Frank Woodruff Buckles, Last WWII Veteran

I've read about Mr. Buckles before, but now the depth of his sacrifice, honor, courage, and more are just hitting me.

http://www.frankbuckles.org/


Yes, the national WWI Memorial is in need of repair and respect. Let's all change that.

http://www.wwimemorial.org/

March~~Lion or Lamb or Polar Bear Non-Contest!

We've had odd winter weather. Yeah, I'm starting to sound like a broken record. My bad.

Anywho, March arrived not like the lion of past years, but as a polar bear. We didn't get any new snow, but on Feb. 28, we got 1.5 inches of rain on top of the snow-soaked-and-covered ground. Several area communities are under water, yet again. The temps were in the upper 40s when we got the torrential rains. Now it's back in the 20s at night, creeping to the mid 30s as of this post.

My friends in communities to the east of us, closer to Lake Erie, are all a-buzz about FOSs, First of Springs. They're seeing buzzards, wood cocks, robins are nesting, long-eared owls are going nuts, all sorts of fun stuff. This is what we're seeing:

So here's my plan--specially for the mommy quilty bloggers who love those contests! Leave a guess when you think the pile of snow in the bottom picture finally disappears and I'll send you an note back. Naw, I don't have any connections with fabric companies, magazine subscribers, mystery quilts, thread makers, BOMs, none of that. Just me and my lousy blog!

Then in May, when I get back out west, we'll have the same contest, with the same lousy prize, to see when those snow piles melt. And out west, we're talking REAL snow piles!

Train Club Quilt~~Done!

I did it! I put a binding on a quilt, and it doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out with the seam ripper! Woo hoo! I did Aubrey's quilt a couple of weeks ago, and that turned out okay, but this one actually looks pretty darn good!

Why, you ask? I frantically spent the entire morning looking for tutorials on-line for ways to machine bind a quilt. It just wasn't working for me. Then I found Crazy Short Cut Quilts! Hooray! With a couple of great hints, it was like sewing magic. So here's the practice version, complete with spiral machine quilting and will you look at that point on the star! Freakin' awesome! I also made 6 smaller versions of that block for another quilt and one of the 6 is perfect. Sweet. (Yeah, I found some tuts on half square triangles, too.)

Crafty, Snowy, Birdy Days

First, I need a yard or so of Royal Stewart Tartan in shirt weight. For the life of me, I can't find any in the US this week! I googled it every which way I could and nada, zip, nuthin'. So if you've got some in your stash, I need some a.s.a.p. to finish a quilt for a really-coming-up-quickly wedding. ::begging begging begging:: Fun facts to know and tell: a real tartan has the same stripe pattern in each direction. When tartans are registered, the designer only submits the pattern in one direction. When they don't match, it's a plaid. See what you learn going to a liberal arts college where the mascot is the Scot?

Next, it's snowing again. Between doctors appointments, snow, ice, and Presidents Day, my boys have only been in school for 6 hours this week. Crap. That really puts a dent in my crafty time.

Also spent the afternoon yesterday with the boys' current caseworker and their next caseworker (they change when the kids leave school~~since we're considering pulling them from the glorified babysitting thing they call school now...... ) well, let's just say we're looking at options. More on that later. And if any of you are involved with using Ohio Waivers for your adult kids with disabilities, lemme know how that's working for you.

And birders~~you should see the feeders of NW Ohio this week. We picked up a new feeder bird for us~~Purple Finches. Because our deck is also the bird feeder, it takes some of the birds a while to find our feeders. Lots and lots of folks get Purple Finches (and their infamous twins, House Finches) at their feeders, but this is a first for us at this house. My sis lives 4 miles east of us on the other side of the park. She has a large grassy lot and water-feature mini-pond next to her house, along with 3 more acres of pines, and you should see the cardinals! She can easily have 15 or 20 at a pop. She also had a beautiful little Carolina Wren visiting a suet feeder right up at her window. I suppose if I were to stop reading all of the birder blogs I'd have more birding time.

Today, I'm hoping to get some sewing time in. I suppose if I were to stop reading all of the sewing blogs I'd have more sewing time. Sheesh.

I Had a Feeling About This One

We've had interesting weather this winter. We've had real snow. Here in NW Ohio, snow is often a hit or miss deal. Or we get hit, it looks pretty for a day or two, then it turns yucky looking, then it melts, and we start over again. But this year, it snowed in mid-December, and we've had snow cover since then. Somewhat colder than usual, too.


A local forecaster, who really should get a hobby, spent a good part of the winter forecasting gloom and doom. It's pretty much reached the point where you automatically subtract 6 inches of snow off his prediction. (He works at a tv station with the coolest new predicting toys and programs, so you'd think he'd be better at it.....) He also completely, totally missed the biggest snowfall of the season, but the other forecasters weren't that close either.

Late last week, they started saying~~finally~~well, we don't know what's going to happen with the next system. What happened was we got hammered with a crappy, rotten ice storm. Here at our house we had a nice snow, followed by hard pouring rain and some sleet, then more snow, then really quickly freezing temps. At our daughter's home in West Toledo, a scant 20 miles from here, they got a little snow, then freezing rain and sleet, followed by more freezing rain and sleet, and then some snow and freezing temps. It was down to 9 this morning. She's been without power now for 48 hours. We put them up in a hotel for the first night and they stayed last night also. There were so many trees and branches down over on that side of town that walking around was flat out dangerous--you never knew when a branch or power line would be coming your way. The elementary school in her neighborhood is still closed, as are all the schools in SE Michigan.

Our Red Cross Chapter set up a warming station at a local YMCA and there have been some folks staying there. The motels are all full, and many of our other friends and family are shacking up with other folks. The up side is that BadAmy and hubby will be able to clean the 'fridge and freezer..... and completely restock it. Everything had to go. Bummer.

I took the crappy weather as an opportunity to sew. Our power was out for about 3 hours in the morning, but that's no big deal. The temp in the house only dropped about 2 degrees. Let's hear it for super-insulation! I was sewing downstairs while my niece and her year-old son were here--their house was powerless for about 18 hours, but she didn't want to chase the baby around, flashlight in hand, so they came and stayed with us. So anywho, as I was madly working on blocks, the lights kept flickering, but they stayed on--yea!

I also went beserk and decided to make a wall hanging for some friends who are getting married. I found out yesterday that they set the date: March 4. This year. Holy crap! They are very interesting folks with wildly divergent backgrounds so the quilt with be pretty much off the wall (har har--get it? Wall hanging? Off the wall? Yea, it's late. Er, early. Either way, it's the middle of the night.) I'll get pics later today and post them. So far all the material came from my stash, but I'll need 2 more materials to finish it the way I want. Okay, maybe 4 more..... Then I promised DD I'd get back to his quilt. But I also need to get a flannel scrappy quilt done for the kid that will be bornt sometime this July--gotta do that now, since I get very, very little time to sew in the summer. And I'll definitely need to go to the store for that one.

The boys have an appointment with the shrink today, I'll have to decide if they go to school for the rest of the day or not. I'm inclined to just bring them home. So very much simpler and easier for everyone. DH will have a cow, but oh well. We'll see....

How I Spent Friday and Saturday....

... decorating and then de-decorating for DH's Rotary Dinner. Gotta show off here. Hubris is my middle name.

All most all of the stuff here came from my stash. Hurricane lamps came from another guy; glittery wreaths were from BadAmy's wedding; mirrors, ribbons, chargers, ornaments from the after-holiday sales with coupons (score!); and the candlesticks are mostly from the Goodwill. Trust me, this was cheap. I bought the material with my 50% off one item coupon at JoAnn's so I own that now, too. I told the girls that helped to decorate to just make the stuff cute. They were all different but all the same since we had to use the hurricane lamps. The other thing that worked really, really well was to use double stick tape on top of the candlesticks~~it's just enough hold the votives on top. And only one slipped--I was keeping an eye on them all night.

So here's a sampling, before dinner and in the evening.

Friday Night Sew In Sorta!

Last night was the Friday Night Sew In (FNSI). I had projects lined up. I was restraining from cookies--gotta fit back into that uniform in a few months. Boys were all fine, DH was gone, the stars were aligned.

Then I fell asleep.

Holy cow. Yep, I fell sound asleep on the couch.

The good news is that I was really rested up this morning! I started working on some more Kind Hearted Lady mug rugs. I'm trying to decide how I really like them, so I've been messing with different stuff like how much machine quilting to put on 'em, I accidentally zig zagged thru the batting on some (like the look as it turns out), and blah blah blah. For some reason it took me half as long to sew them today, so I'm trying to figure out what I did better this time. Hmph.

I left my camera at the club where DH's Rotary Club is having the Dinner Dance tonight, so I can't upload pics just yet. Conceited girl that I am, I took pics of all the centerpieces we made with my stash. I'll post those, along with the new stack of mug rugs.

I'd go sew now, too, but I have to do yet more computer work for the Rotarians. I'm thinking I should auction off computer/graphics lessons to some of the old farts.......

Friday Night Sew In!

Somebody out there in the blogosphere, I think its Crafty Vegas Mom, came up with the idea of staying in on some Friday nights and sewing. So later on, I'll fix a cuppa, wish I had some cookies stashed somewhere, and go down to the crafty corner in the basement to sew. I've got a couple of current WIPs to play with, mainly more Kind Hearted Lady kitties, and of course, DD's hobo quilt. That should keep me out of trouble for a while.

Spent today setting up for DH's Rotary Club's Community Dinner Dance and Auction. It looks nice. Between my Goodwill stash and another guy's hurricane lamps, it looks good. And we had just the right number of hands to get the work done without bumping into one another.

Birding the Blues .. and the Crafty Greens

You can probably tell that my interests are all over the map. Oh well. I have a blogging Ranger Peep who has about 400 blogs, so he can separate all his interests. Too much work. Anywho, here's today's mixed up offering:

Got Yarn? My darling daughter, BadAmy is at it again. This time is green and sparkly. She has this posted on her Etsy store (there's plenty of it, not to worry~~just an Etsy quirk there) and I think it will be available at the Black Swamp Fiber Arts Fair in Bowling Green, March 26. I love that she's found this great niche in life.

Next up: The Bluebird Winds have arrived!

One of the best ornithologists in the country, the late Mr. Lou Campbell, used to tell us to look for the first bluebirds of spring during the first southwestern winds after Valentine's Day. Well, looky here. Those warm, moist southwesterly winds have brought incredibly high temps to our area--a real teaser, since it's only mid-February and we know winter will hammer us again. And more bluebirds, too. But more interestingly, there are hundreds of bluebirds overwintering in our area these days. In past Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, we'd have a couple. This year we had literally hundreds, and often in flocks of 15 to 20.

I suck at bird photography (I blames it on lack of great equipment, as opposed to lack of great skill), but I do have one good bluebird pic. Ha! Tricked you! This is BirdGirl Sherrie's pic: Ha! Tricked you again. This is the now famous Western Bluebird that put in an appearance two years ago.

And this is Pat, a local birder who had the chutzpah to say out loud, "I think I saw a Western Bluebird at the Oaks." That whole episode was a blast.

Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah, the Bluebird winds of February. Next up on the bird watch list is Buzzards. I love buzzards. Did I ever mention that we call our place Buzzard Crest? Not to be confused with Falcon Crest? True, dat. And around the same time as the buzzards, the woodcocks will be back. More about them and my hero, Aldo Leopold, in a couple of weeks.

And I shouldn't have mentioned anything yesterday about us all being healthy. I'm not sick yet, but the 'tells' say I soon will be. Now where did I put that vitamin C?

Back to Crafty Stuff

Gee, whiz, this is supposed to be the quiet time of the year~~no such thing around our house. (I just wish I could figure a way to get paid for having this much fun. Got it covered 4 months of the year, but that leaves 8 unpaid-yet-working-my-ass-off months. Hmmmmm....)

Yep, let's see, last weekend organized and ran a first-time-for-us Winterfest with Barb. It was a grand success. Did I mention that? Well, it's worth mentioning again. Did I mention the hundreds of people who attended?

This weekend is DH's Rotary Club's annual fund-raiser. I'm in charge of decorations, most of which will come out of my stash. For at least the past 30 years, the Club has done an auction. When DH and I met, they rented a tent and had the auction in the parking lot of our beloved Swanton Super Valu. That's where The Romantic picked up my engagement gift: a chain saw. No diamond for me, looooong story there. Then about 15 years ago, the club moved the auction inside, and it was still fun, but not as wacky as the parking lot ones. But the auction as they were doing it has run its course. This year they are going to try a higher class, $40/head affair. The local country club is donating the room, which is really, really nice of them. There will be grazing stations, silent auction, and afterwards dancing. We'll see how this goes. Swantucky really isn't a $40 a plate kinda town, but apparently ticket sales are going pretty well.

For the decorations, I sprung for some nice ultra-suede type stuff in wonderful, regal purple, which I've cut up into squares to put under centerpieces. If we don't monkey with the fabric a lot, it doesn't fray, so no sewing involved~~yea. I also went out and bought a ton of silver stuff~~several yards of a gauzy silver metallic material, all the after-Christmas silver ribbon I could find, silver beads, stuff like that. I own a ton of pressed glass candlesticks of all shapes and sizes (thank you, Goodwill) that we'll use all over. When BadAmy got married she used silver, crystally twig wreaths for center pieces and we have 8 or 10 of those still. So the plan is to make each center piece different, using all this stuff. And the best part of the deal is that I bartered an afternoon from BadAmy to come help. I helped wind the yarn for the first shipment of her yarn club, and in return she's gunna help decorate. She's awesome like that.

But wait there's more! Took DD to the U-Mich Hospital to discuss the results of his first round of tests. Yep, there's something wrong with him and it's not all in his head. In fact, his brain isn't connected to his butt, just like I've been saying for years. Maybe I'll pour out all the gory details in another post. Yuck. Poor kid. He needs one more test for the final diagnoses, and it involves putting him to sleep to check. Back to U-M.




But wait there's more! I actually squeezed a little sewing time in! I'm experimenting with more Kind Lady mug rugs. . . . . .

and ta-daaa! I got the
hobo sign wall hanging for DD's train club pieced together, have the batting and backing cut, and now just have to figure out how to quilt it. I'm thinkin' stitch-in-the-ditch for this one. And I got my Alpine Wonder quilt out of hock from the long-arm shop. I'm going to try to bind it myself. There's a great way to ruin a perfectly good quilt.

So the good news is (knock on wood) that none of us has any flu or serious cold type stuff. I imagine with the colder weather we'll all get hit soon.

The Real Me

You didn't ask for it, but here it is: The Real Me. Photo by Karen Berger, AW Mirror






Presenting the Golden Sled Trophy

Photo by Tom Duvendack

Birding and Thawing

Must be warming up around here
because the snow if sliding off the roof. This pile has averaged about 3 feet all winter, and with the little thaw we had yesterday and today it grew considerably. And still all the snow isn't off the roof yet. So getting to the can of birdseed to feed the birdies for this weekend's Great Backyard Bird Count will take some doing. That and since it's warming up a bit, the dang-blasted raccooonns are back raiding the feeders. They've cleaned us out in less than 2 days. Gad, I hates raccoonnsss.

But nonetheless, it's time to gear up for the GBBC. Not only is it easy, but it's fun to look my own zip code up afterwards to see how many of my neighbor peeps have entered data. It's a bit of work, but if you can blog or FB, you can do this. Easy breezy. And important! So get your birdie on, crack open that Sibleys or Petersons or even your Kaufmans and put a little dinner out for your fine feathered friends.

Whitehouse Winterfest!

I haven't written much about this, but wow did we have fun.

I've thought for a long time that Whitehouse should have wacky cardboard sled races. We have one of 5, yep, count 'em, 5 sledding hills in NW Ohio. It's so flat around here you can actually count the hills. Scary, eh? And our hill is the tallest with a steep side and a bunny hill side. Anywho, a couple of months ago, I mentioned this to the Community Development person from the Village. We've done several other events together. She said that she was trying to come up with a winter "thing" in the Village, and voila, Winterfest was born. We brainstormed ideas and came up with the sled races, snowball throwing, snowman and angel making, a 5K, food booths, music, carriage rides, and on and on. Yesterday, we made it happen. (Yeah, baby, Barb and I are a force to be reckoned with.)

When we were choosing a date, I did a little research and found that the coldest two weeks here are the last two of January, but the snowiest are the first two weeks of February. Lo and behold, the Farmers Almanac said we would have a big storm before Valentine's Day and one after. And did we ever. This is very, very unusual for around there, but in town there's 12 inches of snow on the ground. When we thought this up, Barb and I fretted that we wouldn't have any snow. We did have back up plans, but yesterday was quite literally the best weather day we've had this winter. I could go an and on. And on and on. So this post is really a shout out to me. How's that for hubris????



DH took most of these photos, and I put them together with iMovie. Love my Mac. We only had 4 sleds pre-registered, so being afraid that no one else would show, I made one for my great-nephew, Lil Ripper, and one for the Glass City Rollers. But holy cow, some of the thirty that showed up simply rocked the house. We have more great ideas for next year, including a pre-race Sled Show and Judging, and lots more. So y'all come on out!

(Okay, I will tell you which one was my favorite, but I didn't figure it out until today--the Cherry Bombers. They had a "pie pan" for sled, the girls wore red jackets and had red balloons in the sled with them, and on their helmets, they put red covered with criss-crossed masking tape to look like a cherry pie lattice top. Get it? They were a cherry pie! Too creative! Tom's favorite was the Hillside Harley--the 'dashboard' inside was hilarious! And those chickens didn't want to got down the steep side of the hill with the rest of the grown ups. Next year, we'll let grown ups go down the bunny hill, too.)

Backyard Birding Time Again!

Remember how much fun you had counting birds at your feeder for the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count? Well now it's time for the Great Backyard Bird Count. This is the Laziest Birder in the World's dream event. And easy. And fun. And important. And easy. Did I mention easy?

So check out this link: Great Backyard Bird Count and I'll get back to you later this week. Okay? Cool. (Hey, Phoebe, I'm counting on you!)

Twenty Years Ago Today, Feb. 11....

. . . my son came home. Forever ours.

Twenty Years Ago Today, Feb. 10...

. . . I was at school, counseling a single mom on ways she and her daughter could make better use of their time and sadly, their somewhat limited talents. At 4:00 p.m., the school secretary yoo-hooed down the hall to tell me I had a phone call. I excused myself (getting tired of talking to the mom anyway, she had been there for and hour and a half), and took the call.

And in that instant, my life changed forever.

It was a caseworker from our local children's services agency. There was a 4 day old baby at a local hospital, did we want him or not.

Just like that.

I had been contemplating going through the highs and lows of foster/adoption again, but hadn't screwed up enough courage to talk to DH about it again. He had resigned himself to our family status. I told the case worker I needed to talk to DH first and would call her back. "How long will that take?" said she. "He's at work and I'm at work," says I, "I'll call you back as soon as I can."

I told the Mom something had come up, here's your hat what's your hurry, and flew home. Of course, you can never find a ranger when you want one, and that night was no different. The dispatcher located him for me and passed along the message to come to the 223. (That's 10-code talk for home.) He arrived just moments before the caseworker called again. She was pretty aggravated sounding, which didn't calm my nerves at all.

"When do they want the baby to come here?" says I.

"Tonight," says she. "The hospital says he's healthy and they don't have room for him." (Here read: they didn't want to foot the bill any more.)

By now it's nearly 7 p.m., and there was no way in hell we could put up a tiny newborn that night. We asked if we could get him the next night, after school. She hangs up. She calls back. Says she, "The hospital says they can keep him one more night. We'll bring him to your house tomorrow at 3. See you then." Click.

Holy cow. Now what do we do?

Nature Bloggers

Despite my latest posts all being about my crafty side, my heart truly lies outside. I'm in my hibernation mode now--nearly glued to my sewing machine. But now that we're having those wonderful, gentle February twilights, the thoughts of spring and warmer weather are starting to play around in my head.

And while I honor and respect my peeps who are outside playing now, my bones are having conniption fits. I never expected that at such a young age, I'd be so wracked up by arthritis. What a pain in the arse and bones. Neither of my parents had serious arthritis issues, so I didn't see this one coming. I knew I'd have ankle issues, which I've written about before, but this just bites. Fortunately, being out west in the summer, where it's so much drier really helps a lot. But here in the winter, holy crap, some days my bones just don't seem to want to do anything. Why bring this up now? I stay connected to the outdoors from the indoors thanks to some really great nature bloggers.

So when you need your nature fix, but your body is in rebellion, take a mental hike. It helps keep me going--even when I can't.

Kind Hearted Lady Lives Here

I love folklore and train folklore is right up there for me. My Grandfather, whom I don't really remember, worked for the B&O in the Toledo yards. (Toledo currently has the 5th largest train yard in the country, down from the third largest in pre-interstate days. Just thought you'd want to know.) And oddly, the annual hobo convention is still held in Britt, Iowa~~and Britt is my maiden name. (Do-dee-do-do, do-de-do-do~~that's me singing the Twilight Zone theme music.)

Anywho, my Dad had HO model trains, and now our son DD has O scale trains. We thought FTD would be the train guy, but it turns out to be DD. I'm making him a quilt based on hobo signs that were left as messages in the jungles all across the country. I found a book in the Greybull, Wyoming Big Horn Quilt Shop by Debra G. Henninger for inspiration. On a quilt shop hop last fall, I found fabric that reminds me of old man shirts, so I bought several fat quarters, raided my stash, and viola, quilt makins'. (By the by, to use this book, you need a pretty good knowledge of quilty stuff. I changed several blocks, so as to not have to make itty, bitty triangles, or to make some of the blocks more closely resemble the actual signs. A couple of the blocks are repeated, which makes me think the editorial staff nodded off at some point. Must not hae been quilters.)

Nearly everyone's favorite sign is a kitty cat. If this was scrawled near your house it meant, "Kind hearted lady lives here." That Kind Lady would be likely to give you a sandwich and water or milk, maybe an old, worn out shirt, and always a kind word. Did those Kind Ladies have sons and brothers who were riding the rails? Boyfriends looking for a new life and job? Classmates searching for adventure? Goofballs just hangin' with their peeps? Who knows.

But I do know lots of Kind Hearted Ladies. Those of you who live nearby, turn your computer off now. I don't want you to peek at your valentine gift from me.



















The rest of you, send me your favorite colors and your address...... or your Kind Hearted Lady's favorite colors. . . .

Twenty Years Ago Today... Feb. 7...

. . . I still hadn't quite decided if I should once again broach the subject of trying to adopt a child or not with DH. It was snowy and all. . . we seemed content. Maybe I'd wait until school was out in the summer to think about trying again.



Twenty years ago today, unbeknownst to us, our first son was born.











~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


But last week, I worked on more blocks for kid #2. (There's part of the surprise ending, if you hadn't figured this out already....)

I've got lots more Hobo Quilt blocks done, but Blogspot is just not being very nice about uploading pics, so here's just three more.

Twenty Years Ago Today...

... I was sitting in my barely-heated-over-the-weekend classroom, thinking there had to be more to life than going to work on the weekend just to grade papers, pretty much because I didn't have anything better to do.

DH and I had tried for seven years to get pregnant. All the the testing showed it was me. Nothing worked properly. Damn. We finally decided to look into adopting~~my Mom had been watching the news, when one of the stations showed weekly stories about kids waiting to be adopted through our county agency. The summer before this day, 20 years ago, we started taking that step. Before the ink was dry on our license to foster/adopt, two little brothers came to live with us. Then their birth mom showed up and the court let her try parenting again. (Within 3 weeks, it all went to hell, and they were assigned to yet another home. The rules have changed somewhat to avoid this situation, thank goodness.) DH was spent after this episode and resigned himself to a life with just he and me and his daughter. We'd be a tiny little family of three. I tried to wrap my head around this and was succeeding pretty well, until that day, 20 years ago.

I told myself that pretty soon, I'd talk to him about maybe sorta kinda looking into trying it again.

Maybe.

The Call From the Wild

It's the call I wait for all year--my supervisor's voice on the phone saying, "It's rehire time, are you available?"

Awesome. Back to Parkadise in mid-May, home in early October. Sweet. Really, really sweet.

The Non-Storm

After a week of hype, the storm was only scary stormy here for about an hour. We got 4 nice fluffy inches of snow on Tuesday, and then Tuesday night when the 'dry slot' got here around 1 a.m. the winds came with it. It roared so oddly that I opened a window to listen. I thought there was truck stuck out front or something. The wind blew straight out of the north, pelting sleet on our bedroom windows, where there in normally no moisture. But after that, we ended up with a couple more inches of nice snow and that was it. Just to the north of us, they got more ice--schools are still closed up there today, and there was fatal car accident this morning. But here, all is well. No major loss of power, and the roads are in pretty good shape. It's cold though~~we aren't used to those 7 degree mornings. I can't begin to imagine how my friends in ND, WY, and MT deal with the minus 30s that they've been experiencing.

We did have a classic DD moment during all this. When the low pressure front moved in on Tuesday night, DD went freaky on us~~really, really weirdly cranky and just plain mean. After he finally crashed, I looked at the tv and there was the meteorologist saying that the low pressure front had just arrived. DD and FTD both have sixth-sense type reactions to various weather fronts. This one was a doozy.

And on the upside, I started DD's hobo signs quilt. The blocks are only 6 inches (5.5 finished size) so it will take 110 plus the sashing to make a double size quilt. There are 55 blocks in the book. So I'm making doubles of each. Yesterday, I made exact doubles, but as time goes on I might mix them up some.

The blocks are designed three different ways: paper piecing for some, regular piecing for others, and applique for the rest. The artist took the hobo signs and put a more 'quilty' spin on them. Since DD has autism and is a boy, he's more interested in the signs looking like signs. So I changed a couple so far to look more 'realistic.' Actually, it was easier--the ones I changed had lots of nasty little triangles. I try really hard not to do nasty little triangles. They hate me. I hate them. (Yeah, I hear ya~~practice practice practice.) And did I mention that I don't know how to paper-piece stuff yet? So I'm actually enjoying looking at new ways to do the blocks.

Here's the first batch. One of these days, I'll label them, but until blogspot stops messing with the hyperlinking dealie, I'll just add the blocks. You figure them out. :)

Snow Days~~edited with new pics

After a week of hype, it's finally snowing here. Three or four inches last night, no biggie, and more tonight. We're right on the border of snow/freezing rain. Everyone prefers snow over freezing rain, so we'll see how the night goes.

I did get to back to the sewing machine. I'm cranking out a smaller quilt for a special young lady, using fussy cut Debbie Mumm fabric and one of my favorite things, chunks of stuff. For the chunk part I made strips 3 inches wide, then chunked 'em up in various widths. Then I randomly sew them back into strips. I used five fabrics for the chunks. It went together quickly, and since I'd like to give it to her next Saturday, I decided to machine quilt it myself. After surfing the web for a long time, I decided to use masking tape to make stripes. Originally, I was just going to put one line down one side of each piece of tape. But instead, I put a line down each side, using a 1/4 inch space between tape and stitches. Since the quilt is busy and 'horizontal' I put the strips on diagonally, creating diamonds. I also went high and outside on the thread--it's blue for the rivers and streams around here. Weird choice, but there it is. I also made binding last night, but didn't get to it today~~too busy breaking up fights since the boys were both home today. And of course, there was snow to shovel. And here's the finished quilt, complete with binding and the whole works.
This is a sneak peak about who gets this quilt. If anybody spills the beans before Saturday. . . .

Here are the updated photos: (I'd label them but blogspot has something weird going on with hyperlinking anything I type in between the pics.)

The top pic is the quilt with the tape for quilting lines.
The next one is the finished binding and the whole works!
And the bottom one is a sneak peak at who the quilt will be going to---don't tell her!

FTD's Quilt, Done!

Tomorrow I'll post all the details, using my usual rapier-sharp wit, but for now, FTD's quilt is ready for the quilter! Pine cone borders to polish it off!

FTD's Quilt, Almost Done!

Woot! I got all the blocks on FTD's quilt put together. It took me longer to straighten them all out than to sew them together, which probably means I didn't spend enough time cutting neatly the first time,* then watching my seams more carefully as I sewed. Oh well, it's not like these are going to quilt shows or anything.

It's a little more Christmas-y than I envisioned, but using the traditional red center, for the hearth of the log cabin, and green logs, welllll..... what did I expect?

I've got pine bough and pine cone fabrics to add sashings around it. That should go fairly quickly~~at least as quickly as I can shoving that much material around. I did see a video of a quilt/sewing table a gal made using stryofoam and heavy duty vinyl sheets. . . hmmmmm. . .

The hues of the darkest of the three darks actually has a lot of black in it, so those are much more pronounced than the others, but that just adds another dimension to it.

All in all, so far I'm really pleased. And FTD said, "Cool." High praise indeed!

* I need that Vagabond Sizzix--it will probably be the first thing I order after I go back to work and get the traveling expenses paid off. I'll order mine from ihaveanotion.blogspot.com!