Cross-stitch progress

I’m still working on Paula Vaughan’s “Reflections of the Past”.  Sure are a lot of color changes on this piece.  I’m longing to stitch something primitive, with larger blocks of the same color!  I really have to pay attention to this one, darn it.  Here’s where I’m at right now:

Back to the longarm again

I’ve been quilting tops for members of my quilt bees.  Most are just quilted with texture, but the hearts quilt is a custom job (what you can’t see in the photo is that I quilted the word “Love” on each red heart).  This batch of 4 tops have an interesting mix of fabrics and styles.

No sleep for me…

I thought that we had Aunt Katherine settled into her new digs, and all would be well, but I got a call in the middle of the night from the nursing home that she fell in the bathroom.  She has a knot on her head from hitting it on either the floor or one of the bars on the wall.  She also fell last week getting out of bed, but nothing but a little bruise from that one.

They’re going to have to put an alarm on her bed so that the nurses are aware when she gets up.  She is going to be very angry about that, and I’ll get all of it.  She won’t tell them anything, she saves it all for me. 

I am just plain tired… I can’t handle the 3 hour a night sleep thing anymore.  If they didn’t think she needed to go to the hospital, why in the world did they feel that they had to wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me she was OK?

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.