Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Keith ran off and left me again this morning so I’m in my sewing room and the first thing I did was put my new ironing board cover on.

Here’s the old scorched one in the trash — when was the last time you changed yours?

We just spent $$$$ to have someone come out and replace our hot water heater and still don’t have hot water. Keith will call in the AM but he’d better hope it’s fixed before he heads out of town again or I will NOT be happy.

Simple quilts are my favorites, not only because they’re easy to make but they just visually appeal to me the most. When I started looking through my design journal yesterday to decide what I’d work on next, I wanted something simple that I could work on in little blocks of time because the next weeks are going to be very busy.

The block is called Little Cedar Tree’s although you usually see it rotated with the darks in the top corner – I like it best like this. Nothing could be easier either, I can layer 3 lights and darks right sides together on my GO 3.5 inch half square triangle die and have enough triangles for 3 blocks.

I don’t usually use this trick of fanning out the center seam of a block but in this case it has two benefits, one, it decreases bulk and two, it allows me to not worry about pressing half the seams up and half down since each block will automatically nestle with the next.

I’ll need 80 blocks plus borders to get a nice size sofa quilt and I’m contemplating borders already. I have a chisel die I’ve been wanting to use which is one possibility and I’m still flipping through Judy’s border book too.

And he needs a GOOD brushing after a week at the doggie daycare/kennel. Now that I’ve spent the bulk of the day being productive — it’s time to cuddle!

It was a thrill to come home and find a new quilt book waiting!

While I rarely make a quilt according to a published pattern, I love books that inspire my own creative efforts. Judy’s new book is perfect for me. I can flip through and get ideas for borders that I can then apply to my own quilts. While I use EQ to draft all my quilts – for those of you that don’t — Judy does most of  the math for you.

You can purchase the book directly from her like I did and she’ll even write a nice note inside!

One last lunch on the veranda and then on my way home and back to winter.

But it decided to go jet skiing with Keith anyway …lots of fun but harder than I expected. Then we sat out by the pool again.

With lots of these visitors!

We had our last group activity yesterday – a sunset cruise followed by a reception and now a couple days to ourselves.

We try not to let the weather bother us so we’ve been in and out today in between the showers. I managed to finish one book and start another.

And Keith managed to snap a fairly decent photo of me.

It’s not an app but I thought I’d share this find with you. I occasionally come across a blog post or a website that I want to save to refer back to. I can do this with an offline reader on the iPad but for knitting, quilting or crafting projects, I like to stick a PDF file in iBooks.

I found a free URL to PDF generator online when I was looking for a way to save this little crochet blanket.

The PDF format was perfect because I wanted to make sure I save the link to the random stripe generator along with the blog post.

In iBooks I sort my PDF’s by category. I have one for knitting, one for Genealogy, one for quilting, etc.