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....

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!