Snappy and Clever Title

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Suzanne

Happy Sunday! Did you do anything exciting this weekend? We had flashes of excitement here and there. Mark got home Friday evening, he’d been in California all week. He and the boys were out playing catch — and got to have their inner pyromaniacs entertained by the burning of the prairie across the road from us.

Every spring they burn it off. It’s a little crazy to watch. You can’t see them in this shot, but there are a handful of our volunteer firefighters standing by, helping out. The dogs were quite entertained by the goings-on. There were a LOT of people for them to bark at.

Saturday morning was really exciting: we picked up Mark’s brand-new truck. It’s a Ford F-150 FX4 SuperCrew with 6.5 foot box. It’s huge. The boys have enough legroom in the back that they could easily be taller than Mark and still be comfortable.

The experience was partly exciting because it almost didn’t happen. We started doing paperwork and discovered that we had misunderstood part of the deal with our rebates/financing options: we thought we were getting a better deal than we were entitled to get.

I hate buying vehicles. And we even like our sales guy!!

We did get things figured out to our satisfaction, but it took forever to go through the delivery. The truck has Microsoft Sync, and we spent most of the time having the salesman explain that, and frankly: Mark and I could have figured it out faster on our own…

It’s very awesome, plus the color matches our house, I think it’s called Red Candy Metallic. Yum.

I finally got some pictures tonight when the boys came home from the farm. I did get 2 phone calls from them while they were gone: Mark’s cell phone is paired with the car (bluetooth) and it has voice commands, so he can push the phone button on the steering wheel, and then say “Call Home” and…voila! They are talking to me!

They brought home the boys’ 4-wheeler, which is why the truck is backed up to the hill: they were getting ready to push the 4-wheeler out on to the grass:

I don’t remember what Will was talking about. I’m surprised he didn’t throw his hands up in his face before I snapped this one:

Come to think of it, that was really all of the excitement for the weekend.

Less exciting, but perhaps more interesting for my quilting viewers, my design wall, although with terrible lighting:

On the left we have Holly and Mistletoe from Where the Cold Wind Blows by Blackbird Designs.

On the right we have some of my Dresden Plates — I posted about receiving these as a gift awhile ago. I’ve now got 4 hand-appliqued blocks done, plus one is about 10 minutes from finishing. Today I decided that I’m going to put 4 of them on yellow to make a wallhanging for the women that gave the blocks to me (I have a total of 40 blocks, and they are big, so it’s not like I’m going to miss the 4 for her…). I’m doing the black and white polka dot version by hand, but I decided to do the yellow on the machine…it takes almost 2 hours for me to hand applique one, and less than 10 on the machine. I’m going to have to resist the urge to switch to the machine for the polka dots…slow is not bad, it’s just…slow! LOL

The applique on the holly and mistletoe quilt: that will be machine, because there are a bazillion leaves and I am NOT doing them by hand. By machine will be slow enough…

Have a great week, I hope it’s exciting, but not TOO exciting.

Suzanne

Quiltmaker Alert

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Suzanne

I got my contributor’s copy a week or 2 ago, but my subscription copy came today:

check out Swirlabout on page 60, you might recognize the machine quilter’s name!

(Image is from and links to the Quiltmaker website. The quilt was designed by Scott Murkin.)

Isn’t it a great quilt??? It was hard to send it back. I quilted this right around the first of the year, and have just been waiting and waiting to be able to mention it.

Another one from the vault

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Suzanne

I know. It looks like I’m being really productive, but it’s mostly my IQ doing a lot of work while I sit around and surf the web. (I posted on MQR that I need to name my IQ since it has become such a productive “employee” — Mom suggested Bess, which led me to wonder about Nancy Drew’s other BFF, George. Now I’m thinking I might have just named both my quilting machine and my IQ. Bess might be the A-1 and George might be the IQ.)

This is another ancient quilt. I started teaching some acquaintances how to quilt (2003? 2004? something like that), and we were making a sampler. We didn’t last for more than about 3 class sessions, and frankly, I’m amazed that I even actually finished this quilt top.

I think it’s a Kim Diehl pattern, maybe from a magazine?

If I were to make this quilt again, I’d do a number of things differently. For starters, I probably wouldn’t bother because I don’t really like samplers all that much. But if I actually did make the quilt, I wouldn’t choose so many different colors. And I would have paid more attention to the values of my fabrics — some of those pinks and lavenders are way too light compared to the dark blues and greens. I think it might have been more successful with maybe all pinks, or all greens, or something. I really really like that border print, and wish I had more of it.

Some time shortly after finishing the piecing, I started quilting. And it was baaaad. Scary bad. Messy feathers in white thread on dark patches. Luckily, I stopped myself before going too far.

I’m in the mood to finish things, so I made the crazy commitment to take the time to finally frog that nasty mess and load it up and let the IQ do an allover design.

The design is called Secret Garden and was designed by Anne Bright. I’d link to it, but it’s not available to the general public until next month (it was part of a pattern club, don’t be thinking I’m all amazing and have some inside track. Well, I guess I do, but I paid for the privilege…).

You don’t notice the rows of this one on the front, it’s so busy, but on the plain white back, you can definitely see the row-y nature.

Remarkably, I have the binding for this one set aside (made and pressed!). Looking at this quilt in the pictures, rather than real life, I find that I like it more than I did before, but once it is bound, I think I’ll find a new home for it.

Full or part time?

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Suzanne

We had reason to fill out a credit application last week (I’ll tell you about that next week…), and after we told the guy how much I gross in a year, he asked if we’d consider my self-employment full time or part time – I answered part time.

Mark said “Yeah, the part of the time when she’s awake.”

(photo of our rack of quilts that aren’t in use. we have lots of quilts in use.)

I have a thing…

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Suzanne

For cherry fabric.

It’s just so darned…cheery.

I love this pink version so much I bought large swathes of it on two separate occasions. And yes, it’s the same print as the border for my Cherry On Top quilt.

And I think a lot of us could use some cheery right now. I have a theory. Tell me what you think. If I ignore the existence of the blanket of snow and the howling wind hard enough, do you suppose I could make it go away?

The rest of you that are in the same cold boat will have to let me know if it works for you.