that I used for these QST's, there was a little bonus half square triangle on two corners of the pattern paper. So with my little bonus HST's, I made this....

I'm going to a retreat in May and you're supposed to take a mini scrappy quilt. I think I might quilt this one up for the exchange. Practically the only people who read my blog will be at this retreat so it's a bit of a party pooper post to ruin the surprise but I didn't want you to think I'm sitting around not doing anything. :o)

And a while back, my daughter Stephanie made a baby quilt for a co-worker. She did big snowball blocks and nine patches. As she was sewing the squares for the snowball blocks on, I told her to stitch another seam 1/2" away from the first diagonal seam and we would have some hst's we could use for the border or something. I had to step in and do something because there was so much fabric she was going to cut off and toss. God forbid!!! LOL Well, she trimmed the off, made her quilt and the hst's have been sitting on my sewing table for months now. While I was ironing my little CW hst's, I decided to press the pink ones open too.

There are only enough hst's to make 4 star blocks like this one but I think I have the perfect fabric to go in the middle. It should make a cute bitty quilt for somebody. Knowing Stephanie, she'll want it for her table or something. And that's fine. As long as all that fabric didn't go in the trash! LOL

Parts is parts...

Last night all my TNT (Thurs. Night Therapy) girls bailed on me. Guess I'm gonna have to find some new sewing friends. lol The girl I work with, Becca, asked if she could come over and borrow my Cricut machine for a yearbook project she's doing for her daughter's school. While she and her sister were cutting out letters, I worked on my QST (quarter square triangles) that I am doing for a swap. I am using Triangulations paper, which I LOVE! Makes the little gems so accurate.

The swap is for civil war reproductions and shirting fabrics. The inspiration for this swap came from this photo....

I don't know where I saw this project but I labeled the photo "Jo Morton Swap Idea". You can check out her website here. Maybe I saw the quilt in a book. Anyway, that's where the inspiration for the swap came from. I'll be working on my little QST units this weekend.

I thought I would share these pretty cards too. My friend Neena made these at one of her Stampin' Up! workshops. She gave them to me as a hostess gift for the scrapbooking gathering I had last weekend. Sweet huh? :o) She does such great cards.

Have a great weekend. I'll check in if I get anything accomplished!

Movie Night

With scrapbooking on my mind, I started to get a little sentimental thinking about when my girls were little. I was lucky to be a stay at home mom and we didn't have much extra money for a video camera. My mom and dad had an old 8mm movie camera so I borrowed it to try and capture a moment or two of the girls before they got too big. This is the projector.


Oh my gosh, it's got to be from the 50's. It's all made of metal parts!!! :o) But it works. And it makes that clicking sound as the movie plays so it's very retro. Cool huh? My mom gave me the projector years ago but I actually forgot I had it. (That's what full closets will get you!) So I dug it out, and the movies, took a picture off the wall and started looking at the old reels. Sniff, sniff......the kids were so little and so darn cute. There is one movie of all the nieces and nephews too. I think my mom took that one. They're all so litttle! Now that the girls are in their mid twenties, they were all excited to come and see the movies too. I only have three movies and they only take about five minutes to watch.. LOL
Since I had the projector, my mom had given me her movies too. There are some with my mom and dad in their 40's, when me and my sisters were kids and family gatherings with cousins. It was so neat to watch them all. I plan on showing my sisters at our next family gathering, which I think would be Easter or Mother's Day. It should be a hoot!

Favorite Cookbook and NSD

Do you have a favorite cookbook or two? When my daughters were in a co-op participation preschool, we did this cookbook. By the way, these preschoolers are now 29, 27 and 24!!! The cookbook doesn't look to bad for being 23 years old, does it?


Truth is, we had so many we had to sell so this is one of my copies. I think I ended up with three of them. Good thing too because my friend Sherrie lost hers several years ago and I was able to give her a replacement. One of the recipes I shared in here was the Texas Sheet Cake my MIL always made for birthdays. I didn't know it had a name back then so in the book it's called Chocolate Cake. How clever huh?
And Saturday was National Scrapbook Day (NSD). I had a few friends over for a little crop. We had lots of yummy stuff to eat, like big fresh strawberries, Texas Sheet Cake, little lemon cakes (that were delicious) from Costco. I "highly" recommend them! We had healthy stuff like salads and dip, veggies and chicken wings, too!
I love living in CA in the springtime. Well, I love living here MOST of the time but in the spring, we get big, red strawberries that are so delicious! I put the cake in little cupcake papers so the girls could help themselves and those little lemon cakes....did I mention the lemon cakes were delicious? LOL


This are was the Sizzex spot......

This area was the Cricuit spot. I have the little Cricuit and my daughter Stephanie has the big one, shown here.

It seemed to take us forever to finish a page because none of us have scrapbooked in a long, long time. We sort of had scrapping block! Quilting has kind of taken priority. But once we got started, we did pretty good. I was able to get the last few pages done in my Family album. I got some extra pictures of my dad so I had to get those in there. It is done. Yay. Now onto the thousands of pictures I have in shoeboxes in the closet! Argh.

The Creative Memories lady came over and did a little demo on digital scrapbooking but I'm not sure I'm sold on it yet. Stay tuned on that opinion!

And **yawn**......does anyone else HATE daylight savings time? Yawn....Argh, it messes me all up!

Bye Bye Ginghers....

I swear, if I had a nickle for every time I've dropped my Gingher scissors on the floor and got a nick in the blades, I would be rich!!!! Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but I have dropped them quite a few times. And when they fall and are open, they get this little 'catch in their giddyup'.

So my babies are on their way to Gingher, Inc. in Greensboro, NC. They charge $7.50 to sharpen a pair of their scissors. A small charge to cover sharpening and shipping them back to me. I know you can have scissors sharpened at Joanns and quilt shops but honestly, I don't trust them. (Don't tell, okay?) The information is on the very bottom of their homepage.

On the homefront, I have been sorting pictures. I want to be a scrapbooker but right now, I'm a scrapbook supply collector! LOL I'm having friends over to my house on Saturday, 3/7 for and all day crop til you drop kind of day. I didn't realize when I planned it, that it is NSD, National Scrapbook Day. Who knew? :o) I've got some goodies planned for give-a-ways just to make it fun. And I'll put on a spread of food so we can keep our energy up.

Still Stitchin'

Sunday we went to see my SIL and we can hit a lot of CA traffic on the way there so I took this little project.

I sewed the block lickity-split a long time ago and would pull the project out to do the embroidery stitches when I would think of it and we would be driving. That part has been done for a long time too! I finally added the tiny buttons. I can't believe I waited so long to do one tiny task! Now that it's done, I need to figure out what to do with it. You can order a rustic frame to hang it but I'm thinking I might just sandwich it and do a mini wallhanging. Then I can use that "frame" money for more fabric! :o)



And I'm still doing that ol' satin stitch on the table runner. It's um, er, going. I sew satin stitch like I drive, 30 mph over speed bumps! There are little glitches every now and then but I can live with it. The green icing was tough with those little turns and twists. And so were the yellow candle puffs. but, I've one cake done, one to go and the confetti.

Here's a picture of the entire runner. It's on my design wall (over some patchwork squares in case your wondering what the shadows are).

"I've got" a case of the "I got's"...

Well, "I got" the confetti on the center of the table runner yesterday............
And "I got" the rayon thread and the tear away stabilizer at the Pfaff store on Friday. "I got" my Pfaff instruction manual out and looked to see what they had to say about satin stitching. And then, FINALLY "I got" to sewing!!!! :o) It wasn't as bad as I thought but it does take some practice. I don't have an applique foot but I do have this open toe and it was fine. That stabilizer is a must!

This is how far I got today before we left to visit my SIL.

All I have left on this half is the green cake 'puffs' and the smoke from the candles. Both have a LOT of small turns so I saved the worst for last. Then.....there's the other side and all those little center circles of confetti and streamers. I think "I've got" a headache!! LOL