Finished Rowdy Girls fabric challenge

Our Rowdy Girls group has a fabric challenge once a year.  We get 1/2 yard of some fabric (chosen by one of the members), and have to make something quilt-related with it.  This year the fabric was a taupey beige from one of the French General lines (the background for the baskets in the photo).  And as usual, I waited until the very last minute to get started.  Why rush?

I designed and pieced this top in 6 days – a record for me.  Not another UFO in the pile, but an actual finished top! 

The hardest thing about it was designing something that used fabric that I actually had enough of to complete the top.  I don’t buy fabric for specific projects, I buy for my stash, and then create out of the stash.  In this case, I had to change fabric several times, because I didn’t have enough.

Here’s the process I go through in designing (as I whined to a friend):

1.  Pick out your fabrics.  Don’t pay any attention to how much you have of each.  5″ square?  That’s fine!

2.  Fall in love with your fabric choices.  Sit and pet them.  Love them even more.

3.  Design your quilt.  Pay no attention to how much you have of each fabric.

4.  Try to fit the fabric you picked out into your design.

5.  Cry and wail because it doesn’t fit!

6.  Go to the fabric closet and pick out new fabric.  Don’t bother to check that you have enough of it either.  Repeat falling in love with it, etc.

7.  Discover that you don’t have enough of it, repeat crying and wailing.

8.  Get back in contact with reality.  Take the list of how much of each fabric you need, go back to the fabric closet, and don’t come out until you have fabric in the correct amounts!

9.  Moan and groan that it wasn’t what you had “visualized” in that fuzzy picture in your mind.

10.  Make the quilt top.

11.  Fall in love again (that’s 3 times now, I guess I’m fickle), and decide that this is your favorite top so far!

New gym shoes

I know this is silly, but the big deal today is that I finally parted with my old gym shoes.  They leaked when I stepped in water (or snow), and the toes were coming unstitched, but I loved them!  The new ones are so clean and white that I think you could see in the dark while wearing them…

Mary, why don’t you come over and get them dirty for me?

An Auntie free week!

We are finally done moving Aunt Katherine, and have handed in the keys to her old apartment.  The last two weeks were a doozy — hauling things back and forth, had several people come to take furniture, linens, kitchen stuff, etc.  I steam-cleaned the carpets on Friday.  Wish my house looked so good!

We got the last of the pictures hung in her new place on Friday too.  I’ll go and do her laundry once a week, and visit while the wash is being done, but no more of the every day hamster wheel.  She is being well cared for by people who understand Alzheimer’s better than I do. 

I’m finally retired for real!

Piece o’ Cake flower runner finished

Remember the Piece o’ Cake flower applique blocks that I posted a long time ago?  Well, I finally finished 6 of them, enough to set into a long runner for the top of my kitchen buffet.  All made from scraps in my scrap basket.  I started this with the tulip block (second from the right) from an applique class taught at our guild by Linda Jenkins.

Cross stitch update

I haven’t worked on my cross stiching for nearly a year, but I’ve finally started again.  Some friends and I are meeting once a week for an evening of talking and crafting.  Last week one was beading a bracelet, once was doing a colored pencil drawing of a cheetah, one was paint a gingerbread house Christmas ornament, one was doing a Zentangle project, and I was cross-stitching.  It’s always fun to see what everyone is doing.

Here’s where I’m at right now:

Finished Holly Basket top

I’ve finally finished appliqueing the Holly Basket top, and got the borders put on.  This was a pain to lay out, and took a long time to applique, but now that it’s done, I love it.  Red, green, and pale yellow just float my boat. 

Here’s a photo – not a particularly good one, but my quilt holder isn’t home right now, so I’m stuck laying it out on the bed.

January catch-up

Things have been crazy busy around here for January.  I retired on January 1st, so you would think I would be a lady of leisure, but not so much!

Retirement entails a lot of paperwork.  Know what happens when your boss is out of the office for the last two weeks you work?  Nothing gets done!  And then the systems don’t show you as an employee anymore, but also don’t show you as a retiree!  You just disappear from everyone’s map.  My medical insurance got cancelled 4 times, every single time they fixed it, the next payroll run cancelled it again.  Didn’t get my pension worked out until yesterday.  And so on, and so on.  Been quite a mess.  But at least I don’t have to do that drive to the office every day.  I do NOT miss that!

We had to move Aunt Katherine again, this time from her assisted living apartment to a “memory care” unit (read that as an early stage dementia unit).  She has Alzheimer’s, not bad enough to completely forget people, but bad enough to scramble her memory.  She can’t remember to take meds, or that she needs to use her walker, or a myriad of other things.  So now she is in a lovely place where she has 24 hours care, but still has a private room and bath.  Not nursing per se, but nurses in the unit 24/7.  We moved her a week ago, and moved her furniture this week (the new place was furnished, but you could bring your own stuff if you liked).  So now all I have to do is find a home for everything from her old apartment that wouldn’t fit into her new place.  We have another 3 weeks before we have to be out of the apartment, so I’ll be working in there several more days to organize and pack up.  Then I will be done with all the constant trips down there, except for once a week laundry duty and visit.  It’s been exhausting to deal with her, so I’m really looking forward to letting the nursing staff take over for most of it.

We finally got some real snow here in northern Illinois.  Of course, I was all the way in the city when the blizzard started, and had a delightful 3 hour drive home!  Much of it has already melted, but the ground is still white, which is what really counts anyway, right?

And a merry medical Christmas to you too!

My husband had his surgery on Monday, and came home last night.  He’s doing well, but slow and ouchy.   His blood sugar is under control pretty well now, they didn’t have to give him any meds for it while in the hospital for 3 days.

Aunt Katherine is still in rehab for her cracked pelvis.  I’ve completed arrangements to have her moved to a different place once she’s done there.  She just can’t be left alone anymore, so she will need to leave her senior independent living apartment, and will move to a memory care unit of a new place, where she will still have her own room and bath, but will have 24/7 caregivers watching over her, giving her meds to her, and will live in a small “neighborhood” of 12 people.  They will have a shared living room, dining room, and activities area.  I think she will ultimately be happier and safer there, although it’s going to be a trauma to move again.  Since she will have a much smaller place, I have tons of furniture, kitchen stuff, etc. to get rid of on the next 6 weeks.

And the biggest thing on the horizon is that I’m retiring from my current job of 31+ years at the end of the year.  I think I’ll sleep for a whole week, then will figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.  I’ll be so happy to no longer have a 3 hours round-trip commute, and no longer have to deal with the corporate idiocy.  It’s not a nice world in corporate America anymore…

Houston Quilt Market

I haven’t gotten around to posting about my trip to Quilt Market in Houston at the end of October.  What a whirlwind those 4 days were!

I flew out on Thursday.  Friday morning at 8 am the schedules for the Schoolhouse sessions were available, and I spent the next 2 hours figuring out which presentations to attend for each of the 15 sessions that day.  Overall, Schoolhouse was worthwhile.  2 sessions were a waste of time, with presenters who really had no idea of what they were doing, but the rest were good.  I went to several sessions on website/Facebook marketing, one really good one about pattern/book printing, and two really good ones that showed by example exactly how to energize a crowd and sell your product to shops.  Lynette Anderson of Australia was my favorite.  She had a polished presentation, fabulous completed samples for us to drool over, specific reasons for using the products she used, and even a complete kit for each attendee, including floss and needles, so we could work on the kit that night and bring home a finished project.  I also received one of Sullivan’s new rotary cutting rulers at one of Pat Sloan’s presentations.  These have a sharpening edge on them, which is supposed to sharpen your blade every time you cut.  Time will tell if it works or not.

Sample Spree was held the same night.  What a madhouse!  It reminded me of a crazy flea market, bare concrete floors, unadorned banquet tables, and mobs of people clamoring to buy samples that would be available at the same wholesale price at the trade show the next day!  The Moda booth was 4-6 people deep.  I won’t ever attend that again.  I got the feeling that it was just a shopping frenzy for employees of quilt shops, who aren’t wholesale buyers in the first place, and really shouldn’t be able to buy anything at a wholesale show in the first place.

I purchased several sample block-of-the month patterns, a roll of Quilters Dream wool batting, and some of Superior’s new 40 weight So Fine Thread.  If that weight works as well as their original thinner So Fine in my longarm, I should be able to eliminate using PermaCore thread altogether.  I checked out Wonderfil’s Invisifil thread, and will check out the sample I bought to see if it’s worth purchasing on large cones for the longarm for use in background fills.  It’s 100 weight thread (very fine), and should look similar to YLI silk at a fraction of the price.

I also picked up a ton of brochures to look through when I have spare time.  Just about every booth pressed a brochure into my hand as I walked by.

The most amazing part of Market were the fabric company booths.  Dozens of  stations in each manufacturers’ area where shop owners could sit with a rep and choose  fabric to be sent to their shops.  I don’t know how the shop owners do it.  There were sooooo many fabric lines available, my head was spinning.  How do they choose, and get it right for their particular shop’s customers???  I’m glad I don’t have to make the choices.  But now I understand why each shop seems to have different fabrics.  No one could possibly have it all!

One of the designers had an I-Pad with a Square for taking credit card orders, and she was nice enough to show me how it worked.  I definitely have to do some research on it.  It looked so simple to use, and she said it was really cost-effective for her business.

We stayed at the Hilton Americas, and it was a fabulous hotel.  The staff there was smiling and ready to help with anything – every single one of them.  I’ve never stayed at a more pleasant hotel.  And it didn’t hurt that it was directly connected to the convention center with a catwalk.

More medical fun…

My husband was supposed to have surgery next Monday to remove a polyp in his colon that just won’t go away.  When he went in for the preop tests, we got a shock.  His blood sugar was 579!  (For reference, around 100 is a good number.)  They immediately cancelled the surgery, and we scrambled to find a doctor who could see him the day before Thanksgiving.  He’s now on two meds, getting a crash course on how to eat with diabetes, and has his blood sugar down to 213 this morning!  Still way too high, but gradually coming down.  The doctor said the one drug will take time to work, so as long as it’s coming down gradually, it’s OK.  We’ve rescheduled the surgery for December 19, hoping that his sugar level will be acceptable by then.

We were by ourselves for Thanksgiving, so Thanksgiving dinner was homemade chicken soup and salad.  Low carb, no temptation to eat candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc.

All I want for Christmas are diabetic cookbooks.  Never a dull moment around here…