Bats in my belfry...

or a bird in my kitchen!





One morning a few weeks ago the dogs were going nuts and I kept hearing a bird chirp. Well my first thought was they had hurt a bird in the backyard, so I went to see and they were all 4 in the kitchen barking like maniacs at this bird.




Cute huh? You should have seen me chasing it with the broom! I looked like a total dork lol.



And then I scared the poop outta the poor bird......





Bird isn't so cute anymore! Took about 15 min but I got it to fly out the front door.



Here is my first "on my own" paper pieced block. Turned out pretty good, except I placed a piece incorrectly and hade a little gap on one corner. But I was able to put another little piece to cover it and now you can't tell :)



I'm now working on a wall hanging from Carol Doak's Yahoo group. It's a celebration wreath she designed for the groups birthday. Hopefully I can finish it this weekend. I think it's going to turn out pretty good, only a couple of little mistakes design elements. I'm really liking paper piecing, I like the precision of it.

Toodles for now -- I'm going to go try and figure out how to do one of those cute signatures that everyone has. Wish me luck rofl!!

It's done!

The top from my last post is almost done. I've got the piecing finished and need to add borders now. These things are like wrestling a bear. I have nooooo idea how I'm ever going to do a king size...........................

I fell in love with this last summer when I saw it on www.patchworktimes.com , Judy designs quilts for her "quilt for an hour" blog posts. I didn't really follow the timeline because I don't really have an hour each and everyday to sew. She just got thru with a star quilt design that I liked also. I've realized that I SO need to work on my accuracy. omg some seams were a very scant 1/4 and some were damn near 1/2" I think!!! And having a Bernina with a 9mm seam doesn't make accurate piecing any easier. But hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon.

I love black and white. I may do another with hot pink or maybe lime green. But yikes first I've got to get the borders on this one and get it quilted. nnnooooottttt looking forward to quilting it! But for only my 3rd completed quilt I think I did pretty darn good ;)

Memorial Day

God Bless all the men and women who have so selflessly given their lives so that we may live free. Their sacrifice should put all the political BS in perspective shouln't it?

There is finally some sewing going on this weekend. I'm trying (and being quite successful I might add) to ignore the huge pile of mail and work that needs to be done on the other side of the room. And by "other side" I mean about 2 feet away, it's a little bedroom that is both our home office and my sewing room. Hopefully soon we'll be able to find a shop/office and I can move some of this stuff out.

So here's a little peek of a quilt I'm working on......

blocks that are about 1/2 put together


leftovers to show the bright colors I'm using


I'm hoping to get all the blocks complete so I can get it on my lame design wall today. Maybe pics this week.....

Here's the block we did in the paper piecing class I went to a couple of weeks ago. It was really fun. Except for picking out the little teeny pieces of paper. There's gotta be a trick to it.


And finally here's precious. Not sure if you can see how dirty her front paws are, but she is demolishing my flowerbed in the backyard. She just won't stay out of it grrrrrrrrrr.


Lucky for her she's cute and likes to cuddle.

Finished UFOs

yeah yeah we all know I'm a blog slacker.......

But dang I've been busy, work sure gets in the way lately. But I finally got a couple of UFOs finished. I took my first quilting class in February 2007 and bought a ton of Moda flannel in May to make my DS a rag quilt to take to school in the fall. Well I didn't get it done, but it was ok cause he didn't stay at school lol. He came home and I put the squares in the closet and went on to other things. I finally drug it out and finished it, albeit smaller than I had orignally planned. I made a lap quilt for my Dad with the leftovers. He has Parkinson's and some of his meds make him cold all the time.

I really like the way they turned out but I don't think I'll make any more rage quilts. I much prefer the traditional pieced quilt. The one with the four-patches are for DS and they other for my Dad. And omg does flannel ever make a mess in your machine! ughhhhhh

Then in my Monday Bernina Designer Plus software class we all made 2 squares for quilts for one of the ladies new twin grandbabies. They were a month old this week. She doesn't know how to quilt so 2 of us took them home and finished. I did the yellow one. They turned out very cute!

Here a close up of the one I did.

They tonight a started a black/white/brights quilt. I' really excited about this one. It's a "Quilt for an Hour" from Judy at http://www.patchworktimes.com/ . It was her July 2007 project. It originally started out as a gift for someone (can't say who in case they have stumbled upon this hehe) but it's gonna be so cool I don't know if I will be able to part with it lol. Hopefully I'll be able to get a few block put together tomorrow and I'll post pics then.

Also tomorrow I'm taking a beginner paper piecing class. Should be fun as I've never done PP. I'm thinking it should be right up my alley, they say you can get perfect crisp points and that goes very well with my OCD analness lol!! Hopefully I'll have a pic of that tomorrow also.

And now for a couple of pics of my little monster. She WILL NOT stop digging in my flower bed. DH finally just turned off the drip system because he was tired of repairing it constantly. Hopefully she'll stop digging/chewing soon. Good thing she's so darned cute......

Go Cowboys!

Well here I sit all by my lonesome wathcing some great football. Nothing better than the Cowboys vs Packers. But I'm all alone because DH went to Las Vegas this afternoon. Darn him and his buddy with a private plane!! Must be nice to whiz off to Vegas for a weekend of golf and black jack huh? eehh well, even if I had a buddy with a little private plane I wouldn't go. nope, no way, uh uh I don't like to fly as it is, and something that little is bound to make me puke don't you think????

So I'll sit here all by myself, well me and the 4, yes count'em there ARE FOUR, dogs....... Sometimes it feels like a kennel here. Except sadly it won't really be that long before there are only 3. Our older dog is like 14 now and some days are good and some not so good, but mostly good for right now.

But I got my design re-digitized. yeah I had to redo the one that I posted about a few weeks ago. Something happened to it and everytime I tried to open it I got an error message and it shut me down. So "delete" and start again...................

Maybe I'll get the darn thing done tomorrow. Then I've got to work on a rag quilt and get it done! I'm running out of time. as usual.....

But I've got 3 whole days to sew. All I "have" to do is go get more dog food and feed the little urchins twice a day and let them out to do their thang. Which is much easier said than done lately. They don't much like the cold and tonight there is snow forecast. They really don't like the snow.

For that matter I'm not a huge fan either. But we need it.

Now I'm going to cruise around blogland for a bit............

Project complete

Finally! I actually got something finished, and before the deadline. It's a candlemat swap for an online group I belong to. They decided to make this one a winter theme so we could display them longer. Here it is.....

ok darn it, blogger won't let me add a pic and I don't have time or patience to figure out why right now. I'll try to add it later.

And then I made a to-do list of the things I want to get done for Christmas. omg there is NOOOOO way. I'm way to slow lol. Between Christmas, birthdays and baby gifts I've got 15 things to make. And that's not even counting the sweatshirts I want to do for myself for Christmas and Thanksgiving. ughhhh why do I do this????

But I'm having a blast learning how to machine embroidery and digitize my own stuff with the Bernina Designer Plus software. Somedays my brain hurts after class from all there is to learn. But it's fun. Machine embroidery designs are so cute and so fun to add to things. And fairly instant gratification, which I'm all about.

I'm going to work on a couple more mine-wallhangings tonight. The weather is to nasty to go anywhere. It's gotten cold again and the wind is blowing so hard. It was a nice day, mid 70s, and now this is blowing in it will barely get into the 50s tomorrow. I don't like this weather, but what really worries me is what this does once it gets to the midwest and east. It gets really ugly then.

I'll try to post pics soon, it's so cute I know all 2 of you are just dying to see what I did!!!! :)