Fall Quilt Retreat

 I so needed this past weekend's quilt retreat. I really seemed to have lost my quilt mojo lately. You know how it is - busy with work, family visiting in Oct. and of course the seasonal S.A.D. which makes me want to do nothing but eat cheese and carbs and sleep 10 hours a day.

I didn't even have the motivation to pull out a current WIP/UFO project and instead took a few pending projects. First I grabbed a kit I bought at the AQS show in Paducah this year. It is a really simple pattern - Malaysian batiks cut into squares and sashed with your own black fabric. The fabulous fabrics do all the work for this quilt. I still need to put on a border - most likely I will just stick with plain black.

The second thing I worked on is the second table-runner I owe my sister. I had the block picked out and bought the fabric a couple of months ago. I managed to get the whole top done. There are 8 blocks here, each with 36 pieces. So while it is only a table-runner it actually took quite a while to complete (lots of getting up to press individual sections and trimming them before piecing them together).

 The final project I worked on was an idea that has been marinating for a while. I got a jelly roll of darker shaded solid fabrics awhile ago as a gift and had come up with the idea of making Lemoyne Stars with them. Several months ago I even explored a few ways to make the stars using different methods. I figured I might get as far as cutting out some fabrics, but surprisingly I managed to cut 8 fabric strips into star pieces (I got 10 star pieces per color using the Deb Tucker ruler method).
I then played around with color and design. I could make 8 single color stars, or I could make 2-color stars, or as I finally decided I would make 10 stars with the mix of all 8 colors. I also had to decide if the layout of the colors would be all the same or mixed up. I went with all mixed up, so no two stars are the same here.So I actually pieced all the stars together and trimmed them, they are 10 inch unfinished.

I can only hope to keep a little of the momentum of the retreat.

What did you do Columbus Day weekend?

As part of our weekend escapades we visited the Conroy Organics store just north of Plattsburgh, NY.  Once the band started the whole herd jogged up to the fence so a bunch of us went over to say 'hi'.

Mom made the most of the trip and did some wine tasting and as you can see picked up a box of wine.
It doesn't look like it but there is a fence between her and the steer. As those of us who know mom, know that if there weren't a fence she would not be out there! (Wine you can only make you so brave.)

Focusing on the postive

 I did get the table-runner quilt blocks finished and pieced together, but this morning when I was going to machine quilt it, in less than 15 minutes the thread broke 3 times and the I broke a needle. I decided to walk away and try again another day. So instead of focusing on this frustration I will share a recent success.

I saw this idea on Pinterest. The idea is to take old Christmas cards and cut them up to re-purpose them as gift tags. I do not know why, but I have a huge stack of old Christmas cards we received from the past few years. 
  

I went to JoAnn Fabrics yesterday and since I had this idea in my head I stopped at the paper crafting section and found this good-sized circle hole punch from EKTools. So I pulled out the cards and got started. Not all cards work well. And if there is writing on the back side you really can't use it to write the 'To' and 'From' info. The great thing about this punch is that you can see exactly that you are punching out - no guess work. As you can see from the photos you can pick and choose what elements you want to keep.

 I also bough a regular hole punch so the tags can be attached by a ribbon. I now have a little zip-lock bag of tags ready to go for the holiday season. And probably enough for the next couple of years.

Lots going on

With the start of the semester and the end of summer a lot of the items on my to do list became more urgent. Classes started last week and I was ready for that - yeah! At home I just finished the touch-up painting on the house this weekend. The furnace tune-up was scheduled for this next week, but they had to re-scheduled so that is still on the list for yet another week. Still on the to do list, paint the porch floor and start cleaning out the garage so when we start getting frosts I can put the car in the garage.

I am slowly but steadily working on blocks for a table-runner (in photo). It is understandably taking a while as there are 53 pieces in each block - several of them bias cut pieces.

In other news Damon's plans for buying a few more fish for the aquarium are put on hold when we discovered that one of the fish had babies. He jumped on the internet and discovered that it is actually easy to tell by fin shape that three of the first fish he bought were all females. We figure at least one was pregnant when he brought them home. So now we have 4 tiny baby fish. They usually hang out towards the bottom of the tank but as they have gotten bigger in the last couple of weeks they have gotten more adventurous so we see them more often out and about.

New Kitchen Shelf is up - finally!

This project started a couple of months ago. I took down the old shelf which was too small and flimsy for all our cookbooks (its been relocated to the sewing room). We went to the local hardware store and picked up a new board which I stained and finished, only to find when we were installing it that is was not as wide as I expected. So back to the hardware store. This time we got one wider, but also thicker - but a bit too thick. So our friend Terry came over with his planer and we reduced it down about a quarter of an inch. Instead of staining this time I opted for a deep red paint. After priming and painting I finally got it installed yesterday. Finding studs in the wall was a pain. But I think at least 80% of the screws are in solid wood. So far it is still up and not drooping or pulling away from the wall so I think we are all set on this project. One more project crossed off the list! 

More work around the house

The excitement this week was getting the new front steps and walkway installed. The contractors actually showed up a couple days early. They dug out the old walkway stone and put them aside for us. The steps took two days - one to frame it and another to pour the concrete. We now have a much wider top step and it as a better level to the porch. The old step was slowly sinking into the yard so it was a bigger step into the house.  After the steps were in they did the blacktop walkway. And then they brought in topsoil, re-graded and put down grass seed. We are busy now regularly watering the grass seed. I am thrilled with how it looks and the blacktop will be great in the winter to help melt the snow and ice. We do have a good sized pile of stones. They deposited the extra soil along the brook where we are trying to fill in the space, it is now cleared/covered enough that with the stones we may be able to build some sort of stone steps down to the brook.

Road Trips!

As Damon and I are both on stay-cation vacations this week we decided to do a couple regional road trips. On Wednesday we took the Triumph to Lake Placid. It was a beautiful sunny day so we multi-tasked and got tans while traveling. We loaded up on chocolate at the Adirondack Chocolate shop.
Today we went farther afield and went to Old Forge, NY. That is a picture of me just outside the Life Is Good Store in Old Forge. How can you pass up a picture with a wooden moose wearing sunglasses? It was a great day for traveling, cloudy and cool (low 70s), but no rain. The main stop was the Old Forge Hardware store (its more like5 or 6 stores). We also had lunch and walked around and hit the other shops in town. On the way back we stopped at the Black Bear Trading Post Quilt Shop in Inlet, NY. OK, I stopped, Damon stayed in the car.