Merry Christmas

M.I.A.

Well, once again it's been way too long since this blog was updated. But, fear not, I have a good  reason. After working all summer to get our home ready to sell, we finally put it on the market and it sold in 19 days. This meant we had to scramble to find a short term rental.

We found a rental a mere 2-1/2 miles away and moved most of the contents of our home, one carload at a time. We did have a U-Haul for the big stuff but, since we will be moving again in a few months we didn't want to box everything. We used plastic storage bins for all the everyday stuff. Let me just say, this is NOT the way you want to move. It took us 16 days and countless trips back and forth.

I have taken over the living/dining room for my temporary sewing room. Unfortunately there just isn't enough room for the HandiQuilter to be assembled. All of my shelving units for my stash had to be disassembled in order to be moved. They are now assembled and the stash is almost all put away.

There are still a few empty cubicles but fear not, there are still several garbage bags of fabric still waiting to be emptied. Maybe by the time we are ready to move again I will have it all put away....

Meanwhile, my sewing table is still in pieces as we have temporarily misplaced the hardware to put it back together. I'm currently using a small, portable folding table from Costco for my sewing machine and actually did some sewing yesterday -- yeah!

On the house front -- things are moving along quicker than we had expected. We will be heading over next week to talk about extra electrical pulls, those all important additional outlets in my sewing room, built in sound system and even picking out cabinets.

This is the garage end -- my room will be above the garage. The Bearded One is ecstatic, he's getting a 10ft door for the bus! The garage will also 12 ft. ceilings so he can even open the top while parked inside in order to dry out the canvas. He's a happy camper. 

This is the other half of the house, downstairs will be a great room with the bedrooms upstairs. It doesn't look like much now but I understand the roof should be on by now. I've suddenly become a big fan of HGTV and all the home shows. My head is swimming with all kinds of ideas, that's a good thing, right?

Hopefully life will be a little more settled now, even if it's only temporary. The good thing is, real movers will be moving us the next time.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy New Year.

Long Time

Wow--it's been 2-1/2 months since I last posted. A lot has been going on since then. Our dilemma has been solved and now the fun begins.

First of all, these lovelies showed up at my door today.


A big thank you to Rita of Red Pepper Quilts and Julie from The Intrepid Thread. I won the giveaway. Unfortunately, they will be put in a box until next spring, sigh.

After visiting the house in question from my last post, we decided that as wonderful as the house is, we can't get past the 8 ft. retaining wall right outside the back door. But, it was suggested to us that perhaps we would like to build the same house on a different lot.


So, this is now the future site of our new home. We will be putting this house on the lot, but flipping it so the garage is on the other side.


See that window above the double garage door? That is my future sewing room.


This is from the doorway. You can't really get a good perspective of the size but this room and the portion directly ahead total about 536 sq ft. The window above the garage is just to the right side of this picture. I debated about dividing the room or not like this one is and finally decided that I need to do so because the room has dormer walls and this wall will give me a place for a design wall. I will put a nice comfy chair, a daybed and all my quilting books in there.

This is pretty much what the view from my window will be.


The Bearded one is happy because not only will the bus fit in the garage, but the ceilings are 11 ft and he will be able to open the pop top to dry the canvas.

The Spotted One isn't so happy. Now that the house is on the market, his little hideaway cave in the guest room is no longer cavelike. Once the rains and stormy weather returned a couple weeks ago he was most unhappy. One sleepless, stormy nite I got up and couldn't find him anywhere! On the second circuit through the house I looked on the far side of my cutting table. I found him, curled as tight as possible in my scrap basket.



What a goofball.

So, that's all my news. After 4 months of painting and getting the house ready to sell, I am finally able to relax a little and do some sewing, in between house showings, ugh.

Keep your fingers crossed for me that the house sells quickly. But then, if it does, we will have to find a short term rental......

Dilemma

I haven't been blogging lately because I don't have anything to share. I'm quite sure I'd bore you to tears in no time flat discussing, ad nauseum, all the things we are doing to get the house ready to sell. Suffice it to say, we're not quite there, YET.....I cannot believe just how much stuff two people can accumulate in 22 years. Then there are all the projects that we've been meaning to do and never managed to start until now. Too bad I won't be able to enjoy the walls my laundry finally has, or all the nice, freshly painted white doors, windowsills, baseboards etc. After 22 years of 1980 dark, faux wood grain doors, everything has been freshened and lightened up.

We're almost there. The 10' x 10' storage unit is getting pretty full. The wonderful young EMT who moonlights doing yard work is almost done with the yard and it looks amazing. All that's left are a few odds and ends, the guest room needs to be painted -- it's still the same color it was when we moved in, Pepto Bismal pink! And, the carpet needs to be replaced. I think we will be carpet shopping next week.

Now for the dilemma, we've found a house in Wenatchee that is exactly what we want, complete with three car garage that are all tall enough for the bus to fit in with a bonus room above for my sewing room. The house also has a wonderful view of the Columbia River and the Wenatchee valley which is a big thing for me since there really isn't much over there besides brown. The house has just started construction and is due to be completed mid-late November. However, the latest word on the opening of the data center, which is where The Bearded One will be working, has been slid from April to August. Yes, NEXT August as in 2013.

So, do we go ahead and put this house on the market as planned by Labor Day. If so, and if it sells, I will be moving to Wenatchee with the Spotted One while the Bearded One stays here. And then there's the problem, where would he stay? As I said, this house is absolutely perfect. It's the only thing we've found that has everything we want. So, it's hard to pass up something so perfect. There's also the little fact that interest rates are really low right now. What to do, what to do. That is our dilemma. Meanwhile, we will continue to finish up what needs to be done here and figure out what our next step will be.

I will leave you with a picture of the Spotted One from our camping trip to the coast last weekend. It was a beautiful weekend and it was nice to get away and not do anything. Of course, when we got home, one of the hottest days of the summer, the air conditioning decided to break down.....


And yes, that is my pillow he's resting his Spotted little head on......

Not Much to Share

Life has been getting in the way of quilting and will continue to do so for the immediate future.

A little over two years ago my husband was laid off after working for almost 20 years at a local airline manufacturer. He has spent the past two years back there, working as a contractor. Now he is going back fulltime but he will be working at their new data center that is currently being built in "The Middle of Nowhere, Washington". This means that we will be moving, probably by the end of the year.

So, to that end, we have been busy doing all sorts of home improvement projects in prep for getting the house ready to go on the market. First up was a much needed bathroom remodel. To go with that I made a quilted shower curtain based on Elizabeth Hartman's Sparkle Punch pattern. The bathroom walls are painted a very light shade of gray that almost looks lavender. I dug thru my stash for all my grays and blue-purples with a few red toned purples for punch. I added tabs on the back to fit over the rod and placed the liner hooks between the tabs and minimally quilted a few of the white areas just to hold it together with the backing (no batting). I did this so that I can easily turn it into a quilt if I don't have a need for a shower curtain in our new home.



Since the next few months will be filled with more home improvement and lots of sorting of 22 years worth of stuff. This blog will most likely be quiet for awhile.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Spring 2012

I'm excited to be participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I am a first time participant and feel quite honored to be part of such a talented group of quilters.

My entry is my Christmas quilt from last year. This is my second full sized Christmas quilt. My first one, had a very unfortunate accident with the red flannel backing bleeding despite having been prewashed multiple times. It bled so bad and my efforts to remove the bleeding literally destroyed the quilt.

So, here is the new quilt. It is a medallion quilt. The center portion, is from American Patchwork & Quilting magazine. But, I wanted to make it queen sized and I wanted to try Tonya's free-pieced letters. So the last two borders are my addition. This quilt is 96" and heavy. I used flannel for the backing and the heaviest weight cotton batting from Quilter's Dream -- next time I will stick with wool, my favorite batting.

I started the center portion of the medallion with some of my leftover Dalmatian puppies Christmas fabric. I had used this in a Christmas tree skirt a few years ago. What you can't really see is that the white on white fabric also has little dog bones. If there is a fabric with Dalmatians on it, you can bet it's in my stash. I also have an inordinate amount of polka dotted fabric too.....hhmmmmm......

For the free pieced border words, I tried to used appropriate fabric. If you enlarge the pictures, you can see I used holly fabric, candy cane fabric, snowflakes etc. The packages between the words were also free pieced and acted as good filler. 

The most difficult part of this quilt was putting the borders together after all the words were made. Since the words were all different lengths, trying to get them to fit the sides of the quilt was quite a challenge. I quilted this on my HandiQuilter with a holly pantograph. And, because of difficulties with my thumb which no longer allow me to do hand binding, the binding is machine stitched. 

Thank you for giving me the chance to share this with all of you. 

Gifting Quilts

One of the greatest joys I receive from quilting is gifting a quilt. Last week not one but two quilts were received by their recipients so I can now share them here.

First up is this Happy Scrappy Houses, a Bonnie Hunter Quiltville pattern. This was a joint project project with my dear friend on the other side of the state. Janet & I became friends through the HandiQuilter Chatters list. Happy Scrappy Houses was made for another mutual friend from that list who has recently moved into a new home. We decided she needed a house warming gift. We each made our house blocks and then Janet put them together  into the top and I quilted it and sent it on it's way.

Can you think of a better house warming gift? I certainly can't. This quilt just oozes happiness.

I also sent out a baby quilt the same day. Little Eden wasn't due for another week or so but she surprised everybody and arrived early. Her quilt arrived just a day later. I had a hard time deciding what to do for her quilt. All I knew was that it had to be predominantly pink and had to have Minkee on the back because that's what I put on the back of her brother's quilt almost 7 years ago. And yes, he still uses his quilt everyday. I've known little Eden's mama since she was about 6 or 7. She's an identical twin and her Mom used to paint their toenails to tell them apart--yup, pink & blue. To this day, Mom's favorite color is still pink. After several false starts, I started seeing granny square blocks popping up all over the internet. Inspiration struck and I started digging into my stash.

I pulled out a pile of pinks and lavenders and set them with some Kona pink. And yes, the backing is pink Minkee -- it is so soft. I am definitely going to be putting some Minkee on the next quilt I make for myself.

Meanwhile, today I got to actually see the little babe thanks to the wonders of  Facetime and her Grandma who was visiting and had her iPad with her. She's a little sweetie.

Yeah, I think she will probably be using her quilt at least as long as her big brother and that makes me very, very happy.

What's on my Bed

Yea, I know--I've been neglecting this poor blog lately. There's been a lot of other distractions in my life lately. Fear not, I have been doing quite a bit of quilting and as soon as some things get in the mail I will be able to share them here.

I also need to share pictures of my new quilting partner--my new Bernina that all your votes helped me to win.

But, in the meantime, Bonnie over at Quiltville is having a link up with "what's on my bed". I still haven't figured out how to include a clickable link into blogger when writing from the iPad. So here's her post: http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2012/04/whats-on-your-bed.html

Since it's still pretty chilly at nite, there are two quilts on our bed.
First up is the red & white/cream snowball. There was an online quilt along a year or two ago with Fat Cat Quilts & Sister's Choice.


Under this quilt is a quilt from yet another online quilt along from a few years ago sponsored by Crazy Mom quilts. I had a batik Bali pop jelly roll that had been languishing for far too long and it gave me the color palette for the quilt along.


However, in all honestly, I really do have to show what is usually on my bed.....


The Bed Slug, otherwise known as The Spotted One. He actually prefers to be UNDER the quilt rather than on top.

Not Much To Show

I don't have much I can show here since I've been working on another secret project. But, before starting that project I broke down and made a new cover for my ironing board. My ironing board is wider than the average board and I have been unable to find a new cover that fits. Good ol' Google to the rescue. After reading several tutorials I used bits and pieces from 3 different ones and ended u with this lovely new cover.


Here's the other side:


The fabric is Denise Schmidt from Joann's with a coupon. I don't think I've ever had such a pretty ironing board cover.

Right now all sewing has come to a complete halt. I've managed to tweak my right arm, most likely from heaving huge branches over the fence, then chipping said branches and hauling the resulting chips to various areas around the yard that needed the mulch. All this was the ongoing cleanup from the big storm.

LizA.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Buses By the Bridge -- pt. 4

Bright and way too early (yes, I have pictures of the sunrise to prove it), we packed up, hit Starbucks on our way out of town and headed down to Tucson.

Our good friend Hobie has a little "casita" on the west side of Tucson where he spends his winters far, far away from Washington's wet, rainy weather. Here's a picture of his labyrinth which you can even see on satellite pics of his place. Pretty darn cool! 

   

Saguaro National Park (west) is pretty much right next door. What an interesting drive that was. The Bearded One and Spotted One weren't too crazy about the endless miles of washboard road but the scenery was so worth it. 

 After the saguaros the destination was Pima Air Museum. The Bearded One spent three hours checking out the aircraft (yawn). The Spotted One & I made ourselves comfortable in the bus and tried to do some reading. 

 Next up was Mission San Xavier del Bac. This is a beautiful mission. I wish we had been able to spend more time but, at this point the sun had decided to stay out and we didn't want the Spotted One to get overheated in the bus. 

 There were lots of photographic opportunities. 

 I was fascinated with this cactus that looks like an artichoke.

 And, there was Indian fry bread! Yum!

 Driving in and out of Tucson were fields and fields with these huge tarp covered bales. They were cotton. But not just any type of cotton, these were Pima cotton fields. If you look closely you can see some little tufts of white left on the plants here and there.

After 12 days in the bus, the dog that absolutely refuses to put his head down and sleep while we are driving finally relented. It was about this time that we were also able to pull into a gas station without him barking like crazy at everybody. There is hope......

Would you believe -- 7 miles from home we get hit with a golf ball size rock, smack dab in the middle of the windshield? Oh that hurt. But, I guess when you consider everything, completing 3922 miles with just a broken windshield that's not so bad, right? We didn't spend any time in a repair shop like some people did, or sick for the entire trip like somebody else......

We came home to the aftermath of a huge snow and ice storm. The Seattle area doesn't get snow very often and even less rarely do we get ice storms. Especially storms of this magnitude. Our neighbor said everything was coated in 3/4" of ice. It is now a week later and we still have two huge piles of branches to deal with. We will have to have a tree expert look at this poor tree. There are so few branches left now....

Buses By the Bridge Road Trip - pt. 3

(Forgive the delay in getting this posted -- the Blogger app on my iPad decided to stop working......)

What can you say about a four day VW gathering that draws 313 buses to the shores of Lake Havasu in the middle of January? 

 That's us, the brown one right next to Bev. to the left and out of the picture is the sidewalk and then the sand and beach. 

How many VW guys does it take to fix Bev's antenna so she can listen to her beloved NPR again?

If you thought a real VW is slow....

Some people had primo spots right on the beach.....

  The kids got to paint this bus. Apparently it's become a tradition. (Yes, it's all washable paint.) 

  

 Walter from Burning Man was there. At nite he was quite a sight, all different colors of neon lights.

Down the canal was the bridge -- London Bridge. 

 And, at the end of the canal was the little lighthouse. The last night the sunset was beyond spectacular.