Happy Birthday B

Lots of pics again tonight. First off, today our Bradford Pears decided to bloom. Yesterday there weren't any flowers on them, and today there are. This is Beverly with a sprig of the flowers in her hair. I hate the way the flowers smell, it is something too sweet and slightly like decay... and as of today, our area will be Sinus Hell for a while. But they sure are purty to look at. LoL.

It was a beautiful day. The kids played in the yard. In fact, here is Beverly with her hero and big brother Artemas, who is "sunbathing." Sure.

For about an hour this afternoon I sat in the sun with my feet up and knitted a little something I am working on for my HeartFeltFun Boutique at Etsy. I could tell you what it is, but then I'd have to... oh nevermind. To the left, you will see my afternoon view. Boy I love to go barefoot.

We did quilt blocks today too. We were a day behind, so we both did one for yesterday. The block was called Wagon Wheel. Diantha, being a sensible child, did hers in such calm colors, as seen on the right.

And since my block is going in my Ranger quilt for the Bumbling Bounty Hunters Mini Quilt Challenge, I called it Probably Hot Wheels and did it in very Ranger-y colors, as seen here to the left. LoL.

Then we did today's block, which was called Road to Oklahama. Again, Diantha selected a more conservative palate, as seen here to the right. I just LOVE her choices in layouts. (And the bubbles! Gotta love the bubbles!)

And once again, I called mine something different, since mine is for my Edna (Grandma) Mazur quilt in the above-mentioned challenge. In the Stephanie Plum Novels (Hot Six) Grandma Mazur once decided to get a driver's license. She practiced and practiced, took the test 6 times and passed. And then in ONE week, accumulated enough points in speeding tickets to lose her license for life. So mine is not Road to Oklahoma, it is Road Hazard. As you can see, I tweaked the 4-patches accordingly.

Alrighty, today is (was, oh dear, I am posting SO late again!) Beverly Jeane's Birthday!!! Yippee!! She is TWO years old! So I am giving the world a little tiny peek at the blessing that has been Beverly Jeane "Betsy" Ross for the past 2 years.

Here is little baby Betsy at a week old... doing bilirubin light therapy in her bassinet at home. See the bruises? She was born in only an hour, and she was born face first, then turned. Her entire face from the hairline, across the brow, and down the center of the front was bruised from the fast trip past the pubic bone. By a week the bruises had settled around her eyes, so she only looked like we beat her instead of just run over her with the car. See how peacefully she is sleeping though!

We skip to 8 weeks old, and what do ya know, she is SLEEPING again! Wonder she could do that at all in a small house with 7 other people. But she was a peaceful baby, which is a blessing.

I LOVE this picture, wrapped snugly up in the beautiful quilt made for her by her big sister Desiree. We had refrigerator magnets made from this print, and sent one to my Aunt Bev down in Florida, so she could see her little namesake great niece (and kept one for us, since it was so cute!).

Fast forward to the first birthday. We had to go to Florida to retrieve some dental records on a couple of the kids, and just happened to be there over the baby's birthday. So we went to Venice to visit Aunt Bev. Spent the day wandering the town and going to the beach (little B did NOT like the sand, like her mama). All the kids got wet in the surf, despite grave warnings to the contrary.

I could have taken them all to Walmart or Target to get dry clothes on the way out to dinner, but I told my cousin, if a person is going to get their clothes wet when they know they are going to dinner, they should have to get an outfit from the Goodwill. The Goodwill there has a warehouse on the back where they dump all the donated and unsorted clothing in bins and you pay $1 a pound for them! So we all went and dug, dug, dug through bins until every member of the family had "new" clothes to go out to eat in. My cousin said she had never done anything like this before and it was FUN!! I paid $4.70 for 6 people worth of clothing, and we went to dinner (and on to have cake) in style. LoL! This is a picture of the elder and younger Beverlies and the birthday cake.

One more... I took this one last night. Betsy had a walkie-talkie headset on and was walking around the house "taking orders" like they do at fast food places. She kept saying "Fee Fies" and bring me pretend milkshakes. What fun.

I am so thankful that God has blessed us with this one more child. I am thankful for her cleverness, her brightness, her gentleness, and her humor (because yes, right from the beginning, she has a sense of humor). I am thankful for this, another opportunity to win a soul to the Lord and nurture a person who can make, however small, a difference.

And I thank YOU for letting me share her!

Lotsa Pics

Not a lot of words. Today we got a bunch of quilt blocks done, though I am still one behind for the week. So here are Diantha's for yesterday, mine for today, and mine for ? the 3rd? LoL. The block for today was called Crazy Anne, but I am doing mine for 2 challenges: the Bumbling Bounty Hunters Mini Quilt Challenge, and the N2quilting Initial Challenge. My colors: Lemon, Lime, Red, Raspberry, Royal Purple, Robin's Egg Blue... and my character right now: Edna Mazur, who is a little crazy. So I guess you could say my block is Crazy Edna! PostScript: WOW, I didn't realize HOW crazy that block looked with all the stripes not matching up! I was just glad to get them all running the same way! I have decided to make another one, with a different fabric as the background. ACK!


I had a terrible headache today. Taking pain reliever didn't help, neither did eating something, drinking water, taking a walk, drinking a Mountain Dew, or just about anything else. But the temp was in the mid-60s today so in early evening I took a motorcycle ride. On the way back home, I realized my headache was completely gone! Thank God!

But my left kidney is really hurting. Shoulda known it was coming. ~~ sigh ~~

I am working on a secret something for my HeartFeltFun Boutique at Etsy. Here are a couple sneak peaks. DON'T PANIC... that really is NOT pubic hair (or chest hair either, though my dh asked...)

Oh and I got TWO Treasuries at Etsy today, one in the Main Treasury, called Stellar Skirmishes... all about Star Wars. One in Treasury West, called Keep On Givin'! AND, if that weren't enough, two other Etsians used items from my HeartFeltFun Boutique in their treasuries too! Calming the Storm and My 8th Rainbow. Be sure to visit the curator's shops for some beautiful, one of a kind items too!

When the Students Surpass the Teacher

A friend of mine says you can always tell when a teacher has done a good job, when the student begins to surpass the teacher. That has happened to me already with my oldest daughter, with her writing, quilting, knitting, spinning. Now it is happening to me all over again with Diantha.

Diantha is only 13, but already she is a great quilter, with a terrific eye for color and what seems to be few restrictions on how she combines. It is amazing to see really. She made these two quilt blocks for our block-a-day calendar, and for her Initial challenge on my N2Quilting Group at Yahoo. I love her freedom in the fabrics she chooses and her nonchalance for how she puts them together. We are playing catchup (after the all-day bullet fiasco on Monday) but here are hers for yesterday and today.

She has been doing some spinning also. I bought some roving balls from Claydancer on Etsy who said she has become allergic to wool. One of the rovings was called Mardi Gras - deep red but has small streaks of a golden color, green, and purple in it. I was wanting to spin it up, and then knit it into a semi-permanent felted Easter basket for Betsy. So Diantha says, mom, you have stuff to do... let me spin some of that roving for you. Here is the end result. The roving ball was 4 oz. of Merino, and Diantha ended up with 108 yards of this luscious, even, heavy-worsted yarn. Wonderful!

I walked and ran some errands today, taught the kids, held B (a lot!), made some copies and a Post office run, and another run out to drop Diantha at church for youth group, and for eggs at the store. And, I actually got a quilt block done, for a change, though it is Monday's block, so I am still a couple days behind. Oh well! This one is going to go in my Connie Rosolli mini quilt in the Bumbling Bounty Hunters Mini Quilt Challenge 2009. And it also qualifies for the Black and White Quilt Challenge Project.

On My Knees Again, and, A Little Pet Yarn

Ok yesterday we went to the new Chinese Buffet here in town. They had TONS of food, most of which wasn't all that Chinese. Now I am THE ONE. Who always gets the pepper butt, the bone in the stew, the bay leaf in the soup, the hair in the sandwich. Even the tooth in the sweet potatoes (that is a WHOLE other story). So when they brought the PILE of fortune cookies (there were 11 of us at table), I reached in and got one. The Burnt and Broken one. And, though still sealed, it didn't even have a fortune in it! What does that mean?

Even though their cookie didn't have a fortune, apparently their food had TONS of MSG in it, because I spent most of the rest of the day in an MSG coma. No really. When I eat MSG, I must... sleep... it... off.......

I slept 4 hours. Then I still felt like I had strychnine poisoning in my muscles, and my head was stuffed with cotton wadding. And the headache, which very closely resembled the kidney stone headache I had just had for 2 days. Along about 7 PM I took an antihistamine, a couple non-aspirin (about an hour after some real aspirin), and a shower hot enough to make my skin red. Then I felt almost human again.

I spent part of Friday, and part of Saturday re-plying a silk yarn that a person had special ordered from me. I had quoted a price for it, and spent WAY too much time having to ply that yarn. Then yesterday I dyed it and went to re-skein it, and got it tangled. Spent about another 2 hours untangling that yarn. I hope she LOVES it and buys it IMMEDIATELY. I threw the rest of that sweater in the trash.

Yesterday wasn't a block day on the calendar, but I made one anyway, because I only needed ONE to finish my Sally Sweet quilt. Somewhere above here is the block. Today wasn't a block day either, because it is the intro pic of the next quilt. So today I cut my sashings for Sally. In this terrible picture, the side-to-side sashings look like they are too short, but that is only becauce the blocks are not all sewn together yet. They will be fine, trust me. And this is the quilt in it's entirety. Now! On to something else!

I put up several yarns today. One is called 8th Grade Romance because the colors reminded me of being in 8th grade, writing the latest heartthrob's name over and over on a notebook in red, pink, and purple (fruit-scented) markers. LoL!

I also made a little pet yarn. I had these bits and balls of fiber from recycling a charcoal wool sweater, and wondered if they could be put to use after putting them through the drum carder. What I found out was, they got studk between the tines of the carder. So I thought I should put something else through the carder, to see if the wool bits would stick to it. I looked around and my eyes lit on that box of unprocessed Llama fur.

So I washed (several times) and dried the fur, picked it, carded it... which didn't get MOST of the wool bits out of the carder. I spun it up into this little funky yarn that reminds me of Ermine fur (white with little dark bits) or maybe Dalmation Puppies. It is incredibly soft! To feel that fur in the raw, I would never have thought it was this soft, but you could just about roll around naked in this stuff. Not mine, get your own. The skein is only 20 yards of about worsted weight, so it would only make cuffs around mittens or a hat, but it is so cute. Hope someone likes it enough to buy it.

Someone in my house (but of course NO one in my house, LoL) put a plastic can of thawed, concentrated White Grape Peach juice either on top of, or crooked in, the refrigerator. Who are these people? Did I actually teach anyone in my household to put juice away like that? Am I crazy?

So tonight after picking Richard up from work, I went to get something out of the fridge, and the can crashed to the floor. The top popped off, spewing the stickiest GUCK all over the floor, the inside of, and UNDER the fridge. I mopped and mopped and mopped on my hands and knees, with several changes of soapy water, all the while remarking what a bad housekeeper I am.

It occurred to me that in my lifetime I have spent WAY too much time on my knees, doing things that I didn't really want to do or cleaning messes I didn't want to clean or just doing, you know, whatever since I happened to be there. And I had the thought, that perhaps if I spent more time on my knees talking to The Guy who holds all these events in His hands, I might not have to spend as much time in the muck.

But then again, maybe not. This is my life, after all. And, my floor is still sticky.

Finally, I Have a Purpose

The kids and I chucked folding laundry yesterday and went to Des' house. I didn't have to pick Richie up until 11 PM so we had the evening free. We had some yummy Greek Salad I made, and Chili she made. I spun some more of the Caramel Raspberry Cheesecake roving into yarn and made my quilt block of the day. Please don't look at it too closely, because it is a sad and sorry little block. Like Stephanie Plum, I am going to say, "It wasn't my fault!"

I have a lot of black and white, 5" charms, so I am making this little series of blocks from them. for this block, I needed ONE 5" charm of white, cut into 4 equal pieces... and TWO black charms, cut into a 3" square and 5 little squares. I went to cut the white charm and the ruler slid... next thing I know I had cut it into 4 unrecognizable shapes. So I thought, I have one more with me, I will just cut it. Well guess what? The lady who cut those charms to send them in for the swap, cut them short on one edge by almost 1/4". So out of 2, 5" charms, I couldn't even get 4 little 2.5" squares. I had to end up piecing 2 of them.

That wasn't enough trouble. I cut the pieces for the center, little 9-patch block. I made this perfect little 3.5" 9-patch. Then I realized that for this block, I needed a 2.5" 9-patch. Head slap! How does one make a 2" finished square divided into 3 parts each direction? I don't even want to do the math on that one. So I just lay the thing down and whacked 1/2" off each edge, making my 9-patch somewhat wonky. Then I put it all together and mismatched one triangle in the corner.

While I was trying to finish the block, my kids go, "Mom, do you realize we should have left to get Dad 10 minutes ago?" So this is what I get.

I am in a Black and White challenge, where we can add ONE other color. That is what I had in mind for these little blocks. But my daughter has also opened a Bumbling Bounty Hunters Miniature Quilt Challenge. The books this is based on have a character called Sally Sweet, who is an immensely tall and hairy Italian guy who dresses in drag for his night club act, swears like a sailor, and drives a school bus for his day job. So Finally I Have a (dual) Purpose for these blocks! They are for Sally Sweet! This block is called Shortcut To School, and the fact that it is wonky makes it even better suit him. Very appropriate, don't you think?