That's Right, We're Freakin' Love Birds...

For Valentine's Day, Rich offered to paint my room.  This is a huge sacrifice on his part because he HATES painting.  I generously offered to choose a more manly color.  It's a big change from the super femme peach that's been up for 6 years.  It's one of those Historical colors at Lowe's.  You're welcome old house.  You are welcome.  The upper left picture is of the 'dressing area'.  To the right is a picture of my favorite plates that hang over my itsy bitsy closet directly opposite the sink area.

The 'toilet' room is so small, you can't get far enough away to take a decent picture.  To the lower left is a full length mirror that Rich made for me out of a plain mirror and some molding.  I love it.

The bedroom area is a much lighter blue, also from the Historical collection.  Check out the hot blonde in the big portrait above.  Then check out the fat mom over to the left.  What the hell happened there?!

  My button cookies...yum.  This explains the fat chick above.  I also made little beaded pins but I forgot to take pictures before I gave them all away to office mates.

 These are from the applique challenge my quilt guild has going on.  I've decided to do mine in a 30's theme.  It'll eventually make it's way into a baby blanket and probably donated to the comfort quilts the guild collects for babies.  30's isn't my thing but I've always wanted to do something along those lines.  This will be a good way to get that idea out from under my skin and a good donation opportunity.

 These simple patterns were designed by Katie McMullen.  Only one more month and we'll be done with them.

 We had another baby shower at the office.  So, I took the opportunity to make these ducky cupcakes.  I've been looking for a reason for what seems like forever.  They took about 6 hours... a little more than I had planned.  The cupcakes themselves were blueberry and were SO yummy.  The duck heads are donut holes and the tails are halved marshmallows.  The beaks and feet are orange Starbursts and the eyes are m&m minis.

DUCK BUTTS!!!!

 Rich and I are going on 20 years of wedded togetherness.  Assuming he doesn't get completely fed up with me by next Dec, I'm making this dresden plate wall hanging in honor of his 20 years of putting up with the crazy.  The love birds will be appliqued to the center of the dresden plate below. That's right we're freakin' love birds.  The pattern is for a pillow but since a fancy pillow would never survive this house, I'm turning it in to a wall hanging.  (ChitterChatterDesigns.com)

Not bad in a loose, artistic sort of way...

 In a galaxy far, far away....Luke, I am your sister:)  Yep, I have a brother named Luke and I can't think of Star Wars without thinking of him.  Although, my latest quilt is not for Luke.  He can be jelly (jealous, for those of you who don't have a house full of teenagers) if he wants to.  My great-nephew Hayden will be getting this one.

 

Darth and the Millennium Falcon are my favorites!  The patterns are from a free site, Fandom In Stitches.  You should definitely check them out.  They have some really amazing patterns from all your favorite sci-fi movies and cartoons.  I'm also planning  Harry Potter and Twilight quilts based on patterns from this site.  These are paper pieced and I had to double the size to make them 9" blocks!  Then I added borders until they were 12".  I can't imagine doing one of these actual size!!  There were some itsy bitsy pieces.
 

 R2D2 gave me fits!  How do you do this guy justice with fabric?  I had hoped to find white fabric with blue rectangles to make it some what more literal but it just wasn't happening.  So, with the urging of my family, I embroidered some detail on his... head? 

 I was most worried about Yoda in the beginning because I couldn't imagine getting his face right.  But, luckily, my son Hunter is a really good artist.  I had him draw the details and I just traced with thread.  Hunter ends up doing a lot of my artwork for me.  Thank you, honey:)  All in all, I kind of like this one but it only matters if Hayden thinks it's cool.  Fingers crossed.

 When Star Wars was finished, and by finished I mean ready to be quilted, I decided to finish a few projects from Valentines past.  This little Storm At Sea was the Super Bowl mystery last year.  It's been hanging on my railing all year.  I used some of my least favorite fat qtrs that I won at this months guild meeting as backer.  Got it quilted and stalled out when I realized I didn't save anything to bind it in.  Dang It!  So there is sits until I can go shopping again.  Luckily, I think Sweet Annies still has some coordinating fabrics.

Which reminds me, at our guild meeting, I won 39 red/ valentine fat quarters!  SCORE!!  I think I won it last year or the year before in Jan or Feb because I've won pink before.  And, I won the patriotic month once...

Also, last month I won  a free applique book.  I need to stop thinking of myself as never winning anything!

So, then I moved on to Heart Strings.  I made this quilt top a few years ago for Sweet Annies as a store sample.  I always thought it was cute and knew I'd never make another one.  So, when she was done with it, I bought it back and hung it on my railing for a year.  Sunday, I got it quilted.  And, I've got it at work with me to finish the binding.  My awesome new job allows me to work on this kind of stuff while I'm in between phone calls.  Jees, I'm a lucky girl when I think about it!

Happy Stitches everyone!

What the heck? I wanted a less stress New Year!

I have to admit that I've really loved having a 4 day weekend.  There wasn't anywhere for me to taxi the kids to, no holiday to prepare for, just a few days to decompress.  Very nice.  However, the New Year didn't start as stress free as I would have liked.  All the crazy things that were happening on the 1st, (flood in the basement, migraine, Ram's sucking, treadmill broke, car steering going bonkers again), ended up to be non-problems in the long run.  Well, except for Rich having a massive reaction to the cat dander in our treadmill when he tried to take it apart to fix it.  His skin was crawling and his eyes were swelling.  Then he started getting this weird droopy eye thing going.  By the way, the treadmill still only goes 1 or 7.  If I'm going to look on the bright side of things, I can just be grateful for a free excuse not to work out.

In my last blog, I left out a few things I had done in Nov.  The cupcake is from an office baby shower just before Thanksgiving.  I thought they were super cute:)


The quilt is something I made for my niece-in-law in Chicago.  She had a friend that loves Eeyore and needed a birthday gift.  I turned the Y into Eeyore's tail.  I thought it was a stroke of genius, personally.  I hope they liked it as much as I did.


For the life of me, I can't figure out how to move pictures around on this blog so that they look decent.  This is my Twisted Mystery 2011.  I started it last January and we were supposed to meet once a month to make this quilt.  For one reason or another, it seemed like I never got to meet with them or work on the quilt.  I spent several hours finishing the star blocks below the other day. 

I wanted so badly to finish this whole thing.  What can I say, I'm a finisher.  It was like torture for me to sit and work on it.  It's just so repetitive.  So I decided to cut myself some slack and stopped for awhile.  I've still got the Flippin' Flowers and Mist something or another blocks before I can stop.

Above is my latest Quilt of Valor.  All that is left is to have it quilted, bound and labeled.  This took me about 3 or 4 months.  Again, repetitive.  Couldn't handle it for long periods.

Then, just because I could, I started my spool quilt.  A few months ago, my guild had a fabric strip exchange.  I put them to use yesterday & made the spools.  There are about 42, I think.  Each stack has about 6 of the same colored spools.  Now that they're done, I wish I'd had more of the jewel tones.  The green and turquoise are super cool.

And, that is all she wrote.  Happy New Year!

The Carnage Left Behind

These are my Girl Scout blocks.  I was volun-told to come up with the blocks that are to represent our Service Unit in the quilts that are being made for the Girl Scout Birthday.  Personally, I'm embarrassed.  I was at a total loss and under a bunch of stress when I made them.  Several years ago my troop made quilt blocks for me for Leader's Appreciation.  I took the blocks from that project and used them as the appliques for these blocks.  After all, it was supposed to be the girls doing this.

Naturally I felt the need to blog about something I'm embarrassed of.

This one with the tree was drawn by my daughter Bethany.  I think these are from 2005.

Christmas Cookies

 All month I felt like I wasn't doing anything creative and feeling bad about it. Then I realized that I'd been baking every night after work.  So I've decided making Christmas cookies was creative.  I sent trays to Rich's work and sent them to my own as well this year.  Then I sent some to my brother Luke & my step-father Jim & Ethan's teacher, too.  Not to mention the hundreds that were eaten by the kids.  And there were the 2 batches of fudge and 1 batch of butter toffee.  YUM.

 I did manage to finish Rich's Christmas stocking.  I worked on it at all of my breaks while I was at work.  I made the old one (above) 19 years ago.  I messed up on the sequin placement of Santa's white stuff and the train grill.  Then, my room mate at the time stuck her finger in his name before it had dried... The funny thing is that the paint bottle burped when I was writing his name on his new stocking and it messed up in the exact letter as before.  He just can't win:)

These are the last of my Civil War blocks.  Well, except for the one that is going to be posted on New Year's Eve.  I'm so excited that I was able to catch up on Saturday.  I was able to work on them for about 6 hours.  I even think most of them even turned out the right size.  Now to decide how to use them.  It just occurred to me that if I set them the way I want to, I'll end up with a 200 something square inch quilt.  I suppose that means I'll have 2 queen sized quilts in the end.

 This is the carnage left behind.  I'm not cleaning it up until I've got the setting done.  I think that is going to be just as scrappy as the blocks themselves.

Last but certainly not least, my snowflake.  We made these at my last TAS meeting.  During my Harry Potter marathon this weekend, I finished the applique and beaded it.  It took 2 1/2 Harry Potter movies to finish the beading that surrounds the snowflake and borders the binding.  The last applique Civil War block took another 1 1/4 movies.  I'm currently watching Half Blood Prince.  Then I'll have to rent the last 2 to complete the greatness of my weekend.  I guess I'll work on those State blocks while Harry saves the world.  Holy crap, they're about to kill Dumbledore.  This always makes me cry.

Happy Holidays everyone!