I Swore I wouldn’t!

Our trip to Portland, OR was uneventful on Christmas Day.  Apparently, we chose the right day to fly in.  Other than the freeways, the roads were still pretty miserable.  The whole family made it to Sheila’s house and Jesse was relieved to finally open presents Christmas night.

I brought along my computer to work on some digitizing, but it has sort of become a community computer.  I’ve read several books that I could download from the library and I started getting antsy.  I just don’t sit well with nothing to do (besides cook and eat). 

Yesterday we wandered out to the Clackamas Town Center, then the women stopped at Fabric Depot and finally at Craft Warehouse.  I was looking for a small project to keep me busy, and that wouldn’t be terribly expensive.  Finally at Craft Warehouse I found it.  I really debated about whether to proceed or not.  I’ve sworn for the last couple of years I would not get into wool.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it is beautiful.  However, it would be one more thing to collect in my stash.  What did I end up buying?  A pattern for a wool candle mat and the wool felt, floss, needles and beads to make it.  I have succumbed!

This morning I woke up and started my project and by this evening it was finished.  I may need to make a second one so they can be a pair.

The pattern is from Bareroots and if you have been following my recent posts, you will see why I was pulled in — SNOWMEN!  It was really very easy and fun — Uh Oh — there are more candle mat patterns, I think I have fallen.

One way to have Snow

I finished up a customer quilt this morning (no it isn’t for Christmas) and took the rest of the day to play.  Since we are flying out tomorrow afternoon to my sister’s, I don’t have to get anything ready for Christmas except packing a suitcase.

I took the opportunity to work on some unfinished projects.  I finished one top and almost made it through a second.  So far the winter has been very mild here, and this project was one way to have enough snow for snowmen.

This quilt top was made from the Crabapple Hill pattern Winter Wonderland.  So ends another top.  I’ll show the other project when I get the last borders on it.

Are We Finished?

 

I started these guys last Saturday night, too. ( It should be obvious by now I have a short attention span.)  I worked on them a little bit each night until early Thursday morning when I put what might be the finishing touches on them. 

The pattern is from Sweet Dreams Patterns.  I picked it up at some quilt show over the last few years.  I realized when I was pulling up the link I have several of the patterns and have already made a few.  I also found another one I “need!”  I followed the pattern for the most part, but improvised if I didn’t have the correct supplies.  The pattern said to sew the buttons on after stuffing the snowmen.  I maybe crazy, but I’m not going to that much trouble.  I tied bits of pearl cotton through the button holes and glued them on.  Also the wire for the ear muffs was just supposed to be a black 16 gauge wire.  I didn’t have that, but I did have silver wire and instead of one strand, I wrapped it around the handle of a wooden spoon to make the ear muffs.  I thought I was going to have mutiny on my hands when I went to put the second snowman on top of it.  All three males in the house were opposed and thought the snowmen should stay separate to save the spring.  I vetoed the vote.  I bought the pattern because I LIKED the stack!  The snowmen are supposed to have twig arms, but I think I like them without.  Finally there was supposed to be a rusty tin star on the top hat.  Apparently, rusty tin is no longer in.  I couldn’t find any anywhere I looked in town.  That’s alright, he looks fine without it.  So are they finished, probably because I’ll be moving on to something else  to fit my attention span.

He’s Watching You

It should be a relief to know he isn’t real.

Mimi asked me to fit this quilt in a few months ago.  Had I realized how small it actually was I might have done it sooner.  Anyway I draped it over my Gammill and he watched me while life got in the way of quilting.  I finally loaded him late last Saturday night while Guy was out “playing” Sheriff Deputy.  I finished him (the bear) Sunday morning.

Mimi never stitches down her pieces on Pine Needles Quilts and while this quilt wasn’t Pine Needles it was no exception.   The pattern for this quilt is published by Bigfork Bay Cotton Company.  He is very eye catching. 

The nice thing about machine quilting is I can play with all these cool quilts and then not have the urge to make them myself.

Customer Quilts

When Ann dropped off her quilt  I had just finished the first quilt I’m going to show.  I promised her I would post the picture.  I may be slow, but I try to follow through on what I promise.  It seemed a good excuse to show the last few quilts I’ve finished for customers.

This first one was made by Pat.  Ruth’s Stitchery used the Crabapple Hill Studio pattern Winter Wonderland for one of their block parties this year.  There were some people who either could not or would not do the handwork.  Pat was one of these and she substituted machine embroidery for the center blocks.

I quilted this next quilt for Jane, however, she did not make it.  A friend made it for her and she warned me it wasn’t perfect.  This quilt absolutely would not lay flat and I was using one of the thin battings from Quilter’s Dream.  This is the first time I’ve ever done a full float.  I was hoping that would help control the fullness.  This quilt was just a headache and was on the machine WAY too long!  All the quilting is freehand however I did use Pam Clarke’s Designs with Lines Basic 8 template to mark guides.  I wanted to quilt in the arcs, but the fullness there would have only been accentuated by any quilting.  So I only quilted where the arcs met.

Finally, the quilt Ann was dropping off when she saw the Winter Wonderland quilt.  I believe the pattern is Jewel box and I quilted it with Meandering Magic .  The design I choose just sucked up the thread, but the quilting was way more fun than the previous quilt!

Great Gift

I mentioned our Quilters Anonymous gift swap in my last post.  I believe everything given was handmade.   Rhonda drew my name and this is the wonderful gift she made for me.

She said there was no way she would make something on the machine since I’m a machine quilter.  I’d have been happy even if she had, but I love this.  The handwork is beautiful, and I didn’t have to do it!  She used the Autumn Sampler pattern from Crabapple Hill Studio.  I hadn’t purchased this pattern.  While I like wool work, I refuse to start collecting something else for sewing.  So thank you Rhonda, I would never have made it for myself.  By the way, Rhonda also admitted she put the last stitch in her gift the morning of the exchange.  It isn’t just me.

Looong Week-end of Imperfections

Guy and I had agreed we would tile the upstairs bathroom over Thanksgiving Vacation.  We had “all” the supplies purchased and I wasn’t planning on cooking much of anything for Thanksgiving. 

On Tuesday last week we had a Thanksgiving potluck at school.  While I am sitting there eating with Jesse, he informed me he didn’t really want me to cook much for Thanksgiving — just Special K Loaf (we are vegetarians and this is a favorite with Jesse) and I didn’t have to do both mashed potatoes and potato boats.  I could do just potato boats (aka twice baked potatoes).  OK, well I needed some food on hand anyway for vacation so we stopped at the grocery store.  While we are collecting ingredients, Nolan informed me he really likes stuffing as well.  Add that to the list.  Meanwhile, I’m miserably sick.  I slept all of three hours Tuesday night because I couldn’t stop coughing my lungs out.

Wednesday we had a half day of school and I had planned to rip the carpet out before Guy came home from work.  The best laid plans…  Due to lack of sleep Tuesday night, I collapsed into bed as soon as we walked in the door Wednesday afternoon.  By the time I woke up Guy was home and had removed the carpet.  I had intended to have a before picture, however I was a little late.  Guy had already painted the walls a couple weeks earlier.  While this picture is not the bathroom, it is what was on the floor and walls before we started.

White carpet is not my idea of the ideal floor covering for a bathroom.  (It is impossible to get Sonic Blue Coconut Slush stains out of the carpet when it has been vomited up there.) The whole house (excluding the kitchen) was carpeted with this when we bought it.  It was nice carpet, but not meant for children and animals.  My brother-in-law helped us redo the floor in the downstairs bathroom two Thanksgivings ago and that was my first experience with tiling.  Guy was convinced I was now an expert.

I was not quite as convinced, I had the basic idea, but wasn’t overly confident.    When we purchased the supplies, I found a book called Tiling Complete  published by The Taunton Press.  It was an extremely helpful book and I highly recommend it.

Also on Wednesday night Guy cut all the backer board to fit the floor.  If you choose to tile do not skip this step.  The people that built our house did skip the step in our kitchen.  The grout cracks out and the tiles break easily because there is too much flex in the plywood.  (The kitchen will be a job for another vacation.)  So part way through Wednesday night the bathroom looked like this.

That was enough for the evening and we had grandiose plans for Thanksgiving Day.  Bright and early I mixed the Thinset to adhere the backer board to the plywood.  That was pretty straight forward.  Unfortunately, while buying supplies I hadn’t noticed we used most of a 50 pound bag of Thinset on the last bathroom which was much smaller.  We only bought a 25 pound bag this time.  That was enough to get the backer board down, but not enough to start laying tile.  Which meant we got a half day off in the middle of the job.

This meant I had plenty of time to cook for Nolan and Jesse and I managed to mark a small whole cloth quilt.

Friday morning Guy went and bought 50 more pounds of Thinset and the tiling commenced.  It was a full day job.  Talk about sore knees and shoulders.  I laid all the tile, but Guy did all the cutting.  We managed to use the boys as runners part of the time.  I’d mark what I needed cut and the boys would run down to the garage with the tile and come back with a cut piece.  I did manage to get all 198 tiles down on Friday.  The Thinset now needed to sit for at least 24 hours.  This is a shot of the tile at that point.

At this point Guy was definitely seeing the imperfections.  Hard as I tried, the rows of tile did not stay perfectly straight.  I also ended up with the decorative tiles one row closer together than I had planned.  You need to understand Guy is a perfectionist when it comes to jobs around the house.  It really bugs him when things aren’t  just right.  It is a good thing he wants to continue to live with me, because I didn’t hear as much about it as I would have if someone else had done the job.

What a relief Sabbath was, I didn’t need to worry about the tile again until after sundown.  About 5:50 I went to mix the grout and decided the buckets we owned were to grungy.  I raced over to Ace and grabbed a new bucket with 3 minutes to spare until closing time.  Grouting goes much faster.  Here is a picture of a portion of that process.

Yes, that is me in the corner with my really grungy clothes, blistered dried out hands.  I was working as fast as I could because you have to go back and wipe off the excess before the grout gets too dry.  I think I waited a little longer than I should have so it was harder than it needed to be.  Once a fair amount of the excess was cleaned up, I gave up for the night.  By now, I was pretty stiff.

Guy finished the clean up on Sunday.  He did an outstanding job.  There are dips in the tiles and he worked at cleaning any grout out of all those plus the excess on the grout lines.  That grout hid a multitude of imperfections.  The tile job looked much better once it was in place

While he was cleaning the tile, I disappeared to the basement and the longarm to quilt my whole cloth.  It is a gift for Lynn in my Quilter’s Annonymous group.  Lynn is in Arizona so I could have taken a little extra time, but I wanted it done.  Our group met this Wednesday to exchange gifts and I put the last stitch in that morning.  I still need to block the quilt.  Merry Christmas Lynn.  To go along with the title of this post, I admit this quilt is also imperfect, however when looked at as a whole it isn’t too bad.

Once Guy had cleaned the grout, the tile job for all intents and purposes was finished.  However there was still some finish work.  The trim needed to go on the back wall before the toilet could go in.  (This is also a replacement toilet.  The original was 3/4 size and my children aren’t that small anymore.  Guy had already put the new toilet in when he got tired of waiting for me to get around to the tiling.  This meant he had to pull it for this job.)  By Tuesday night that part of the trim was finished and the toilet was back in place.  Guy finished putting the trim in last night on his birthday.  There are still some nail holes to fill, but most of the work is finished and here are a couple shots.

I need to figure out what I want for a shower curtain and pick up a few accessories.  The hard part is done.  Guy says it was more work than he expected, that maybe because he didn’t hang around the whole time we worked on the other bathroom.  It was a lot of work (no more than I expected), but I think it was worth it!  Is it perfect?  No, but Guy and I need to remember nothing is perfect, but God.  We just need to do the best we can with what we have here on earth.

Does the Proboscis Matter?

I’m going to an ornament/gift exchange on Sunday.  I could have purchased something, but I always prefer handmade items so out came the embroidery machine again.

The designs for these fellows came from the Machine Embroidery Snowmen set by The Stitch Connection.  They are made from scraps of batting.  Is it possible a longarm quilter has batting scraps?  I couldn’t find exactly the buttons I wanted and settled on these for the noses.  They are a little large and my boys have told me they look more like penguins than snowmen.  So in this case the proboscis does matter, and I made snow penguins.  Both boys also asked why I gave them a crown of thorns.  They aren’t buying that they are holly and fir halos or wreaths.   I guess that is what comes from living with a house full of males!

Carving Out Creative Time

Around grading and lesson plans, I carved out a little play time during the last couple of days.  This is the result.

The faces were embroidered on the embroidery machine.  The designs are from a “Quilted Ladies 2″ pack, which I bought from Sprinkles Sewing Center in Pueblo during their moving sale in April.  The designs are by Bonnie Colonna.

Each of the crazy ladies I made is a little different.  There are only 3 face designs in the pack, but I left the glasses off some and also mirror imaged the designs.  The pattern pack included little quilts that looked like they were shirts to me.  I decided adding them made the whole thing too big for my purposes.  I added pin backs so they can be worn or put on a tote bag.

Guy looked at them and asked if I would wear one. I told him I would and his response was I’m turning into an old lady.  Humph!