Back on Track...at least in the studio

Tonight the hubs went to play poker so I was on my own. After a strangely healthy but tasty dinner of coconut & red curry chicken bisque, salad, an artichoke (okay, so sue me, I dipped it in melted butter) and a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio, I headed upstairs to the studio to try to be productive and start on my SIL's Christmas gift.

Afer a few hours of sewing strips from a jelly roll together in a few configurations, and  alot of rotary cutting, I've got 20 12.5" strip pairs and 40 4.5" 6-strip sets. Colorful, interesting, now what?

Ah...we flank the two-strip pairs with the 6-strip sets and it looks like we're going to wind up with a pretty cute 12" block...twenty of them, to be exact.

So maybe I'll sew 4 across and  down, turning some of them a half turn or so now and again for interest. Then I can border them out to a decent throw size, or maybe I'll intermingle some borders between them. I don't know. I'll put the blocks together tonight and spread them out tomorrow and see how it plays.

Speaking of tomorrow......if you're reading this, before 9:00 a.m. EST or thereabouts, please, please, please cross your fingers that the shower no longer leaks. Yep,,,,after spending an outrageous amount of money for caulking, waiting a day for them to reinstall the faucet correctly, we finally got a chance to give her a spin on Wednesday morning. Surprise, surprise, surprise....the water still dripped from the gaping hole in the kitchen ceiling.

What's a girl to do? Move? Tear out the shower we just put in a year and a half ago and start over? And then what if we've still got a leak after that? Well, I got the plumber to come out again, and I really didn't want the same guy back because the tile guy convinced me that the plumber was incompetent (probably trying to justify the $105 an hour for 4 hours to caulk a shower he was going to charge me) but the warranty company was giving me fits, and the hubs said that Mr Original Plumber should be the one to come back so I agreed to have him out again.

Well, he was very patient with me, and very thorough, and assured me that there are no leaking pipes or drain (and provided lots of visual aids to prove this to me). Fortunately, he did figure out that the faucet plate had it's drain hole caulked over, and that no one ever sealed where the pipe extends through the plate, so the water was most likely splashing back behind the plate and since it can't drain out, once it fills, it pours over into the hole in the wall the pipe comes out (and there's a water line on the back of the faceplate which kind of proves this theory).

While this is totally not in his job description, he recaulked the faceplate, leaving the drain hole open this time and he sealed around the pipe and plate. He said he's pretty sure that's the problem. And I got a bill for $45 instead of the $95 plus paying him for caulking because he said he felt bad that I had been overcharged by the tile people who didn't actually fix the problem, which was (as he reminded me more than once) not a plumbing problem.

Tomorrow morning we find out if his diagnosis was right. Hold your breath and cross your fngers. Think happy thoughts. Work some mojo that our leak is gone and we can go back to living like normal people and have the hole in the kitchen ceiling fixed.