Another Finished Quilt

In February I started working on a Red and White quilt (throw size) for one of our guest rooms.

This is the most detailed quilt I've made this past year. I am totally thrilled with how it turned out!

As usual, I sent it to the Missouri Star Quilt Company for the quilting. As usual, they did a great job.

I always wash a quilt when I am finished to wash out the fabric sizing and to make it all nice and wrinkly. I was super anxious about throwing this quilt in the washing machine. I was worried all that red would bleed into the white and I would end up with a red and pink quilt. I tossed it in the washing machine with about a dozen Color Catcher sheets. I am sooo thankful for that invention. The Color Catcher sheets came out very pink, but the quilt was fine!! WooHoo!!

Doesn't it look nice on the guest bed?

A Weekend Wash

This whole weekend was just a wash.

Hubby and I usually like to take off to somewhere else for a long weekend like this one, but decided to stay put instead. Hubby was expressing a desire to work out in the yard and we thought this would be a great weekend to do that. We also planned on golfing Friday afternoon and I expected the second quilt that I am making for my sister to be delivered from the quilter and I could get the binding sewn on.

And as you probably already surmised,  none of that happened.

Friday afternoon as Hubby was coming home early from work so we could golf....

(I must insert here that I really don't golf. At all. Hubby golfs and I drive the cart. And make snarky comments. And play Angry Birds on my phone until the battery is dead)

(Where was I?)

I checked the weather radar and saw that some rain was heading this way. So we canceled the golf outing. (Good thing... it started lightening and raining within the hour.) We went out to dinner and stopped at a Red Box to rent a movie. That night and Saturday morning we watched Anna Karenina. I've never read the book, but thought the movie would be interesting. I was wrong. It was hard to understand the flow of the movie. The movie was very theatrical and artsy for one thing. For another I think it left out quite a bit of the book. I was looking up the summary on my phone to try to understand what was going on. In the end, we were glad we only spent $1.28 to watch it.

Saturday afternoon came and my package did not. I did not get to spend the weekend working on the binding of the quilt. Boo.

We ended up driving to a little bit bigger town to poke around in some antique stores. We always enjoy that. Didn't buy a dern thing. But that's okay.

Sunday we were I was so bored with the rainy weather I suggested to Hubby that we play some games.

And we I even had fun! That may have something to do with that I actually won a couple of games. :)

Today we ventured to another town for some mediocre Mexican food (which is better than the bleh Mexican food we can get here in this town) and some more antique-store-poking-around. This time we found a couple of things including a neat copper oval bucket thingy. I'll have to do some Pinterest searching and see how I can shine it up.

One quilt shop had quite a few old quilts. I love to look those over. One that stood out to me was a zig-zag design. I stepped close to see how it was constructed. Later, I was describing to Hubby how it was constructed (more complicated than the one I made for my nephew's little girl) and realized that he had sort of a glazed look on his face as he wasn't understanding why in the world I was rambling about half-square triangles, rectangles and triangles for. I laughed and concluded with the phrase: Spherical Chicken.

Basically I was acknowledging that I realized that he had no idea what I was talking about. (Poor guy puts up with my endless babbling about quilting and all things quilt related.) The Spherical Chicken phrase came from this scene of The Big Bang Theory.



We ended today with watching Toy Story 3. I love those series of movies. I mean what kid hasn't wondered what happens with those toys when no one is in the room? I remembered that we went to see Toy Story 3 in the theater as our house was being packed up when we moved three years ago. I bawled at the scene at the end of the movie where Andy and his mom look at his empty room before he heads off to college. We were packing up our kids rooms for the last time. Ever. No other house of ours will have a room that used to be Caleb's or used to be Megan's. It's still really weird to think of it that way.

Looking back, maybe the whole weekend wasn't a wash. We did manage to find some interesting things to do, even if it was rainy and cold all weekend.

Table Runner

I made this springy table runner in April when we kept getting snow and more snow here in Minnesota. I desperately needed a dose of something spring.

I followed this tutorial from The Missouri Star Quilt Company. (Of course.)

A List of Things

I saw this list idea on another blog and thought I would "borrow" it:

  

Things I love:
long weekends with our kids

celebrating our daughter-in-law's graduation from medical school

seeing the pride our son has for his wife's accomplishment

hanging out with my parents last weekend

meeting my niece's almost 6 month old twins (I got smiles, giggles, snuggles and bottle time)

Things I strongly dislike:
the weather in Minnesota

pain

being alone every day

the way I tend to just stuff my clothes in my dresser drawers

men in restaurants in sleeveless shirts (read this super funny post about the subject)

Things on my to-do list today:
make the bed with clean sheets

finish the laundry from the weekend

sew the binding on one of the twin size quilts I'm making for my sister

finish the red and white quilt (sew on the label and wash it) 

Things I'm praying for at the moment:

that the red and white quilt won't bleed when I wash it

a change for my husband and me

wisdom for a project I'm thinking about tackling

my childhood friend's kids (she passed away a year and a half ago)

wisdom for our son and daughter-in-law as they look into buying their first house

Things I'd rather be doing today:

having lunch with one of my kids

sitting outside in warmth (it's only 48 degrees) reading

having some good friends for dinner

hanging out with my husband 

Things (of the food variety) I'm craving lately:

a garden tomato

rhubarb crisp (made from the rhubarb my mom shared with me)

Kansas City barbecue

chocolate

a Panera lunch 

Things I'm looking forward to:

finishing reading Jane Eyre and then watching the movie

summer

Mom

 Three years ago I wrote the following post about my mom. 

I thought I would re-post it today for Mother's Day:

 

 Things my mom has taught me:

• She taught me to love my family. My devotion to my husband and kids and kids-in-law is rooted in this.
• I learned how to refinish furniture and cook and bake and read a recipe and table manners and how to set the table from my mom. She was a Home Ec major in college and has a vast amount of knowledge in these areas. She was willing to try new recipes and I like to as well. There are the classics like her Swedish Rye Bread and Thanksgiving Stuffing and Rhubarb Crisp. When I bake the Rye Bread, it smells like Mom and Dad's house. The stuffing? Sadly, I'll never be able to duplicate it because there is no written recipe. That's what makes it great. Now that it's spring I start thinking of who I know that has a rhubarb patch so I can make some Rhubarb Crisp.
• When I was signing up for classes for Junior High, Mom suggested on a whim that I sign up for choir. Ever since the 7th grade I have loved to sing. The past 9 years I have been privileged to sing on our church's worship team. I may have never known I could even sing, if I hadn't taken Mom's advice to be in the choir.
• She gave me a love for sewing. From the age of 9, through the first several years of marriage I sewed much of my own clothing. I had very few store bought dresses. I enjoyed sewing things for my kids when they were little. Now I enjoy quilting, which I could not have done without that base knowledge of sewing.
• She gave me a love for Bernina sewing machines. I have owned two. Every time I use my newest one I think, I like this machine.
• Most importantly my mom (and my dad) introduced me to Jesus. The years between age 9 and age 14 my parents sacrificed to be able to send us kids to a two week Christian camp in Ontario. I still remember things I learned there. My mom came to Christ at a Billy Graham Crusade when she was in college. I am thankful for growing up knowing Christ.

 Mom, I just wanted you to read this again.

 I love you and am thankful that you are my mommy!

May

We've actually had a couple of pretty nice days here in the North Land. The grass is more green, the trees are budding and the birds are super busy building nests.

But today is a chilly rainy day. I'm in the basement under a quilt that I'm sewing the binding on and catching up on Dallas episodes on the DVR.

Spring?

Well, we had a nice spring season. It lasted about 5 days this year. ha. We had several days in the 60s and 70s. The perennials are poking up and our neighbor even mowed his yard. Not sure that there was really any grass long enough to mow, but he drove around his yard last night on his mower.

Today? In the 30s with a chance of snow.

Yes. I wrote snow. Ugh!!!

On one of the nice days last week, I got myself and ice cream cone and took my book to a lake to read for a while. I've noticed these big white birds on a couple of lakes:::

There have been hundreds of pelicans around here for the past week. My guess is that they are migrating somewhere.

In an effort to have the illusion that it's srping here, I made this cheerful table runner:::

I followed this YouTube tutrial from The Missouri Star Quilt Company:::

I'll be hunkering down here as winter sets in again. Guess I'll clean the bathroom. Yippee.