What's On My Design Wall?

Well, it has to do with these scraps, and I thought I had taken a picture.....I just finished labeling 15 blocks and packing them up for class tomorrow. Photo after I do the sashing in class.

Speaking of class, that's where I've been. Last week was crazy.

Monday was the first class for Windmill Farm

Wednesday I started working on Mexican Star:

Eight more blocks to finish.

Thursday I learned how to do a proper binding, and Friday was a major disappointment.

I went to a Hunter Star class and once we started cutting I realized that the two background fabrics I had chosen to compliment my Timeless Treasure Indigo FQs was positively HIDEOUS. Not to mention it's very labor intensive and because I'm making each star different and each block contains the makings for 3 stars, it is also going to be very design wall intensive. Fortunately this class doesn't meet again until the 20th, so I was able to buy new background fabrics (another $48 investment into this quilt) and I've got some time to play catch up on all the cutting and piecing.

After Friday's class I was a late arrival at the neighborhood Happy Night where I learned that one should never drink rum and cheap red wine the same night. I don't know how I functioned in Saturday's class, which was an art quilt (applique) class. I do know that the pieces I cut out and pressed the edges under, which are ready for layout, do not look anything like a poppy when laid out. I stood to cut, I stood to iron, the teacher kept saying 'take a load off, have a seat while you cut those templates out, but going from standing to sitting with the mother of all hangovers is not conducive to remaining upright.

The splitting headache continued throughout the day. No number of ibuprofen, naproxen, Diet Cokes, granola bars, grapes had any effect. Finally around 9 p.m. I took a Percocet and it was gone this morning. If I had any sense at all, a little 'hair of the dog' might have ended my misery sooner, but I just wasn't feeling any love for Captain Morgan.

This morning I dragged my neighbor who may be interested in taking up quilting to a quilt show, and we spent the better part of the day critiquing the entries and playing with new sewing machines.

In test driving the new Bernina 300 series, they sat us down and we made these cute little zippered change purses that took 10 minutes and let us use different decorative stitches and change feet a bunch of times. (These Bernina's have snap on feet, but can still use the regular feet).

Of course I also spent equal time at the Babylock booth checking out the Sashiko machine and talking about the 12 needle embellisher while my neighbor checked out their sewing machines.

But...the biggest deal of the day? The only money I spent was on lunch and raffle basket tickets. I bought nothing at the show. (I must have been still feeling the after affects of Saturday.

(OMG....the only thing on TV is infomercials...what time is it? Crap, it's 1:30...need to wrap this up)

I've got the last Windmill Farm class tomorrow, and then I wound up in another waitlist class for a Garden Maze which has a kind of Celtic knot thing going on. Our anniversary is Wednesday and we're going to a British Invasion tribute concert at Strathmore Hall, so I should have more time to blog this week and maybe finish up one or two projects.

Oh, and let's not forget to mention that when I did get home from class on Saturday, the hubs had spent 5 hours in the kitchen prepping tomatoes and peppers for a salsa making session, so after an hour's veg out time, hoping to lose the nagging headache, he helped can 18 jars of salsa. And not just any salsa.....salsa so insanely hot that I'm putting a couple jars up in the medicine cabinet for winter, when I wind up with one of those head colds where I can't breathe through my nose...this will clear your sinuses right up.

I just don't understand men...let's use the hottest peppers known to man (Habarnaro) and leave the seeds in, leave the seeds in the Jalapenos, but remove the seeds from the Cubanelle and Poblano mild peppers. Oh, and we'll also add double the Tabasco sauce the recipe for spicy Salsa suggests as an optional ingredient. Well, on the bright side, we won't have to make Salsa again, since I don't see us using up this 18-jar batch in this lifetime :)

Well, it's off to the office for me tomorrow, and I need to go before I'm forced to buy a Magic Bullet....seriously, who doesn't want to invite 2 couples over to sit at my kitchen counter while I demo my nifty little chopper and make all kinds of crap.....oh wait.....they're making FROZEN DRINKS in it.....where the heck is the phone......

Have a great week! Stay cool, stay safe, stay sane (and sew if you can).

Caution:Hypochondriac quilting

I remember back when I was 18 years old, freshly married, and working in D.C., I used to devour every woman's magazine I could get my hands on during the hour-plus commute. One story that stays with me was the story of a healthy young 20-something woman who just dropped dead without warning. She had a headache and took some aspirin. Turns out what she really had was an undiagnosed brain tumor. For months after reading that article, every headache I had sent me into frantic worrying that I too had an undiagnosed brain tumor and would surely keel over on a downtown street, or in the back of the chartered bus on a Friday afternoon not to be found until Monday morning's commute..

Remember how I mentioned that Buster broke the Tiffany lamp as well as one of the CFL bulbs in it? Well, for the past few days I've had a neck ache, the kind that could happen if you thought you drove past Johnny Depp on the Beltway and you whipped your head around real quick to check and see if it really was him (but it wasn't). At any rate, no amount of naproxen has helped.

And you know how sometimes your toes hurt if you're wearing new thong-type flip flops that are just a little wider or rougher or stiffer on the part that goes between your toes? Well, my toes have hurt for a couple of days, only I haven't worn flip flops for five days. (dum dum dum dum).

Are you with me? The plot thickens....

A couple days ago I noticed the hanging plants in the kitchen window have been looking pretty 'not green'. Obviously in need of some kind of fertilizer, I've been plucking leaves off them with an increasing regularity. Looking at them tonight, I'm starting to wonder if our water doesn't contain some deadly chemical that is slowly killing us, and the plants are trying to tell me something....or maybe they're choking on mercury vapors wafting through the kitchen.

Could all of this be because I didn't run through the house and open all the windows and turn on the a/c and fans when that lamp hit the floor? And I actually picked up all the glass shards with my bare hands, sustaining a minor cut (where mercury undoubtedly leeched into my bloodstream), and I'm pretty sure I might have put my finger in my mouth when I cut it. And. I didn't  double bag the glass shards it and deliver it to the EPA, I just dropped it in the kitchen trash can where it probably sat for a day, oozing noxious, plant-killing vapors.

I'd like to think it's just my over-active imagination. The constant neck pain is some combination of my old overstuffed pillow on the new firm mattress...the rapidly dying plants might not have liked the tiny bit of acid-loving fertilizer they got over the weekend...I'm searching for some rational explanation. But then, there's a dark side that has me thinking that I could be a feature story in LHJ, and a year from now, some naive little twenty-something will start to wonder about her own neck ache.......or maybe I'll wake up in the morning to find I've grown an extra toe on each foot.

Other than that, productive last couple of days. Got the house totally cleaned as soon as the grandpup was picked up. Down to two dogs, back to normal. Managed to remember to go water my friend Anna's plants (she's at the beach). Went to my first class of 5 I've scheduled for this week, and I'm a third of the way through the homework for next week.

Pretty amazing that this:

turns into this:

The finished quilt is called Windmill Farm. The wide strips in each set cut at 7-1/8". I hope I never have to use 1/8" again. I'm going scrappy with Moda's Pumpkins Gone Wild from a couple years ago (O-M-G....she's using something from her stash!) The background is Kaufmann Kona Cotton. I'm thinkng about using a dark colored thread to quilt it....sort of like painting on a clean canvas.

Of course, all bets are off if I really do have Toxic CFL Syndrome.  If you don't hear from me for a week, call the EPA.

Non-toxic Tuesday wishes to all of you!

Goodbye July....Hello August!

O-M-G! Paco is just so happy that Buster was picked up this afternoon. Now, granted, Ricky (the Grandpup) also arrived yesterday  for a weekend stay, but Paco can deal with that. Now that strange-puppy-cousin-who-is-always-being-yelled-at has left the building, Paco can relax.

If you remember, I mentioned that the hubs was into living on the edge and invited the Grandpup over last night to bring our canine total to 4. After a little grumbling/growling/needed to be separated before blood spurted, they seemed to be tolerating each other. I headed up the street for 'happy night'. Shortly after leaving, I needed to return home for the fixings to make a proper 'Cosmo'. I called the hubs and he set it all out and was coaching me on the mixology, having left the stir fry dinner he made himself in the middle of the coffee table, in front of the tv.

Would it surprise you know that Buster took the opportunity of his absence from the family room to jump up on the coffee table and eat HALF of the hubs'dinner, which included ALL of the chicken. None of the other 3 dogs would have even considered the opportunity. :) I just filled my tote bag full of liquor bottles and juice and headed out the door. Not my problem (big grin).

Today was filled with visits to fabric shops in Frederick. Needed a few fabrics to supplement the stash for one of the classes this week. Had to pick up a pattern ($16!!!) for another, and since I just got into a waitlisted class, I needed to modify the fabric requirements to accommodate a bunch of FQs I've had for over a year, and buy some yardage to set them into. Speaking of accommodating, the hubs was very.

Not sure how this is going to work out...

But I needed something to be a major part of all those blues. It's a dusty, washed out kind of magenta, and a darker version. We shall see. It will either suck, or it will be really stunning. We'll find out on Friday. Looking at the picture, it looks like we're heading to Suck Town, but looking at the fabrics in person tells a different story.

Then I spent the rest of the night honing my OCD skills

These are all the fabrics for each class, ironed, Mary Ellen'd, and hung on skirt hangers with their class lists with the additional supplies needed highlighted. Yes, they're arranged by class day, as they hang in the studio closet. When you consider that I work 2 jobs and have classes scheduled for Monday/Weds/Thurs/Fri/Sat, I need to be uberorganized if I'm going to enjoy the classes I'm in. Fortunately, my part time merchandising next week is on the light side.

While I was in one fabric store this afternoon, looking for some coordinating fabric for one of the classes, I could hear the shopkeep talking to a customer. It sounded like they were talking about the children's book The Pink Motel. Now, that was one of my favorites, and if you check back a few months of posts, you'd know that I came across this postcard of the hubs'grandfather posing in front of a Florida pink motel that he owned in the 1940s, and I not only got the postcard but also acquired the book and shadow-boxed them.

I digress.....at any rate, while I wanted to chime in 'hey, that was my favorite book when I was little', for some reason, today I decided to m.m.o.b. (mind my own business). A couple minutes later the shopkeep saw me and said 'did you see your sister....she just left the shop'. I must have looked a little confused because she then went on to detail their discussion....The Pink Motel, my blog, how I'm obsessed with quilting (the shopkeep interjected...'like that's a bad thing') and it dawns on me that I was overhearing her conversation with my sister and was oblivious that there was any connection. My sister is in the same quilt shop as me, at the exact same time, and neither of us knew it, or ran into each other....two ships passing in the night. Strange.  I haven't phoned her yet to tell her (she'll read this and find out :) ).

Well, it's already Sunday, and it's already August. The hubs is out playing poker, I'm tired of ironing fabric, so I think I'm going to take advantage of an empty bed and sprawl out. Plenty of time to do some sewing tomorrow.

Goodnight all!