Ready

All ready for the big day.

She has no idea there are presents coming; all she's requested is that we eat cake.  Don't worry sweet girl, there will be cake.

Waiting...

Yup, waited until the last minute to make my list online for tomorrow's plant sale and it is taking FOREVER for each page to load on the website.

So, to make the most of loading time, I'll share some pics of what's already coming up in the garden outside.

Two nights ago my dad and brother came over to till one of the gardens that was mostly ignored last year; I try to only till when creating a new garden space, but this was the best option for reclaiming the space for this year as I'd rather get it planted and mulched instead of spending all my time clearing it by hand.

While they were busy with the tilling I took some (rather terrible) pictures of what's coming up in the other "vegetable" gardens.  It was a little too close to sunset, so I apologize that most of these are a bit blurry.

One of my mums.

Dianthus (pinks)

Green onions; whatever doesn't get picked comes back the next year.

And when I was down on hands and knees transplanting some borage seedlings from the other garden, I looked over and noticed HUNDREDS of little green onions coming up - some of the green onions above went to seed last year and voila, a whole new patch of onions magically appears.  Love that.  So excited about this since I have a terrible time getting green onions to sprout.  My absolute favorite part of spring is discovering which plants successfully reseeded themselves the previous year.  Less work for the gardener, and the plants always do well.

Some of the transplanted Borage; best to do early on before there are too many roots as Borage doesn't like being transplanted.

Lemon Balm; I didn't think this would come back, so it was a welcome discovery.

Yellow Wonder Alpine Strawberry; planted some of these last year so haven't actually had the chance to eat one yet..I can't wait!!

And another gamble; my sorrel came back.  Behind it is a type of walking onion; also newly planted last year so I'm excited to see how well they reproduce this summer...

Yarrow; this is just a small chunk of a patch that's been going strong for the last few years; starting to see little seedlings coming up everywhere so may need to do some "weeding" this year.

Beets!  Planted a few weeks back right before it started snowing again.

And peas, planted at the same time.  I didn't get any peas planted last year; can't wait to show Ada how to pick these and then eat them fresh in the garden with her.

A few of my irises; descended from a large patch my great-grandma had in front of her house, with some additional varieties mixed in from my mom.

I'll also have to get some pics of the 3(!) parsley plants that are already up and growing.

Okay, finally done with the plant list and it's off to bed so that I actually wake up when the alarm goes off at 5am tomorrow.

Distracted...

I admit it.  I got a little distracted after that last blog post...a month ago.  Sorry.  Want to know what's been getting my attention?

Mostly I've been getting things done.  Things like these:

and these:

Yay for getting lots of gifts off to their recipients...and making some space in the closet!

In the middle of all that this showed up in my mailbox:

Yup, as soon as I saw the cover I sat down and read the entire magazine.  Can you blame me?  I really want to make that cover quilt...but maybe a miniature version since this one takes nine yards of fabric just for the yo-yos.  Sigh.

and then these showed up:

After flipping through that top one at least a hundred times I ordered this, and ran to the mailbox every day to see if it had arrived yet:

And yes, I read the whole thing the same evening it arrived.  Can you tell what I'd love to be working on right now?

Oh yeah, and those TWO sunny days we had during this alleged Spring - I spent in the garden:

So far one brave pea has emerged, and has been snowed on twice.  Ugh.  I often have nostalgia for snowy winters...but I just can't say the same for cold, wet springs.  I really hope the sun comes out soon.

In the meantime I'm hunkering down indoors, with a few more distractions:

I promise to be back soon with more on all of this...for now I'm just thankful to have a few quiet minutes on the computer, while this sweet girl is napping.

She's a little under the weather today and daycare's closed since they're sick too, so I came home early.  Best part of my day?  When she asked me to snuggle with her on the couch while watching a movie.  Guessing that won't last too much longer. :)  (Second best part?  When she told me she wanted to go to sleep at the exact time I wanted to put her down for a nap.)

How are you spending your days during this dreary Spring?

Full Weekend

A busy, but good, weekend.  Saturday started with a trip to the quilt shop for the block-of-the-month club.  A quick trip home was followed by a birthday party for our now 3 year-old niece.

The birthday girl, blowing up balloons.

Ada was the only one not dressed as a princess, but she didn't notice.  She also didn't eat any cake.  But she was completely into the flower balloons. :)

After another trip home for a nap, we headed off to birthday party #2.  This one was held at a place full of inflatable slides, jumping arenas, etc.  Ada was completely freaked out by everything at first, but once she got hold of a ball she got into things and ran around in circles, and tumbled, and fell down, and jumped, and had a good time.  And then ate her whole piece of pizza + a piece of cake and wanted more.

And today Chris got some solo time, Ada got some play-time at Grandma and Grandpa's, and I had some girl time, which meant spending the afternoon touring expensive Parade of Homes houses.  And of course I took my camera.

Here's what we saw:

Sigh...love these butterflies.

And this great ceiling in the master suite.

And the tile in the master bath. (+ the walk-in shower)

What I didn't love: The bedrooms were fairly small and there were odd built-in decorative elements throughout the house, like the weird floor-to-ceiling mirror thing in the dining room, that would take a ridiculous amount of work to get rid of if you wanted to redecorate.  And last but not least, the thought of trying to deal with 20' curtains.  Who wants to clean those?

The next house - a bad floorplan + a cramped random bedroom off the side of the upstairs loft that you could only get to by going behind a half wall and down a couple steps.  Two thumbs down.  But I did like the railing here on the stairs.

House #3 - Cute girl and boy rooms connected by a bathroom.  Saw this in a few of the houses.

House #4 - After walking through this one we both said, there's a lot of WALL here.  Another bad floorplan, terrible flow, and huge expanses of wall all over that made the house feel like it was broken up into weird chunks.  The laundry room was tucked in a far corner upstairs, on a different floor and opposite end of the house from the master suite.  The island in the kitchen had 2 chairs on one side.  The range was on the counter behind the chairs, and there was so little space that if someone was sitting at the island it would be impossible to cook at the same time...but, at least you could see the huge flat screen tv in the adjoining living room from anywhere in the kitchen. :)  This house also featured one of the largest lampshades I've ever seen:

Come back tomorrow for part 2 - lots of good stuff in some of the other houses. ;)

PS - I can't resist sharing this last pic, from St. Patrick's Day:

And yes, there is several more inches of hat that got cut off. :)

Waiting for Spring

January Modern Quilt Guild Meeting

Had a GREAT time at our guild meeting last night.

Back at the November meeting we traded scraps in a blind swap to make mug rugs for each other, and last night we gave the completed mug rug back to the fabric owner.

Here's a closer look at the mug rug I made for Kelly with her scraps:

 

And here's a bit about my process.  I had wide both wide and narrow strips of most of the fabrics.  I took the wide strip of the leaf print and cut a chunk off that looked about the right size - literally.  No measuring, no squaring up.

Then I took several of the narrow strips, sewed them together, cut off chunks about 1 1/4 inches wide, again not worrying if things were completely straight because I wanted it to feel a little more organic to go with the leaf print.

After sewing on the border I squared it up, added the batting and backing and worked on the quilting.  The first thing I quilted was Kelly's name in the bottom right-hand corner (this was just free-hand):

Then continued from the "y" at the end of her name to stitch just inside the outer border until I got back to the end of her name.  Then I stitched another line in the outer border.  And last I stitched around the middle vein and outside edges of each leaf.  I used my darning foot for all the quilting, including the "straight" stitching around the border to keep the organic feel.

The binding is a Flutterby print from my stash that just seemed perfect; a light pattern to it, and a nice deep brown to frame the piece and set-off the busy patterns.  The binding was a bit of a bear to stitch; I wanted it fairly narrow, but with it only being a 1/4" on each side it was harder to pull around and do the hand stitching on the back.  Probably not something I'd want to do for a larger piece, but I really like it on this piece and am glad I didn't go wider.

And here are a couple close-ups of the mug rug I received from Alyson.  I love it, and it's now lookin' pretty on my desk at work.  I really like the bits of pattern fabric used in the binding; it adds a little something extra that just kicks it up a notch; love it!

The pattern scraps are Meadowsweet left over from an apron, and some coordinating solid scraps I had on hand from a different project.

And - yes, there's more!  We worked on a fun little project last night and everyone left with something COMPLETED!

We made these cute little wallets using paper and vinyl:

Really easy and fun.

Nichole gave a demonstration and walked us through everything - and pre-cut all our vinyl for us.  All we had to do was pick out a sheet of double-sided scrapbook paper, make a few cuts and start sewing.  Pattern is from Martha Stewart.

Happy crafting!!

(And no, I haven't forgotten I promised that post on my word for this year; my only excuse is that I've been busy actually working on something related to my word.  I'm hoping to be ready for posting on all that in the next few days.)