Afternoon. This is me being smiley :) I’m doing real good considering I was almost done with this post and then accidently erased it. *sigh* all those things happen though for a purpose. Someone was probably trying to say … Ann you can be a little more succinct! Pretty much what we’re going to do here with the help of pictures is to spread out what’s been happening over the last couple weeks of not writing. It’s been pretty busy. Some parts up and some parts down … which includes activities and our internal personalities. Go figure. We’re still riding out a schedule at work where I’m there as little as possible.
To be fair I had problems adjusting to a lot of things going on and then some regular aches and mystery pains. We’ve become drowsy behind the wheel and we have what I think amounts to golfer’s elbow. We’ll find out tomorrow because we’re scheduled for a regular doctor visit. That was some part of this time frame too, because we hadn’t had a Dr. Marvin appointment for three weeks. Wow. Way too long!
Before we get into things proper … I too wanted to say something positive in that we’ve heard from two of the three boys yesterday. Maury stopped over for a few moments to give Rich a picture he’d found of an old map. He knows Rich collects them so it was a nice thing. He’s talking about getting together with us, but still hasn’t picked a way to do it … so we’re going to try and hang loose with that. Joe also called and it was a pretty cool conversation. He has picked a day – he asked us what we were doing on July 3rd. He said he’d like us to come see his new apartment – Maury’s asked the same, and then we’ll probably go out to dinner with Joe and Cari so we can talk about the wedding that follows 3 weeks from that time. Joe gave me a lot of time to talk about things going on here so that was an additional bonus. I do love the kids. Just they are so gosh darn busy. That’s what all Mom’s our age say though, right?
Ok, back to our story more in time with the pictures. Last we left off we were working on fishes. This was before the CS trip first weekend of June. This is the last fish we were working on. I believe there is only 3 left including this one. They are going to be soooo beautiful if we could ever just get a handle on it, but in the meantime so much comes up … just don’t know which way to turn.
As to CS’s that seems to be still fairly fresh in our mind. One of the first things that we remembered was meeting this moose. It was like CS? Where did THAT come from? Hehehe Turns out it was a gift of Emily who was clearing away things in a garage sale. Word is she’d carried this by plane all the way from MN to WI. We found that up on the fridge would be a good place for him … he’s big enough to still garner attention. We told CS she should remove the oatmeal, but she was pretty convinced Noey was going to get up there and break something. Besides Macy eating more petals … things went ok with the animals. Emily tries her best to block them off and CS has Kleenexes waiting for her.
We made sure to get a jump on things right away Friday night. We staked our corner on the end of the table as the best position to not over-do our space availability … I went short, but wide, Emily and Linda went wide, but not deep. CS got as normal her table end. Before the girls got there on Saturday, we did a lot of trimming of CS petals. She’d done another 25% so was up to 50%. She also took on our part of the block project. Hopefully she’ll see the sense in sharing that back with Linda and Emily. It’s too much on the difficult side for us yet.
I felt I was taking too much space and dropping fabric down on poor Linda, but she was nice about it. The nice thing about the table is because of the clear top you can put things underneath it which normally take up more space. It was a luxury voyage in that things were on the same flat level as the needle with lots of room to the back and side, but most importantly 7” of real estate toward the front. It gives you a good opportunity to smooth things out.
After the petals, we worked on the table skirts. CS showed us how to ruffle and it turned out to be real quick and fun. There were quite a few to go through, but it wasn’t bad - Soon after though we went to bed. We didn’t get our evening project as scheduled done so that interrupted the morning, but even that worked out.
This picture of course is of the quilted moose! I don’t know what to say of the moose sleeping, but it was after hours, I assure you! There was really good conversation as always and a lot of catching up to do. Linda brought treats again, Emily brought a pudding/jello and Mark bbq’d for the group. I know, I know Ann’s a slouch. Some time getting there is all we manage. CS, Linda and Emily worked on the small and large squares. Linda’s posted some pictures of them – so please take a look … they are so cool. This quilt(s) are going to be wonderful! We also might get a couple of newbies. Janet and Jean friends from the quilting retreat might join us the next time on July 17th. We’ll all have to make room, but we are all looking forward!
And another ta-da moment ...
This is the project that I ended up working on. It matched the colors Emily and CS were doing in class. CS taught me how to do the appliqué binding which turned out pretty cool. We were just real appreciative of it being simple and ready to jump together within one day. We needed a project like that to help calm us down.
Sunday we had our problems leaving and didn’t want to go back to the real life. We hadn’t finished nearly enough and we had so much to do AND the company was good. Unfortunately CS ran into some rough water with a few younger parts not wanting to go down in the basement or work together with anyone. I think we were overtired, over-stimulated, and over-sugared! Pretty sure we had some coffee too. What finally helped us get through it was to not worry about the basement and to work steadily for a bit on the fabric bricks at CS. The above picture shows some of the fabric and it’s going to be really nice one day when we can work on these too. There’s absolutely soooo much to do and so little time. The colors and patterns though are great!
Back at home we didn’t want to give up the striping. The sewing was very relaxing and we were pretty keyed up. CS sent us home with a couple extra jelly rolls (2 ½” x 40” strips). We worked on the stars and stripes one, and then added our extra with Thom’s Marine emblems and colors. It felt like it went together as smooth as butter. And, when we were done we were so happy to announce it was going to go to Vickie. Vickie has a son in Afghanistan, and he drives a tank. Pretty sure he’s going to be involved with stuff. She worries a lot, but does a lot of constructive things in keeping a big group of mothers together. She’s my best on-line Marine Mom friend and we love her dearly.
We messed around somewhat in thinking of doing another Marine-type quilt, but we lost heart in doing it with trying to work with Moda. They had a lot of fabric swatches to look at at their site, but they weren’t available except through dealers and no dealer had my stuff or at least a way of cataloging what we wanted. It was very frustrating. Most of these colors worked off the three stars and wreaths, but I guess it was another learning experience without actual money of having fun and figurin. Butterflies! What were we thinking?
A couple of small projects got done in that we figured out how to re-do the hem and we got CS house to sit up on the right side. WooHOO! AND, we did it all ourselves! Part of what slowed us down was the amount of ordering that went into the end of last week. I believe we went to work on Tuesday, but then stayed home Wed, Thur, and Fri being mentally sick and much too obsessively busy. We found ourselves very involved in the writing back and forth with the Sister Moose and we found that was more enjoyable than anything else - when Linda started talking about getting some organization in her house cleaning.
We went to town and ended up in the next state. We found several programs we were being influenced by. But, first just wanted to jump some pictures here – part of that ordering work we did played out in washing, sweeping, mopping, wiping, and straightening the Kitchen. FlyLady said it was zone 2 in the kitchen and dining room. In the process of having everything so neat and ordered, Rich decided that I should permanently take on the household tasks in total. He’s still doing the shopping, the up and down with laundry and the cooking. There’s no doubt there could be more balance so we said yes. One day we got to the front design board, and the following is a result of that. It was very satisfying!
We didn’t get back to the fish after that … our thoughts were that we’d finish this simple striped quilt – yes CS snuck in three more projects without completing any we’d taken up including Joe and Cari’s quilt and we are like a kid in a candy store. We thought hmm, how long could that take. I think the problem with this project other than taking 3-4 days, was that in the end we miss cut the end and we’ll have to lop about 10” of the 90” off … CS seems pretty forgiving, but it was definitely a blunder in folding and evening out. It’s pretty though and soooo nice and welcoming warm.
And this ...
This is the FlyLady if you haven’t seen her already. CS and Linda were probably frightened by all we were pushing out, but they remained steady and worked through their own projects. CS is doing her closet and bought another shelf to replace the space where there used to be bricks or will be used to when I’m finished, she bought some sweater things for more cloth, and a stepping stool to get to the top of her closet. She’s really going to town. She even took down the empty shoe boxes she’d been holding on to and she got more ink to print out the fabric catalog. I think we have 80 pages, and I haven’t finished what I got and there’s a lot more to go. I would like to see the collage pages back to back with plastic sleeves, but we have to worry about the expense, because we are going to need two copies one for both of us north and south Spruce Hehehe.
Linda is doing Linda stuff that includes in no small part quilting, family and CLEANING! Yeek! We talked to Linda and CS a bit of a challenge in the obtaining of some kind of ordering devise as per Flylady, we could give some of our stuff away, put it away somewhere different or throw it away. We picked up a real nice set of bags from her store for only $14.99 and shipping, but Rich was pretty frustrated. He didn’t want us spending anything until the mid-month check comes in. He likes to carry a balance, and our thought is … well there’s still money in the account!
The next item we looked at, but didn’t buy was this ironing table. It’s really a nice one made by reliable. It’s double gusseted for strength, but primarily it has an expandable table which is really, really nice for the kind of ironing I’m doing. We looked high and low for the best deal. There’s one selling on eBay now for $160 where they usually go for $250, but I have to wait until the money comes in and after CS can help us order from eBay. We never did it and don’t know how that sort of thing works. It’s about all I wanted to spend on a table. It was really sad when ours died, because it was old when we got it 30 years ago. We’ve had it longer than we had Maury Pat. It’s a bit of history, but it disintegrated. Very sad. We’re also going to need one of those gismos to hang it up on the back of the door.
As to the craziness … most of it revolved between FlyLady, which is an iPod app, and then the two apps ALSO backed up on-line as the “Outliner” and the “CalorieCount.” You can get a pretty good idea what’s been happening with all that. We seem to have gone off a deep end. I think that they are both useable, but at first they need quite a bit of studying to figure out. I seems we didn’t get so far from that … and then we were trying to figure out the next part.
In our setting up things to be listening to that was constructive, we came across an podcast of a Lady named Sandy who was very compelling and down to Earth. It didn’t take too long to find that Sandy and the FlyLady were both at a site called BigTent.com Well, you know us and how this kind of thing happens, but now we’re not only a member of FlyLady, we took on 12 more quilting groups. One is here in Chicago, but the others are to some level of professionalism or another just quilters talking and broadcasting. That’s tilted us again … first in wanting to listen to it all and then in trying to add to it all. It’s all very exciting. I think it’s like the old fashioned message boards where people write or talk in their points of view so we’ll have to be discerning in turning some of it off. It does seem to be something nice to listen to, although even that interferes with CNN, Rhapsody and Leo LaPorte the Tech guy.
I think this has been part of our problem. Everyone inside seems to be blossoming or fainting not too much in-between. We’re going through this entire stimulus and have to slow down to put it maybe not in order as much as perspective and priority. I don’t think anyone with 20 minds can slow things down enough to take on all of that which is out there. There’s been some good though. It’s good to have a nicer and more full sense of home, we got out walking with Rich and he seems to be quite happy with most of the turns of events, with the exception he’s pretty much serious about me going back to work. Sister has understood, but I know that the center’s annual report is waiting my return along with more staffings and other - too much, too much.
But you wanna know what else? Rich had asked me to hand sew a label onto his umpire uniform. I did it, and it probably now has to be done by a professional, but in the process I had found the space our old sewing and cross-stitch stuff was in. We found the most amazing thing. It is the quilt that we made so long ago in our early teens. It wasn’t particularly pretty – all old material from my great grandmother, but, it has soooo much meaning. My Grandmother had given me a red box of sewing squares and the treadle sewing machine. I hadn’t remembered. It’s my history, its CS history and Linda and Emily … and it’s for real! Everything in time.
Oh my gosh ... look what just happened ... I went to my email and found this! This is from the lady on the podcast mentioned above. Isn't the world just so small and wonderful!
Chinese
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Spanish
Posts
