Wrapping things up...quilts, fingers, etc.

Here are the first few inches of the newest weaving.  I did this pattern before with blue and green, but circumstances arose that prompted me to do it again...I have wanted a chance to make another piece in some different colors.  The fact that this is a documented pattern is very cool--especially since it's in three colors and most of the European pieces are one color...boring.  Emma Compton was having difficulty with the pattern and since it's been so long since I did it, I didn't remember if I had made any adjustments--I had to warp it up to figure out what was going wrong.  The directions are pretty straight forward on this site, but they're wrong.  Sigh.  Maybe the creator has the cards warped up differently, but I set my loom up and I needed to turn the ODD cards first, then the EVEN, and start weaving from the home setting from right to left (opposite of everything she had done). In any case, it works great...note on that second diamond that there's a yellow thread sticking out funny.  Card 14 was threaded wrong.  I turned it 90 degrees backwards and now it looks perfect.  I've done a couple feet on it now, so it'll be just a few more days before it's done.

In the meantime, I've been working on a couple of quilts.  One for Lauri, which is a medallion round robin style.  I quilted the center part of the quilt in 3's and E's.  The outside border I quilted in rays of the sun and swirly wind.  I had a little trouble with one section of the border where the fabric was wrinkling.  I may pick that section out, steam it a little and then try again.  This is the lovely center medallion.

Here's the whole quilt top laid out on my bed.  It's a rainbow of happy fabrics!

Next on the docket is a pair of baby quilts for a customer I did some work for last year.  Linda D. has two baby showers to attend in April, so these two baby quilts are almost ready for gifting!  There's one girlie quilt and one generic gender-to-be-announced-later quilt (although it has butterflies on it).  I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I think I'll do an all-over swirly thing.  Or maybe I'll do the Oil Slick pattern again...the one with the snake tails.

Yesterday I got my birthday present in the mail--a cable to update my Geomate Jr.  It was a little more complicated than the directions said (a lot more downloading and registering), but eventually it said it was ready to go with all the latest caches from the Western US (including AK and HI), and I took it for a test-seek.  There's a cache that I have looked for nearly a dozen times near the kids' karate studio.  It got me closer and the hints made more sense, but it was still a DNF.  I wrote to the owner telling him that I've given up.  I'll try out a few more sites this weekend while I'm down having a Girlie Day with Jeanie and Lauri.  We're planning on getting fingernails, toenails, eyebrows, a little shopping and cocktails!  I can't wait!

Slowing me down a bit is a smashed finger.  The bone is fine and I didn't actually sew through my finger, but yesterday it got caught in the space between the needle assembly and the machine.  I immediately put pressure on it and after a couple minutes, when I was sure it wasn't going to bleed anymore, I smeared some Neosporin on it and wrapped it in gauze and a bandaid.  I'm good.  Yeah, it's still a little tender, but I'll live.

My Emma has a half-day of school, so I think I'll take her out for lunch.  And later...guild night!  I have to pack up my sewing machine, rotary cutter, rulers & mat, and bring a few things to work on.  It's the night that they do all their charity quilts, so it'll be fun!  I also have a stack of batting leftovers that one gal, Rosie, pieces together for the charity quilts.  Waste not!

What Did I Do This Week?

Keepin' busy...listening to cat fights outside...hangin' out at the house and trying to catch up on a bunch of stuff.  Newsletters to write, documentation to compose, research to do...if only I actually *could* clone myself.  But then I'd have my selves to so many things that they'd be begging for more clones, so they'd start cloning themselves, and you know what happens when you make a copy of a copy...you get the funniest line in the movie, "Multiplicity".

I got a call on Monday about getting a quilt done for a baby shower on Saturday.  She dropped it off on Tuesday and I had it back to her on Thursday.  Heckava deal!  It was a tiny thing (45" square) and she wanted spirals on it, so it went together quickly.  Also on Monday, I met with a lady who handed me another quilt!  It's a football season lap quilt made up of t-shirts and sweatshirts from the University of Washington.  My in-laws would be "horrified", of course, since they're born-and-bred WSU'ers.  Kidding.  Really, they're fans of their team, but I don't think anyone in Washington is really serious about the rivalry.  We all go out for beers afterwards, no matter who wins or loses.

Yesterday was such a nice day, Ben and I walked down to the park to play for an hour.  When we arrived, six or seven kids were just leaving...which left the park vacant.  I pushed Ben on the swings, which he was able to maintain for quite a long time afterwards, then he played on the tire swing and the merry go round, climbed around on the toy in the middle, and it was time to head back.  Not a single kid came to play until we were leaving, at which time one of his school classmates and her little sister came with a young lady (could have been her Mom, but I'm thinking older sister, cousin, or babysitter--she just looked TOO young).

When we returned, I said, "Hey, Emma!  Are you ready to go to Karate?" and she said, "I crashed on my bike."  Sure enough, she used every band aid in the house to cover her wounds.  Luckily she was wearing her helmet and really only scraped up her knees, her right palm, and bruised her left side.  She was a bit too stiff and sore to go to class, but we drove down to the dojo anyway to talk to the teacher about rescheduling the lesson and ask about continuing lessons.  Unfortunately, the prices were quite high, even after they gave us the rock-bottom price.  Emma would like to continue, but we'll have to see about that.  Strangely enough--and a little scary--one of the other instructors also has CF.  Due to bacterial infections that are transmittable between them, they shouldn't be within 6 feet of each other.  They are both the picture of health--how could we know?  However, he's having knee-replacement surgery next week (from an injury from long ago that hasn't been fixed in previous unsuccessful surgeries), so he's leaving the dojo.  Sorry to see him go--he's a great guy and a terrific teacher--but better for Emma so she can continue at this dojo to not have that potential medical issue looming.

Oh, here's the back of her leg. She really "got in gear" on this accident...poor kid.

I forgot to write about soccer camp from a couple weeks ago!  The two little ones were signed up for camp again this year and really enjoyed it!  I was concerned that we were going to have a reproduction of last year's drama with Ben not wanting to participate, but he did!  He was excited to get into his gear every morning and play with the other kids...at least until 11:00 when the little kids went home.  The bigger kids (including him) stayed until noon, but three times I had to go over and peel him off the playground to go back with his class.  The instructors thought he was one of the Kindergarten kids, not an almost-second-grader.  They also didn't order a small enough t-shirt for him, so he's swimming in the size 10-12 that he was given.  But Craig Tomlinson and the other instructors were great and taught them a lot, and both kids are looking forward to next season!

Emma, of course, is retired from soccer.

Quilt show tomorrow!

K