One more UFO top done!

Finally, I finished the top for a surprisingly simple UFO on Monday. I started this little wallhanging I think 2 years ago for a Weird and Ugly fabric challenge from N2Quilting. I really hate this quilt. I don't now why, maybe because I don't think my contrasts between the people and the "sand" is right. Maybe cause I just don't like it. *shrugs* That is probably why it took me so long to finish zigzag stitching down the applique. I am going to try to pin it out tonight and take it with me to Mom's tomorrow to throw a quick stipple on it here and there. I want to try to outline quilt the pieces so the scene is visible from the back of the quilt too but I think it needs some funky stars or something in the sky.

Also tomorrow I will be able to take pics of the other 2 quilts I finished this week, the last of which is in the washer as I type.

Mom and the kids came over yesterday for my Tackle It Tuesday which was packing. We got quite a bit accomplished. Veronica took down all the remaining pictures, wrapped them in newspaper and boxed them. Diantha took down all the posters in Jeremiah's room and rolled them, securing them with rubber bands. Both girls took down the remaining quilts from the walls (we had at least 1, if not 2 or 3 quilts on the walls in every room), washed and boxed them up. Mom helped me drag everything out of my lower cupboards and sort and pack them. We got most of my dishes boxed up, all the coffee mugs and everything else in/on top of the china hutch.

I have 3 more boxes and my dresser to go through this evening in preperation for the world's biggest yard sale on Friday and Saturday. Tony is working late so I should be able to tackle them and make a pan of brownies if I can keep my nose out of a book long enough. Halfway through one I really like; such a temptation!

Our fish have been dropping like flies. Apparently they've come down with "Ick" which is apparently bad. We lost 5 in the last 3 days. Panicking upon the realization of the problem (thanks Mom!) I ran to walmart last night for some more newspaper for wrapping dishes and Ick drops. Took Artemas, Beverly and Hannah with me with the plan that even though it was only a 4 mile drive both little, extremely tired girls would fall asleep and I could leave Artemas in the car with them. NO! So I grabbed B out of the car and carried her in the store, Artemas grabbed Hannah and we put them in a cart. Wandered around, got the fish stuff, M&Ms, newspaper, got in the back of a very long line and Artemas says, "There's poop on your shirt." Yes, Betsy had pooped on me and I wore it all over walmart. He says, "Probably you can hide it with the newspaper til we get home." Uh...no! So over to teh clothing department for a cheapy (yet stylish) tank top, I run to the bathroom to change and we proceed through the line and home as planned. Mom thinks it's really funny. Tony thought it was really funny too. Jerks.

Had to take a pic of the house for the insurance company yesterday, figured I'd share. AND I think that catches me up, LoL!

Trying new Quilting

I haven't blogged in a few days, but my Mom says that's okay because I outdid myself the last time by blogging 3 times in one day. I kept forgetting things, though!

Thursday my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin came into town. Apparently Gatlinburg TN has some big fireworks thing they didn't want to miss. We on the other hand are lazy and won't even drive into town to see them. More on that later. I snapped this pic of Mom sitting at IHOP waiting on her dinner, knitting of course.

Friday we went to Mom's for Tony to mess around more with the back porch and while he was doing whatever it was he was doing I pinned and quilted 3 smallish/lap/wallhanging quilts. I bring things that I want to stipple quilt here to Mom's because my little Singer Simple machine has a tension problem (too much caffeine??) and Mom has an antique 50's Singer like machine that does a WONDERFUL easy stipple. I always do just a random meandering pattern because it's quick, I'm good at it, and it's quick. However on the N2Quilting yahoo group I'm on there has been some discussion about free motion/stipple quilting and I thought I'd give something different a try. Of course, being the coward that I am I stayed almost in my comfort zone. One quilt I just did my normal stipple. Quilt #2 got a random, meandering stipple like normal with little loops thrown in here and there for fun. Quilt #3 got a radom meandering stripple like normal with spirals thrown in here and there for fun. The loops were difficult for me to feel like I had a rhythm. It felt like it took longer because since I wasn't used to it, I wasn't as fluid in my movements. The spirals though, were suprisingly easy.

Friday evening was the First Friday's thing downtown where I live. We raced back from Mom's and set up our "booth" with Dad's soaps, Diantha's handspuns, Mom's recycled yarns and my handbags. 3 hours of standing around because I forgot the chairs, with about 10 people walking past. Right before we left I sold one small handbag, which let me put gas in Tony's truck, buy him a joke of a lottery ticket (with which he won $3!) and buy myself a bottle of Bacardi pre-mixed Mojito, which BTW is NASTY. I had a "real" mojito at Chili's a week or so ago and it was yummy. This pre bottled crap tasted like watered down tooth paste. Ugh.

Saturday we lay around the house taking our time with this. Tony helped me do housework, we got the kitchen, living room and our room cleaned up and all the laundry done and all but 1 load put away. In between all these I sat around sleepily rereading twilight. Then we made a walmart run where we wandered about looking at things like area rugs and a Shark Steamer.
All with the hardwoods in the house we are trying to buy in mind.

Then it was time to head back downtown and set up for their 4th of July thing. They had told us we could put our booth back up, that the shops were having sales and the City was doing a celebration/fireworks thing about a mile away so they expected foot traffic. It turns out that it was an all-day thing and we should have set up about 10am. Oh well. 6 people walking past us and 2 hours later we decided we were bored and packed up. We didn't take the kids to see any fireworks, we were both tired and didn't feel like it. They saw a few from our porch and were so excited that then I was sad they missed the bigger displays.

Yesterday we went over to Mom and Dad's again. Tony wanted to weed eat, LOL! I didn't take any quilty, spinny or knityy projects; just new moon which I'm rereading now that I finished the first one last night. On my way there I stopped at the Buy 1/Get 1 Fireworks place and bought $20 worth of fireworks to set off in their driveway for the kids once it got dark. Of course by the time it was nearly dark it was also RAINING! The kids huddled under the overhang they made from the back door to Mom's van and watched as Tony, Artemas and I lit fireworks with wet lighters. We tried lighting a cigarette and using it to light them, that worked best...it took the cigarette longer to get soggy than the lighters, LOL! By the time we were out of fireworks the rain had stopped but we were still dripping. I went back in the house and very cheerily announced to Mom that I burned both my thumbs and caught my shirt on fire! She wasn't surprised, remembering the slight pyromania of my youth (that Tony says I didn't outgrow!) I'm sure. Diantha came in behind me and just as cheerily said that I also won the wet tshirt contest.

Courage, Monster and Holly?

LoL! Shall I explain my title?
First, I have a new listing in my etsy shop today. A pleated fabric purse with a quilted-inner pannel for stability, made from a large scale green and pink floral fabric with a pink Breast Cancer Awareness batik cuff at the top! I called this one "Courage."

Secondly, yesterday I decided to experiment with Hannah's getting longer hair and put it up in two little bitty pony tails. However, since her hair is still rather short instead of being on the side of her head they were near the top. TOTALLY cute! Tony said it looked like horns to hold up her halo, LoL! She's such a little monster; this look definitely fits her and I will be putting her hair up like this more often since it didn't seem to bother her.

I didn't do a tackle it Tuesday this week. Actually, I did, but my tackle was more like "Clean house enough so we can continue to live" and "try not to have a nervous breakdown." I'm happy to report that both were mildly successful!

This afternoon when Tony got home (he's on day shift all this week which is royally screwing up the children's sleeping/napping patterns) I left the kids in Hannah's room with him to "help" him clean out her closet which we've used as storage, looking for things to pack and to put in our ever growing yard sale pile. While they did that I threw together some quilt blocks Mom found in her stash that she said she'd never do anything with. I had a perfect fabric for a border for it and JUST enough, I mean I seriously had a 1" strip of fabric left! Tomorrow night calls for a trip to Knoxville to have dinner with the grandparents and maybe I can talk Tony into a quick pop into JoAnn's for some backing material. As soon as that's obtained this little beauty will find its way into my etsy shop also. I thought of calling it "Holly" because it looks Christmassy, though it doesn't actually have any "Christmas"/holiday fabrics in it. Tony says it looks like it should be "Peppermint Swirl." Probably I will humor him. : )

Featured!!

Boy am I bloggy today!
I just wanted to share, one more time... I'm featured this evening at CafeHandmade - http://cafehandmade.blogspot.com/2009/06/featured-artist-desiree-bowman.html!!

And, while I'm at it...finished pics of my fall leaves quilt! Pop pver to my etsy shop to see the mini wallhangings I've been working on lately.

Smoky Mountain Honeymoon

Okay, finally some pics. Quilt is all done except for the label. I know, I know, you're supposed to put the label on and THEN quilt the quilt so that some theif somewhere can't pick the label off. What can I say? I'm lazy? I have a lot going on? I just don't care? Probably it's all three.

As soon as I make the label and get her new mailing address this quilt will be winging it's way to sunny FL to my very dear, childhood friend Kelli who married in May. She has always loved sunflowers and said she's doing her house in sunflower colors, only darker. I came up with my own interpretation of that color scheme and ran with it.

Using civil war repros and more luck than ability I pieced log cabin quilt blocks and set them in the straight furrows pattern. I used red in the centers as a little nod to tradition and put a thin inner border of the same red print around the log cabins. Then a border of HSTs--I LOVE HSTs! and finally a very thin green outter border from the same fabric as the binding. The binding is doubled fold, continous biased binding so the little red stripe in the green fabric runs diagonally which is really cool.

Again, more dumb luck, my backing fabric of little chickens was not wide enough. I had just enough strips leftover from the log cabin blocks to make a 6" wide (finished) strip of strips, chinese coins style in the middle of the backing. It made it just wide enough and I love the way it looks! I machine quilted it in a random all over meandering stipple, which is so fast and fun.

I washed it when it was all done to shrink the Warm and Natural all cotton batting I use. It shinks up to 3% on its first washing which is not enough to cause problems to the quilt but enough to give it a slightly puckered antique look. It measures 45" wide by 53.5" long (figure that one out.)

As Serendipity would have it, my friend and her new hubby honeymooned in North Carolina, in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. So I have named it Smoky Mountain Honeymoon. I LOVE this quilt. If it weren't intended as a gift I would DEFINITELY be keeping it!!

Excuse me while I have a nervous breakdown

Dante says the 6th circle of hell is ice. The 5th must be packing.

Tony was off Fri, Sat and Sun this past weekend so Fri and Satruday we spent all day at my parents house cleaning off their back porch (which is roughly 20'x12'?) which was packed to the cieling except for one almost "walkway" with stuff my Dad just had to bring with them when they moved. :-D We seperated out a HUGE dump pile and a HUGE yardsale pile, complete with a stove and refrigerator. Then Tony finished all but about 6 boards of the wood floor they are doing so he's going over after work today to finish that.

While he started on the porch I used Mom's old sewing machine to stipple quilt 3 quilts. My Smoky Mountain Honeymoon which is a wedding gift, a little scrappy squares wallhanging for my etsy shop and the fall leaves quilt I made from disappearing nine patch blocks. Yesterday I managed to get binding made and put on the Honeymoon and little scrappy quilts and get them washed. However I did not manage to get good pics of them, except this one of the scrappy quilt that Hannah--complete with Larry Boy outfit--had to get into. Will post picks of the Honeymoon log cabin later on.

Whenever my kids have outgrown anything I've washed it and boxed it up. For the yard sale we're gonna have with Mom I decided that probably we didn't need all of them anymore and to go through and keep one big box of Jeremiah's outgrown clothes, all sizes and one of Hannah's. I had saved all of them just in case we ever decide to have another baby but I am tired of them and if we ever decide to have another baby we'll just get more. Someone else could use them now and they are nice clothes, mostly name brands like Carters, Children's Place, Adidas...someone else can enjoy them for next to nothing and I can buy drywall with the proceeds LoL!!

Tony got the boxes out of the storage closet yesterday and I spent ALL day opening and sorting them. I probably have $2k worth of kids clothes to put in this yard sale. We did keep one box that's all Jeremiah t-shirts with things on the front to make a t-shirt quilt for him, or for his future kid? This quilt is not getting made any time soon.

Now that I have a bunch more smaller boxes today's agenda is to finish packing up china and clean out bathroom cabinets. Maybe I will get the binding put on my fall leaves quilt. Maybe I will NOT have a nervous breakdown about the fact that we have 3 weeks exactly to be all packed up and my son wants to have a birthday party in exactly 2 weeks! He wanted a Spiderman theme. I told him I could get Dinosaur stuff at the dollar tree. 2 hours later he came up to me and said, "Mama...I can have Dinosaurs if you really want me to." Broke my heart. Now I gotta go to the party store and stock up on Spiderman crap. Wonder if I should make the cake look like a giant web?

Must caffeinate...

Tackling or Trudging?

Today was Tuesday, which meant try to tackle something. I am wondering if I actually succeeded in tackling anything or if I've just moved at my normal, erratic pace?

I finished the applique on my mini quilt and cut the backing so it's already for quilting. With Jeremiah's help we picked out some DVDs to sustain us for the coming weeks and began to box all the rest of them up. Whereupon I promptly ran out of packing tape. So with my packing handicapped I decided to tackle laundry and normal house work.

I took an embarrasing "Before" picture of my bedroom from the end of our bed toward our closets. Since we're expecting a visit from the landlord I'll need everything clean so may as well start in our room. Got the floor cleaned, vacuumed and my dresser clesned off. Still have Tony's dresser top to clean. I folded 5 loads of laundry, washed one and cleaned out my dresser. Then made dinner, sewed something secret for about 2 hours, ran the dishwasher and vacuumed Jeremiah's room. The living room is a mess of boxes awaiting tape but the house is getting more clean starting at the back and working forward, LOL!

A Little Quilty Somethin'

Had to run over to loan office today to prove we had all the downpayment $$ in our account and to give her check stubs, etc. All set now! Need to call about insurance in the morning and waiting to hear back about the actual closing date. It's tentatively set for the 22nd of July which is just ironic because we gave notice on our appartment this morning and have to be out on the 22nd! Our land lord is coming to "survey condition and/or damages" in the next 5 days and I suddenly feel as if I'm about to fail a test.

This afternoon while the kiddies napped I put off packing, even thought I got a ton of adorable little boxes for books and things at walmart last night. Smile at the night crew guys and they fall all over themselves trying to hand you boxes. LoL!! Sure I have to be out of my appartment in a month but you know what else is in a month? The mini quilt swap deadline! And sure maybe a little quilt isn't as monumental as moving but... I can shove random crap in a box at the last minute to move. I cannot shove random fabric in a box at the last minute to mail! PRIORITIES people!!

I got the background done. I can show you because I am secret and the lady getting this doesn't know who I am or what I'm up to, buahaha!

Saturday while cleaning out my stash closet I came across some leftover scrappy nine patch and 6 patch bits from my scrappy squares queen sized quilt. I sewed them together and this afternoon added 2 sets of borders making this adorable little top! I'm going to quilt it and list it as a wallhanging in my etsy shop sometime this week. The center has 120 2" squares!

House pictures

We went over to the house again this afternoon and I took "Before" pics. I was going to post them here, them decided it would be much easier to upload them to flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamncheezr/sets/72157620068712449/

Check 'em out! :-)

A Non Quilty Day

I didn't quilt, but I did sew.

First we got a call from Dottie--more on that in a min. Then a trip to walmart, back home to pack Tony off to work and back out the door. The kids and I went to JoAnn's for batting, plaid fabric and velcro. Then on to Home Depot for some paint sample cards and a 28 oz Eastwing, blue handled, waffle headed framing hammer. A hammer to me, is a hammer. I have been perfectly happy for 5 years with the $2 hammer I got us a Big Lots. A couple weeks ago Tony informed me that is not a "real" hammer and went on to describe the eastwing. Sure. It's $34 too! OMG! I put off buying rotary cutter blades cause they are $8.

From Home Depot to Kroger to wander around without a list, spend $50 and hope to God I ended up with enough food for my family for the week. Back home all the way thru Knoxville in Fri rushhour traffic. Yay. The groceries are still on the kitchen floor.

When we got home I took out my plaid fabric and set to work. Gotta love it, the only aparrell weight plaid fabric they had was a remnant that I liked and I got 33" which did this whole skirt for $2.35! Why do I need a little plaid skirt? I'll not go into detail. Tony requested a while back that I acquire one and Father's Day's as good as any. I cut 2 14" pieces and joined them to ake one looooooonnnnnggggg piece which I hemmed down one long side. Then i pinned 200 pleats along the top, sewed it, added a little no-show waist band. Tried it on, wrapped around me waist and put pins where it needed velcro. Tada! I had to pin it to get it to stay on my dress dummy 'cause she's a lot skinnier than I am. I am really super thrilled I made this, without a pattern, and it turned out so good! If only it was long enough to wear around people. LOL!

A N Y W A Y... This morning at 10 Dottie called and said they accepted ouroffer, with the difference that we pay the closing costs--which apparently wecan get added on to the loan so we don't have to go out of pocket right nowsince our pocket's ain't that deep. (Course that means paying intrest over thenext 30 years on teh closing costs. Sigh.) We are meeting tomorrow with both Dottie our realtor (to sign contracts) andwith Terri, the head lady of the lender we're working with (to sign all those loan paperworks). I am not even going in to the fiasco and extra trip to walmart to get the printer to print my '07 and '08 returns, one of which I had to pay for.

I am officially freaking out now. Packing! Giving notice at our appartment! Itlooks as if we're going to have to move from here about 2 weeks before we will close on the house so Tony and his Mom have already worked out that she willjust go stay with her SO and we can take over her 1 bedroom apt. til we close.

But then WHAT IF the deal falls thru and we are homeless??? Excited, but freaking out...

Happy Blocks

Dottie, our realtor called at 10:30 am and said she was faxing our offer over and wanted to make sure she had the correct, legal spelling on our first names. Guess "Tony and Des" just won't cut it on a deed, LoL! It's now 7:34pm and we haven't heard back from her because she promised to call as soon as she heard something and I'm guessing she hasn't heard anything. I hate waiting. I hate waiting! I am not a let's diliberate and think things over for a couple days before we make a decision. I am too balls-to-the-wall. It took me 2 months of dating Tony to decide that even though he really is the ...whatever... that I originally thought he was, I kinda loved him anyway and sure I'd marry him. So, I think if someone got an offer at 10:30am that by 7:30 they should have at least decided yes or no. Like I said, I hate waiting.

In order to try to keep myself occupied I have sewn today. Sure I could have cleaned, but cleaning slightly resembles packing and the thought of packing brought on waves of hysteria. So instead I decided to sew. I had to cut 100 5" batik charms for a swap I'm gonna be in and since I was messing with batiks I was reminded that I needed only 35 more "Happy Blocks" for my scrappy batik quilt that I think is gonna be king sized. I say think because my notes on this quilt simply say "Need 35 more blocks." I was in a block swap last year and made a bunch of them and this will round them out!

These are the easiest quilt blocks you'll ever make. Take a 4" square and 2 strips that are 8"x2.5" and 2 strips that are 4"x2.5" and sew the strips around the 4" square like borders. Tada! You cannot screw it up. You can even increase the size of the strips and center square (to oh say, 4.5" and 3") and have a bigger block! These are 8", which means 7.5" finished, which means for a king sized quilt I need about 71,463 blocks. :-D However many I need, apparently I have them all now so that's something accomplished at least.

I could put them all up on my design wall and begin to play with the block arrangement but I still haven't sewn together the churn dash/friendship star blocks from the last time I did that. I arranged them, I labeled the rows, I took them down in rows. Now I can sew them together exactly as they were on the wall. I just haven't. Why haven't I? Well because I need white thread and since the only white thread I have is a giant cone which won't fit on my machine, I would need to wind 10 bobbins. And I haven't felt like winding bobbins. However in the piecing of the "Happy Blocks" I used up little misc thread bits on 4 bobbins so I guess now I could wind some...

Good News and Bad News

First the bad news because it really isn't all that bad and if we get it out of the way things will be much more pleasant. Maybe.

Tony called me last night at 6:30 and said he was on the way to the ER cause he had been cut at work and needed stitches. At 8:30 he called and said they were finally about to stitch him up. Freaking Oak Ridge hospital. He cut his elbow on a piece of metal or something at work and have himself a gash that was 1" long by 3/8" deep and needed 5 HUGE stitches. He says "Probably they could have put 7 or maybe 25 stitches." LoL!

My darling husband came home last night finally at quarter to 1--he had to work 2 hrs over because he missed half the day at the ER--looking like this. He is usually this dirty but not usually this bloody. A lot of blood considering he has the thickest blood ever and hardly ever bleeds cause he clots so easily. Apparently it's a good thing, I dunno. Doctors seem to think it is. His arm is really hurting him though. He took a vacation day today because it was hurting him too badly to move today and he wouldn't have been able to move the big pieces of steel at work.

The good news!

He said it wouldn't hurt his arm to drive around in the car and look at houses and since he suddenly had the day off we might as well. We had a list of a few we wanted to go see but he got on the computer anyway and found another which we will refer to as house #1.

We started today with 5 houses to go see. Our realtor made us an apt to go see house #1 (at 2:30pm) while she looked up the other 4. Loved house #1!! Realtor called and said houses #2 sold/had contracts pending and #3 ended up being a trailer in a not-so-nice area. Gave us directions and we went and saw #4. NOT good! Didn't like the house, hated the yard, hated the creek, septic, blah blah. Just bad house.

Mom and Dad drove into town to hang out for the night so we had realtor show us #1 again. M & D had same opinions/thoughts we had, would make same changes, etc. Long story short we called our realtor at 9:00pm and told her to write up an offer/contract!! Meeting tomorrow to sign, etc.This is our first time buying a home and we are really excited/scared. Trying not to get hopes too high, they showed this house 10 other times in the last 5 days and it is super cute and an awesome deal. BUT sitting here talking and thinking about what we could/would do, it's hard not to get excited!!