one thing one week!

Katie inspired me to go ahead a join the One thing One Week challenge this go around. And I DID IT!!! I told myself I wanted to finish the top of A's quilt. I did! And I even had the foresight when I first cut into the Simpson's fabrics to cut a bunch of extra pieces that will go the same way so none of the fabric in the borders or even the top goes in other direction besides up and down. I did a very thin black border around everything and then the Simpson's stuff, and it will be finished off with black binding so I didn't think I needed another back border but if I change my mind I have some cut, measured, and ready to go on....you know just in case. But I will gladly call it "done".

(and thats all I told myself I would do, I told him he wouldnt get a finished product but he would get the top. I dont know how I want to quilt it since it's serioulsy jumbo size I am thinking tie quilting but part of me thinks stitch in the ditch would be better for hard wear and tear. Opinions?)

now if only I could get a picture. Any guesses what I am asking Santa for? A camera, maybe with a backup one too? What is with me and Cameras? Three in four years!!!!


For those of you who didn't hear all about it when I had a camera, I made A a flannel quilt with this wild "where's Bart" Simpson's fabric and alternated that with nine patches, 5 black 4 assorted bright colors....it's got 32 Simpson's blocks 9 inches each and 31 9 patches also 9 inches finished, then a 2 inch black border and a 5 inch print border. I had a hard time getting it together until it clicked together perfectly. I think I was over-thinking everything!!

100 books

I am sure you have seen this around Facebook, but I wanted to share it here. Some good titles to check out from the library, and interesting how many books I have not finished. Ever since I was in high school I realised I couldn't NOT finish a book, No matter how much I don't like it I just have to know how it ends. Many of the unfinished ones are books I had to read for school, something about being expected to read a book made it less fun and therefore I didn't finish.

Here's the deal if you haven't seen it yet:
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series- JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22- Joseph Heller
14 The Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenberger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House- Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited- Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The DaVinci Code- Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick- Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island- Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

so I have read 31 and started 12, oh one of those 12 I didn't finish because I Renewed it three times from the library and still didn't finish it, I might be able to now that I've been reading a lot again. Davinci Code is on the list now!

Thanksgiving 2010

This is now the third year I've done this sort of post, and I am so thankful I did it in '08 (the first year I made my own real Thanksgiving dinner) because I couldn't find the same recipe for how to brine a turkey that I liked and had it on here. I hope you don't mind.



Menu:

Turkey (Adam bought a 13 lber for me and it fit in my batting storage tub, which also nicely fits in the dishwasher for afterwards.)

Mashed potatoes

baby peas in butter sauce (oh from the box if I weren't working until 1:30 I might do my own)

Family Fruit Salad

Rolls

sparkling cider

pumpkin pie?



easy this year, especially since A likes his potatoes out of the box, but I am adding some Gouda and garlic to them to jazz them up a bit *update, Adam said ABSOLUTELY NOT! make them plain so he can add gravy*

so I brined my turkey again, this is the way I think I will do it from here on out. If you look back to Nov '08 I have directions, but I just found this site today when I was looking for times to cook since I got a smaller bird this year than in the past.

Mashed potatoes out of the box, no adjustment, easy peasy

warmed up the gravy from Costco

sliced cranberry sauce

made fruit salad last night (I might have shared the recipe, but it's got mandarin oranges, pineapple (omitted this year) maraschino cherries, grapes, marshmallows and whipped cream...do as you like.

crescent rolls thanks to Pillsbury

Pumpkin pie (follow the Libby's pie directions)

then a Peanut Butter Pie I chose this one because it is similar to a chocolate cream pie I make , but this one looked good too.

Peas in Butter Sauce thanks to Green Giant

oh and I made dressing in a caserole dish with dried out bread, butter and onions melted down and a littel garlic for fun, added a little chicken stock, then baked in the oven next to the bird for the last 20 or so minutes.

and four happy people!!!

silly confession

I had to share....I am blushing just thinking of telling you this but I want to provide you with a little laugh here.

A came home last night and I had picked up the living room, vacuumed and had worn my high heels last night (and one of my favorite cardigans) and had a glass of wine. So when I came home from work (and then preschool) this afternoon he said "who did you have over when I was at work yesterday?"

no one

"why did you get all dressed up and clean up and everything."

brace yourself


well, while I was working on his quilt (the flannel Simpson's one, I am working on getting the rows all put together and debating borders) and those flying geese for my donation quilt, and after the girls had gone to bed....I sort of imagined that I was being interviewed for a quilting magazine.


now I have no interest in designing quilts, no real plans for my quilting other than to make myself happy with it. But it was so fun to pretend.



he just rolled his eyes at me

nov FNSI

this FNSI was a success. I wish I could show pics to prove myself but you are stuck with my word here.

First I got the man to vaccuum the living room for me (so I cleaned it up except my desk first)
Then I made teh girls food and got 1/2 of them down at a decent time,'
The second one I bribed with movies and marshmellows. (great parenting eh? once a month won't kill us)

Then I got to sewing.

I made:
37 one-seam flying geese. (I can get 18 per fat quarter. I cut four FQ's a a time and a bunch of the brown squares and I did two full FQ's worth plus one that I had left over from my last cutting session)
17 -9 patches for A's Simpson's quilt that I forget why I set it aside but am making blocks like mad...again the only thing that stopped me was needing to cut more of the black fabric (11 more to go then I can match them all up with the 32 blocks of Simpson's fabric!! I Think this might be a Christmas present)

R got a little sewing time in too with her quilt we are working on together. She's using my only two 1920's reproduction fat quarters but they had "puppies and flowers" so whatever...she's using a 5/8 seam because it's easier to see on the foot I use and is doing an OK job. I help guide the fabric while she uses the pedal, does most the fabric guiding (I just correct when it gets bad) and pulls the pins I put in out. So cute! I will have to get a camera to show you her work.

So not a ton done, but so much fun anyways. Imagine if I could have started earlier....or if I had cut more in advance because it's either the ironing board on my table or the cutting mat and I chose ironing board.

pst..see my new button and my updated PHD list =) I think I am going to start a new one for 2011

fyi

really quickly, Retro mommy is having an awesome giveaway!!!

projects...and a request

hey there. I have a cute little post about H's baptism and the family's visit, but that will have to wait for now. I am having technical difficulties again. I think I just want a new computer =) I think I Am going to ask a friend to come over later this week and see if he can look at it and fix things, but I am not sure at this point. I wish I knew more about computers but it has never held an interest for me. much like I wish I could draw but I am thrilled I can quilt.


So first things first, I was working on a quilt from ages ago again and almost have all my blocks done. If I have to I can say I DO have all my blocks done, but what I am looking for, if any of you have it is six more 2 1/2" squares of Sandy Gervais Candy Kisses fabric in red. I used three of the reds from the line, candy kisses on red, the heart flower trails in both the large print with pink hearts and the small print with red/pink hearts, but I would be thrilled with any of the reds. I looked online and after search page 6 coming up with one print per store that had it and many that said "sorry this item is no longer in stock" I threw in the towel, thought I'd ask here first, then maybe check out eBay or do another search when I am feeling more patient. Please spread the word, if you have it I will reward you with something from my stash...depending on what you like. Worst case scenario I finish the quilt with what I have and I probably will be the only one who knows that it's unbalanced. See my controlling side?

OH, exciting news, I have all the APQ swap blocks done (ok I need to write on them still but they are DONE) and I just need to wait for my next payday to make it to the post office and get them out, FINALLY!

and I chose an awesome deep chocolate brown that's totally solid, no little hint of anything and it's looking sharp. I couldn't find a deep rich grey, or one that wasn't soft, light, like a sidewalk pavement color, and I wanted crisp to come to mind when you saw the wild prints against the background. I am thrilled with the brown I found, and I only bought 2 1/2 yards but I plan to go back and get more if needed, they had three bolts at the Ben Franklin that I can walk to from home.

I am sorry there are no pics, it would have helped a lot. But camera's acting funny and computers acting so strange. And I am too tired to fight with either today.


Edit:
Katie recommended I give a link to the ones I am looking for, what my descriptions aren't good enough (just kidding, I thought it was a great idea) so I found the line on moda's site, and have the names of the three I used. Any of the "lipstick" would be fine and dandy, but I used :

http://www.unitednotions.com/fcc_CandyKisses.pdf

17408 11Tossed Hearts Lipstick

17411 11*Trailing Hearts Lipstick

17416 11*Candy Kisses Lipstick

two quick questions

well I can't find a pattern for both a jelly roll and a charm pack in one quilt, but I did find TWO jelly roll quilts I want to do off the Moda Bake Shop....so help me pick one now, and one for another time. Remember I am using Sent With Love and white, so which is better?

Sweet Menagerie
or
Avignon Picnic
?

Also....
Ages ago I got a fat quarter bundle of Jennifer Paganelli's "Poodle" and I am going to make a quilt using the one seam flying geese Ricky Tims demonstrated recently. I was thinking of doing grey first, but am leaning towards a deep rich solid brown. What do you think?

hey hey the gangs all here!

I am finally showing off all my wins! I got the most recent a couple days ago and the UPS man scared the bejebers out of me! I was singing and dancing around with the girls, the door was open since we made something stinky for dinner (I think it was french onion soup and I had a roast of some sort in the crock pot and the combo of flavors was overwhelming) and he went *ahem* oh my....so here's what I won in the fall into fall blog hop:

This was the last arrival. a charm pack, and a jelly roll of Moda's Sent With Love line. I have a few ideas for either jelly roll, OR charm pack, does anyone have a great pattern or link to a quilt made with one of each? I don't mind going out and getting a yard or two to make something too, but I have no ideas! This was a second prize added by if she got 200 followers, and when she said she did and she was throwing everyone from the fall into fall give away into the pot I posted "oh oh me me I WANT this" (or something along those lines) and she sent an e-mail saying I won...then moments later another saying "hahah! I just read your comment on the other post (about the second prize!) too funny!

I saw someone (I am sorry I forget who it was Marsha?) made this already, you might need to send me a tip or two. The directions look easy enough but I don't like "new" to me. How else am I going to learn. This is Scrabble Jack, and his teeth are to say "happy fall y'all" it's made by Happy Hollow Designs and they have a ton of other cute things, so if this works out well, you know I'll be asking Santa for another project or two. I saw a Santa I want to bring home with me.

This was a MAJOR score of a win.

I got two books, (Beyond the Log Cabin and the Cats Meow)

A few quilt patterns (I think three)

Two things of Connecting Thread's Essentials (if you have not tried it and can't afford Auriful, give this a shot, it's AWESOME! also I had a great experience when I bought from them ages ago.)

A thingey to hand up pictures in a window or any other glass surface (my broken 60" TV perhaps?)

a men's t-shirt to make a cute quilt with their patterns...I have to find that again, I will practice with this one

AND eight cute half circle napkins folded to look like a Christmas Tree. R LOVES those!

That same give-away I won these too, but I don't think I will be using them. After the hair pulling experience when R's Halloween costume this year I am not going to follow any of McCall's patterns any time soon! And I love the colors of the threads, but my machine can't handle Coats and Clark. Strange eh?



(this will be passed along in a give-away soon, I just have to figure out how to make it better!)

The last thing she had I am debating keeping to try, but again I HATE these type of patterns (give am a quilt pattern any day though) but these look easy, and winter is right around the corner but you'd never guess it from the temps right now! I will make a decision latter!

Lastly, this came in the mail for me. I was part of a team of test quilters for Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks by today's top quilt designers VOL 2! My name is even in the book on page three or four. They sent me this mug as a thank you! How cool!!!

well, I think I bragged enough for one day. Soon I'll show the blocks I am FINALLY making for the rest of you guys.