can't talk, sweater.

the february lady sweater progresses. this makes me happy.

my plan for a weekend of crafty goodness has been put into effect. hooray! so the whirlygiggles were the result of thursday evening's work. i need to get a few more fabrics to add to the quilt, which is destined to be a baby quilt for a january baby shower. i'm thinking that it needs a vibrant purple, a yellow, and some more blue. and possibly some green. definitely no more red, pink or orange. this comes from a pattern given by crazy mom, and the perusal of MANY a whirlygiggle quilt and tutorial, but all in all, SUPER easy to piece, i was pleasantly surprised.

today was spent hermit-like in the craft room, and not all in a good way. the morning brought me brown crud spewing from my iron and some mad iron cleaning and the lasting stink of hot vinegar, but it seems ok now. no more brown, but starting to get drippy, which i had noticed before. hopefully i won't need to replace it, because it's really quite a good little iron.

break mid-day to venture out into the pouring rain for this, which is my fall project, and e's fall project. more on that later:





also, just ignore that junk in the corner. and that other junk in that other corner.

next up was charm squares cut for a hgtv swap, which is excellent because i can swap around 200 and this will bring my running total up to about 800, which will be almost enough to start on a charm quilt!

the big finish today was the baby blanket made from the extra blocks from wedding quilt number one:





i'm kind of thinking that it might actually be MUCH better with the same sashing as i used in between around the border. i'm finding the white around the outside a little yuk.

and finally, just before bed, i finished FINALLY started and finished ironing all the fabrics which have been patiently waiting on my drying rack to be ironed. definitely going to bed happy thinking of this lovely stack of fabricy goodness, some of which is destined for wedding quilt number two.

i've already decided it's going to be a crafty kind of weekend.

and so it begins.

a year of meeting new people, i have just heard, is on its way to me via the australian and canadian mail systems! (hopefully playing nicely with one another) and i just kind of had a heart attack. someone else is going to send me a set amount of precious fabric and i'm going to have to make something lovely out of it AND NOT SCREW IT UP. that's kind of pressure. but i've already kind of got an idea. kind of. maybe just an inkling.

also, i still have to twist a few arms or throw in a few more "ehhhh?"s cuz it IS a good idea, but i think that i might have a plan for a real live bee in real life. to make a blanket for a good cause. yes e, baby bro is a good cause! (i will be testing you on this post later, as previously discussed)

i just HAD to tell SOMEBODY!

preggers news!!!! one of my best ladies (actually, the aforementioned lovely bride #2) just called to share some fab news she'd gotten for the weekend--one of her good friends (whom i simply ADORE!) is preggers! she was like "so i know that maybe you need some lead time on baby thingers, so of course i called you first. ANDYOUHEARDNOTHING" hahahha. YAY! so tomorrow will be the start of the search for THEPERFECT pattern for a baby quilt. i'm stoked. and a bit nervous--i only have until january(ish) for to produce something for the baby shower. although TECHNICALLY she isn't due until march, so yeah. oh, and another friend of a friend (who is also one of the most lovely women of all time) is due in november, and i need to get in gear on something for that soon-to-be-little-one as well, but i've already got something in the works there, so i'm not SO concerned about it.

also, also--i won't drink the water, no fear there!

inspiration!

so i spoke with bride #2 about wedding quilt #2, and i've got it sorted, and a pattern ordered. i'm going to make i do, which she really liked (of the options I gave her, HA!) and i really like, and it's kind of fitting since it IS for a wedding...so that's one thing taken care of, and i won't really need to order MUCH more fabric, REALLY....

next up: move #3 was this morning and went quite well, although really makes me dread ever having to move my own junque again.

and finally: i've joined another bee! bee addicted 3. it never rains, but it pours. i'm pretty excited. will announce my inspiration to the wider world once it's my month for each bee. very excited! beyond that, tired.

i'm lacking in definitive inspiration

or maybe i'm just whiny. i've got to really start thinking about wedding quilt #2, which although is still about a year away, i'm stressing over. i've started collecting fabrics (browns and blues, which i LOVE, was the request), and they look great together. i was planning on staging a values quilt. but now i'm just not feeling it. not sure why, since it will be stunning. then i was thinking maybe a log cabin-y sort of quilt, but i'm feeling that even less! maybe i should actually iron the fabric, finish collecting possible addition fabrics and then see what i come up with...in the next YEAR. silly!

time for a bit of a break

this week will definitely be more craft-focused than last week. i've started mapping out the pattern for the quilting of the wedding quilt. hopefully i can get it finished tonight and i can also get the vintage sheet quilt squared.





then i'm hoping that this weekend or next, i will be able to get to my local quilting store to get some time in on the longarm machine on this and the wedding quilt. AND we're bringing back the stitch 'n bitch tomorrow, so i'll be able to get some knitting done! and watching charm school. hoo baby!

family v. crafting v. my waistline

so i had good plans for getting crafty and other things done this weekend. i really did. instead, i napped (although not enough because i'm still exhausted), visited a lot, and ate out a LOT. oh, and didn't gym once. :P tomorrow i'll be back on the wagon. this evening, i'm hoping to carve out a bit of crafting space to plan out my quilting plan for the wedding quilt. because...my lqs now has a LONGARM MACHINE TO RENT! yay! i will be playing with this a lot, i think. especially since i did the tumbler quilt on my machine, and honestly, i just do not know how people manage to quilt things on domestic machines without killing someone. for reals. i had a less-than-double sized quilt going and was FRUSTRATED even with the minimal quilting I was doing, i can't imagine doing something big. and i like BIG quilt tops since mister man and i are both severe bedhogs.

also, the girls are too cute. they've been a bit much since it's been hot here and we have no air conditioning, which they aren't used to, but still. adorable. and it turns out that i have a lot of dvds that kids like. last time, it was he-man (AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE) with the other little neices, and now these ones are upstairs GLUED to the smurfs--it's the first time they've seen the smurfs. i'm thinking that maybe after dinner, it may be a good time for fraggle rock!

off to eat more food. chinese! and cuppie cakes--it's the oldest's seventh birthday. and then craft.

the house is set...

or at least almost set. we have GUESTS coming this weekend. already we have one little monkey here, a good friend of mine who will be here for the better part of a month. and then this weekend and next weekend my sister-in-law will be here with our little neices, which will be adorable. they'll be here for this weekend and next weekend, but for the week in between will be with the other brother in montreal. and the house is set, more or less. the kitchen is clean and the fridge is stocked. the beds are made, the floors are washed and vacuumed, and mister man is picking up a borrowed bigger vehicle tomorrow (child seats. :P) and doing the bathroom. should be a good time, but maybe not a very crafty time...we'll see. if i don't get to my machine too much, i'm definitely going to be checking out the crafty porn around the intarwebs and start gathering inspiration for MY MONTH IN MY QUILTING BEE. ahem...i'm ok. just a lil excited. :D

xo

this is how much i needed to craft tonight

my makeshift ironing board since i was too lazy to haul up my big board from the basement, and i didn't have much ironing to do...


i have a friend staying in my craft room. well, not IN my craft room, but in the space that was our spare room, and will be my craft room, but it's connected to my craft room, and it means that i can't really craft in there while she's reading and getting ready for bed and stuff...so i took over the dining room table. mister man LOVES it when i do that, although i left it in pretty good shape mess-wise. PLUS, it means that i got all four of my rows for the olive-rose-esque quilt finished, and now i just have to figure out how on earth i'm going to square them up, because they REALLY need it. darn shifty vintage sheets! (that's my story and i'm sticking to it.)



diamond would LOVE it if my crafting would take place near her new couch all the time.

OH.MAI.GOD.

I HAVE TO TYPE THIS ALL IN CAPS, I'M SO EXCITED. k, not really cuz i find it kind of obnoxious, but for serious, i'm that excited. I'M IN AN ONLINE QUILTING BEE!!!! the lovely sheridan has opened her sanity to a quilting bee, and since i've been stalking her for sometime, i was in on the ground floor. well, not really, but i was in under the wire, and now i'm in a quilting bee! my first quilting bee. i'm excited and scared at the same time. hi future bee peeps (maybe if you're checking me out), i promise to not screw your blocks up and send it out on time, i swear. i'm hoping that at least some people will want some cute kicky little moderny blocks, and then even if i'm not stellar, it will look like i made it like that. but also, i swear i can sew a straight line. i promise. for reals. now i've got to go and try to sleep because yesterday was hell without having slept for more than 3-4 hours.

xo!

holy inspiration batman!

so checking out a variety of bloggy inspiration and i found some amazing inspiration. WOW. i need to get to more and bigger quilt shows. i especially want to make a hex quilt, a cathedral window and i LOVE the teeny tiny boxes at the bottom. it constantly amazes me how good people are with colour.

maybe some time for creativity this weekend, although I'm not convinced since my SIL will be here with two small ones.

whoops!

so finished the tumbler quilt, bound it, hand sewed it, washed it, dried it (it didn't fall apart! :D ), folded it (it's square, more or less, which is a pretty big shock considering how much squaring up i did) and sent it on to its new home...without taking a picture of it. super. i will probably get better at this? maybe i can get some action shots, cuz it turned out pretty darn adorable for something that i didn't really like and had little motivation to finish on my own. i'm glad that j liked it enough to want it or it would have sat forever in the waiting pile...

"$120?! i could make *that*..."

a phrase my friends are coming to know and love...or at least know and then run from the room before i rope them in to help. so had the day off (from work at least--not from family or moving, apparently. ANYHOW) and i wanted to get some things sorted around the house since we've got a month's worth of guests starting next week, and my now-ex-roomate (sad! but it's ok too) left us her mattress (queen, YAY!) and old metal bed frame, but we would either have had to wrangle a box spring (which hadn't worked out so well in our place in the past) or get those wooden slat things.

thought process: wooden slats it is. start where everyone [i know] starts, ikea.ca. wooden slats for a queen sized bed are $120. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS. for a bunch of 1 x 2s strung together. me: "i can make that!" [somewhere my dad's heart overflows with pride at this exact moment] mister man: "i don't have to come, do i?...i mean, i will, but i would rather not" (he is the main proponent of running from the room when he hears "i could make that", although he's supportive of the making and the fabulouso finished products).

so anyhow, an hour and a half later, i have conquered home depot and the bed frame, fixing the whole show up for under $20. take THAT ikea!

then this evening, i got back to the tumbler quilt which i have been guiltily watching sit in the pile for some time now because i have lacked inspiration for the backing. long story short: i found a cute sheet at value village, and the quilt is backed, quilted, and the binding is sewn on, and now i just have to flip the binding and hand-sew it, which i actually SUPER love doing. and now that it's all cute and together, i REALLY like it, and am kind of sad to see it go. pictures tomorrow at the snb reunion tour.

also started last night was an olive rose-esque quilt that i have had pieces of vintage sheet swap fabric cut for for AGES. i say olive rose because clearly i can't follow printed directions to save my life. i didn't like the busy-ness of olive rose, so cut down the numbers of fabrics. then i redistributed how i wanted them to go. then i started sewing and realized i hated one of the fabrics i had. then i realized that i wasn't piecing it really according to the pattern, but that once it was finished, no one would be the wiser anyhow, so i stopped worrying. then i realized that my rows weren't entirely the same size, and decided that i would cut them down (or not) when i got all four of them done. i'm hoping to get all of the top pieced this week (i'm halfway there) and then quilted this weekend VERY quickly because i realized that i have guests (a lot of them) coming this week, and no blankets (how embarassing!) because i gave a bunch to charity in the spring. oops!

so tired now. headed to bed after a long, kind of frustrating, kind of nice, kind of productive day. xo!

moving take 2 and 2.1

move #2 went well this morning (at least on our end, which is the only part i was a part of). j got off safely in her van o' stuffs, despite the weather's best efforts and some late help arrival. and then we have started move 2.1, which i smoving more crap in (a couch, a dining room table, a lovely antique china cabinet that will house my fabric) to fill the gaps where j's stuff used to be. so far, so good. we got the couch in, and my mum's going to bring a kitchen table tomorrow.

diamond-dog also arrived home from purgatory (aka that place with that puppy--the rents' place) happy to have been invited, and completely exhausted. we've moved things around a bit in the spare room and in the living room, and she's spent all afternoon testing various spots for their nap potential. so far, i think everything has passed since she's been asleep around the apartment for several hours now.

she also clearly misses j already. she used to hid her bone in j's closet, and she went to move it (from where it had been found in the living room while she was gone), and instinctively went to her usual stomping ground, which just ended up being a bit pathetic...





tonight, i think that i return to the february lady sweater. my sewing room is in a bit of a state of flux, and before i can start anything else down there, i will need to iron all the new fabric i got from pink chalk's sale last week, and i just don't have the energy for that.

moving, moving...

one down, two (possibly three to go!) to go. my gran's move was this morning and went well. at least no one killed anyone, so that's good. tomorrow: my roommate is moving out and we're helping there, and then at some point, we've got to get to my parents' house to bring home some furniture to fill out our place. it's a long weekend here, and i don't want to spend it all trying to house it up. :P i would like to craft it up at least a bit. i was also hoping to get in some runs. a lot of things that i would be looking forward to doing and then a lot of things that need to get done. i'm thinking that it may end up being another weekend where my projects get a bit shelved, sadly.