9/11

This day deserves a post......

God Bless this great nation and the men and women that make our freedom happen.

B I N G O ! ! ! !

Over at the HGTV Forum they do a fat quarter bingo each spring. For how ever many fat quarters (up to 30) you send in you get bingo cards. I played last year with 10 (I think!) and had a BLAST. So this year I played 25 cards. It was so much fun, especially the day the doorbell rang and this was on my front porch.....




Yep I won in my group (along with 1 other lady) and here is what we won



Here are all 286 fat quarters. I had soooo much fun going thru them all.

Fabric heaven :)


My plan is to try and get a couple of tops pieced for Quilts of Valor or maybe Project Linus. Not sure which yet. Needless to say I'm going to have to find a great scrappy pattern.

Lastly for tonight here is a picture of the Ladies room on the casino floor at Paris Las Vegas. It was sooooo gorgeous. I SO want a sink and tile like that!



And omg did I ever feel like a dork taking a picture of the ladies room lol.

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!!

testing testing 1 2 3

ok I found a great blog and she asked how to do strikethroughs and someone commented on how so here goes a test

supercalafragalisticexpealadocious

let's cross our fingers :)


ps oh and because I'll forget this in about 4.3 seconds here is how:

< s > text < / s > only without all the spaces

whew thank goodness I remembered to add how I did it..........

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.

What happens in Vegas..............

stays in Vegas, including all my money! The gambling was bad enough this time, we both lost. Lots. We didn't talk to anyone that was winning. bummer...........

Then if that wasn't bad enough we were robbed (or burglarized?). Either way it sucked. Because I'm lazy I'm going to copy/paste from my trip report over at www.openvegas.com

We got home at 11:45 last night (hate that 3 hour drive from Albuquerque!!). This is my 3rd trip this year, gotta love Diamond benefits! Hubs made Diamond towards the end of last year and we are trying to take advantage of all the offers we can. He’s not able to go as much this year so he probably won’t keep the diamond status.

It’s gonna be really hard to wait in line with everyone else next year lol.

The good was seeing Cher, the bad was the gambling and the scary happened early Monday morning.Hubs went out Friday with a friend for a golf tournament thru GVR Saturday and Sunday. I flew in Saturday. After getting to GVR to pick up Hubs we had dinner at Hank’s Steakhouse. Wonderful food, but way to much of it! To start hubs had French onion soup, not a little appetizer bowl but a huge mixing bowl of it, he said it was very good. Then he had shrimp cocktail, a filet of some kind (I’m not a steak person so not sure what kind) and asparagus. He said the steak was very good. I had salmon and green bean almandine, both were very good. They best tho was the fresh berry salad I started with. It was a baby spring mix greens, house raspberry vinaigrette, goat cheese, candied pecans and fresh raspberries blackberries and blueberries. If I hadn’t been so stuffed I would have ordered another for desert, it was wonderful. This was my first time in GVR and I liked it a lot, although it was a little confusing to get around. Very tasteful elegant décor and although I didn’t see the rooms, hubs said they are really nice. Loaded him up and went to Paris.

After getting to Paris we played BJ for about an hour, I managed to loose my entire weekend budget in that hour………………. not good and it would stay that way the entire time. Now as sad as that sounds I must tell you I’m an extremely low budget gambler, I’ll never ever ever make Diamond status lol. Unfortunately hubs lost the entire time also. It seemed to be the theme for everyone. We met a little lady in the elevator and she said she was polling everyone she met in the elevators and no one was winning, she was ticked off. It’s like she was now on a mission to find a winner, I’m sure she didn’t….

Sunday we were up early and dropped hubs off for golf then back to the room to get ready. Today was CHER day! Went to LV Outlet to kill a little time until I had to pick inlaws up at the airport, took them to check in and then out to the course to pick up DH. From there we went to Caesars to pick up the tickets. We grabbed a bite to eat at a food court (great quick burger) and then had a drink, fed a couple of slots and did some shopping while waiting for the doors to open.

Finally 6:30!! MIL and I get in the security line and I forgot I had my camera in my purse so I have to check it and pick up after the show and now we are in the doors!! We had great seats, rear orchestra right next to the sound guys and director and center stage view. I was a little worried about sitting next to them, but it was actually quite interesting. Thought the director was going to have a breakdown a couple of times, once I couldn’t see anything on stage wrong but there was definitely something not right and the second time a clip didn’t start on time by maybe 30 seconds.

Let me preface this by saying I’m a huge fan and thought the show was fantastic!! She had 17 costume changes and Bob Mackie didn’t disappoint. During the changes they did several different things, sometimes it was clips from old Sonny and Cher shows, pictures of her in different costumes, a couple of times her dancers would perform and a couple of times there were “Cirque” like performers. It did get a little tedious a couple of times, but hey it’s Cher and you have to expect time for costume changes. The costumes weren’t quite as revealing as in years past, but they were still stunning. And her singing…………. Just don’t know how to describe it except amazing. Definitely the best part of the trip. After the show, drop MIL off at Harrahs and head back to Paris and up to bed – I’d lost enough for one day.

Went upstairs a little before midnight while DH played in the Gold Room for a couple more hours. Set my purse on the ottoman at the foot of the bed (boring I know but it is a very important detail as are some of the following details) got ready for bed, left the bathroom light on for DH and the door cracked so he wouldn’t fall over anything when he came in. He came in around 1:30 or 2 , very quietly closed the door, noticed the bathroom light on and left it on and got into bed. Around 3:30 got up to potty (now you’re thinking what the heck with the BORING details????? But stay with me here), and noticed the bathroom light off. Ok so he thought I had gotten up and turned it off, no biggie.

I get up at 9am go into the bathroom and there is my purse on the counter. With my wallet in upside down…….. Now I can be a little OCD about some things and putting my wallet and the other things in my purse a certain way is one of those OCD things (plus I don’t step on sidewalk cracks) ((yeah now you’re really starting to think I’m nuts…..)) So I go out into the room and ask DH if he was in my purse and took my money. An odd think to ask because #1 I know it’s going to piss him off and #2 he’s never ever rummaged around in my purse and taken my money, if he runs out he just gets another marker . At first he kinda blows me off and asks when I last saw it, well it was all in there when I got up to the room. So he’s says we better call security then.

As I start to do that he notices his money clip is missing and his wallet has been gone thru, wellllllll all hell breaks loose then. So security gets to the room and they have had another room gone into also plus they have been trying to catch this guy for 8 months! He goes up and down hallways to see if a door didn’t catch, like ours didn’t because DH was trying to be quiet so it caught the first click but not the second click (didn’t know it hotel doors usually click twice before this!). He came into our room took my purse off the bench and took it into the bathroom and went thru it and then CAME BACK OUT INTO THE ROOM went to the OTHER side of the bed and got DHs money clip and went thru his wallet. We never heard the guy or sensed he was in our room walking around. That is very scary! But only in Vegas do I think this would work, you are dog-tired after going all day and most likely have been drinking so when you go to sleep you are sound asleep. And worse is the other room he went into had their 2 little kids in there with them. Thankfully tho they caught him this time! Not sure of the details yet, have to wait for a detective to call us but because of the amount of cash he took from us it’s now a felony so he’s looking at 10-12 in prison hopefully. This after he spent 2 years in jail for the same thing. And he only takes cash, no chips or credit cards, just cash. Dumb ass…………………

So we spend a chunk of Monday at the Metro sub station filing a report and doing paperwork. Then we went to a golf store and then met up with the in-laws back at Paris. Spent some time in the Diamond Lounge and had a few drinks and appetizers, what a nice place, it’s quiet and so relaxing. I’m going to miss that lol.Then it’s more gambling, although at this point I should
call it what it really is…… a donation lol. We couldn’t get ahead for anything.

Then we went to see Anthony Cools, me and the in-laws. What can I say but wow……… can’t decide if I liked it or not, it was pretty raunchy. We were told it was a drinking show and boy was it. Only problem was I only had one drink before and that definitely wasn’t enough. Plus I can’t decide if I believe the hypnosis stuff or if they were all plants for the show. I’m leaning toward plants for now. Then a little more donating before heading up to bed.

Tuesday we got up and packed up and headed down to Harrahs for more donating and then to Venetian to have lunch at Grand Lux. MIL and I had chicken salad sandwiches, FIL had BLT and hubs and pot roast. It was all very good. Then walked over to Palazzo, very elegant décor. Back down to Harrahs for more donating and then get the car and head to airport.

Sorry if the Vegasy part is boring, but like I said above I'm just to lazy tonight to remember and retype the story. I just can't believe someone was in our room and we never heard or even sensed it. Dh sure wasn't so quiet the next night! He let the door slam and threw the security lock lol. Still haven't heard from the detective in charge to find out the details, maybe next week.

We've got a chance to go back out in July and see Garth Brooks. I hope it works out because DH and guys have gotten so busy. We are going to have to cancel our San Diego trip in June and sell the US Open tickets. He just doesn't think he can be gone an entire week. bummer............

Happy weekend! Hopefully I'll get some sewing done this weekend so I'll have some quilty pics :)