Countdown to Turkey Day

This will be a short week for me. I'll only work Monday and Tuesday before I take off for the Thanksgiving holiday. There won't be many people in the office this week at all so it's going to be quiet. Hopefully there are no major emergencies that will need to be taken care of. I kind of wish that I had taken off Monday and Tuesday, but both the Senior and the other Manager are taking off, so I guess just being gone on Wednesday and next Monday will be okay.

Today I quilted E's quilt. It turned out great. I now need to go make some binding and sew it to the right side. If I don't get the hand sewing to the backside done, then I can finish it on the car ride. B finished another of the fabric bookcases and we unloaded another seven boxes. I used more of the new fabric for the backside of E's quilt. It'll be interesting to see how this quilt washes up as all of this fabric except for the green on the back was not pre-washed. I always pre-wash my fabric, but since I started out with a charm pack as the base, it would have been hard to pre-wash.

Doggie and I went for another long jog today. The weather was gorgeous. I can tell the dog is getting a little bit slower as he was not pulling his leash very much at all. On the contrary he was running in front of me to the point of me almost tripping on him several times. I don't want my doggie to get old. I love the dog.

Time To Get Serious

I have tomorrow off and so I must shift into high gear and finish my projects. Thanksgiving is next week and I will be leaving on Wednesday. Consequently everything must be done by Tuesday evening. Actually, I could still do the hand sewing on the binding if I run out of time. It is a 10+ hour car trip so I should be able to get some stitch on.

In the next couple of days, I need to 1) make my brother's birthday card, 2) finish sewing the last 12" of the binding on his most beautiful quilt, 3) hand stitch the binding on my sis-in-law's quilt, 4) finish E's quilt (it still needs a back made, put on the longarm and quilted, make binding, sew down binding), 5) sew binding on another sis-in-law's quilt, 6) cut fabric for Thanksgiving day tablecloth, and 7) purchase fabric markers to write on tablecloth.

I was visiting the Craftsanity website a few days ago when I saw the video on the Thanksgiving crafts that was aired on a local MN show. The last thing they showed was the tablecloth. This got me to thinking. Hmm . . . There will be 30+ people at the festivities this year. Six of my siblings will be there along with their families, my Mom, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. I want to lay out the fabric and pens and have everyone write a note of "thanks" or just random comments and then I will bring back to Houston and quilt it up. I will then ship back to my brother and SIL to have ready for next year's activities. Since my Mom and my SIL's Mom are either nearing 80 or in their 80's, I thought it'd be a great idea to get their thoughts down while we still have them with us. I'm excited about this project. I'm sure it'll turn out great!

My Stash is Probably Bigger Than Yours

I have always wanted my own fabric store and now I have one. Granted it's small and right now it's in a spare bedroom, but hey, it's a fabric store and I am very happy! I see many, many different things when I look at the fabric. Not only do I see quilts, but I see kid's clothing, aprons, purses, art work, etc. I'm glad I'm able to afford to buy these things. I managed to survive the stages of living from paycheck to paycheck. My shopping binges aren't for clothes or shoes and apparently right now they tend toward fabric and expensive sewing machines! My next purchase may just have to be the Bernina 8 Series. That machine is SWEET! The shelving was designed and built by my sweetie who puts up with my fabric fetish. I'm pretty sure he secretly wants to pull out a bolt of fabric and get out the rotary cutter! He's a keeper! The door to the spare bedroom was used as the blueprint for the shelving. Ingenious! This was the prototype and now he's building two more to house the rest of the fabric.

Tomorrow is Monday and back to the grind I go. It is my 9-80 though so I'll have a 4 day week and then next week I'll only have to work 2 days as it's the Thanksgiving holiday. The end of the year is deceiving as we get all of these days off for holidays and then wham, we're hit with year end work that must be done fast and furiously. I'm not looking forward to that at all. I'll be doing the foreign accruals and even though there are only three foreign companies that I need to do, the workpapers are like a foreign language and no current employee has ever done the foreign provision. I don't mind except for the fact that the provision has to be done in 2 days. That's going to be tough as I think I'm also responsible for at least two domestic provisions also. I may not get much sewing done during that time frame!

Well I'm off to dream about my new fabric store! And a world where everyone has a brand new quilt!!!

It's A Small World After All

Sometimes things happen that just prove how small the world really is. Back in the late 80's I moved to Boston and worked in a public accounting firm. Now I live in Texas and this week I picked up a file for a company we purchased and lo and behold the first thing I see is the letterhead from my old accounting firm. And then to my amazement the person who signed the return is someone I know. The funny thing is that I wasn't the one who was going to the work on this company. I volunteered to work on it as I was waiting on other information that was slow in getting to me. Chances are good that I would never have seen these particular files even if I was involved in prepping or reviewing the returns next year. Small world I tell you.

So, since I took I stroll down memory lane, I started googling people at the firm to find out where they were and what they were up to. I found quite a few of them and they are all doing well. Then I googled myself and I'm not out there yet! Hmm . . . I think that's a good thing!

Today's project was working on E's quilt. It's turning out beautifully and I think she will really like it. I better get my butt in gear and finish up some quilts. Thanksgiving is in less than two weeks and I'm off to see my relatives and hand out some quilts. I have three (maybe four) to give away this time and they all are in various stages of completing the binding. I better ramp it up this week.

HiHo HiHo It's Off to School We Go

Yesterday and today are classroom days. While I'm sitting there dreaming about designing quilts or drawing doodles and sketching quilt design patterns, in reality I'm listening to a myriad of speakers talk about transfer pricing. Hooboy. Now that's exciting! It's what I do in my day job so I have to pay attention and at the same time realize that this is not what I want to do. I do like my day job and it pays the bills nicely, thank you, but knowing that there's another world out there that's filled with color and possibilities is overwhelming at times. It's so hard for me to turn my brain off "numbers" mode and go to "creative" mode at night. I know a lot of people do it, but for some reason it's really hard for me to do. I think part of it may be that I really enjoy the creating side and I feel really, really good when I'm sewing, quilting, crafting. I'm afraid that I will start to resent my day job and feel like it's holding me back so I only make time for the fun stuff on the weekend. Even then, I spend a lot of time thinking before I ever sit at the sewing machine, or stare at the design wall or pick out fabrics, or load the longarm. Once I get started, though, watch out. I'm on a roll. Then Monday comes and all my fun stuff gets set aside. If I could only learn to compartmentalize better. Oh, well.

Well, it's off to school for me now. I've got plenty of scratch paper for today's design ideas. Just kidding. I really am learning a lot and it's stuff I need to know. So the doodles are being kept to a minimum!

Fabrics Galore!

On Saturday the last of the packages with my new fabric purchases arrived. Yay! B is busy building shelving to house all the beautiful bolts. I rummaged through the boxes looking for the perfect fabric to go with my new quilt. Above are Version 1 and Version 2 of the quilt. I think I'm going to go with the offset quilt. I found a lovely brown to use for the triangles in the corner. It is not the brown that is shown in the picture. The center diamond is made from Moda's Urban Couture collection. I really like all the fabrics in the charm pack, but I opted not to use any of the blue fabrics in this particular quilt. I think I'm either going to make and keep this one to go with the brown leather couches we purchased earlier this year. Or I'm giving it to my niece, E, who said she liked the earth tones. I have enough fabric to make another one so maybe we'll both get one. Of course, I do have two couches so . . .

It was beautiful here today and doggie and I went on a jog along the bike path today. We didn't go far on the bike path before we ventured back onto the neighborhood streets. Doggie really doesn't get that he's not the only one on the path. He definitely doesn't understand bikes and I really didn't want to be the cause of taking one of them down. We stayed on the path for a 1/2 mile and then did the next 1 1/2 miles on the streets.

Last night I finished sewing the binding on the new baby quilt. It turns out I will have a new grand niece or nephew in June so perhaps this quilt will be earmarked for him/her. I have plenty of time, though to make other baby quilts so I'm thinking I'll have plenty to choose from when the time arrives. In my dreams I'd like to make a quilt a day, but in reality I work 40+ hours each week, so I'd be happy with 1 or 1 1/2 quilts a week. I was looking at the e-bay fabric stores today and I'm not sure that that is the way I want to go. I guess I need to do some more investigating. It just doesn't seem very pretty and all the stores look the same and there are a gazillion of them. Does anyone make money with these stores???

The pictures aren't uploading tonight so I'll try again tomorrow.

National Fabric Day!

Today is my own National Fabric Day. While I was at work, five of the 19 boxes of fabric that were shipped arrived at my door. Tomorrow I should get the other 14 boxes plus 3 more that were shipped Priority Mail on Monday. It's Christmas here! My dream of owning my own fabric store has come true. The fact that the "fabric store" is in my spare bedroom is just a minor detail. (contact me if you want to purchase some lovely fabrics!) I would like to stay home tomorrow and go fabric shopping, but I must continue on with the day job that allows me to purchase such large quantities of fabric. Hopefully I will have an Ebay store up and running soon.

I loved this quilt at the quilt show. There were tons of awesome and gorgeous quilts, but for whimsy, I choose this one.

Well, I better take one more gander at my new "stash" and then off to bed I go. Nice quilty dreams tonight, I'm sure.

Fright Night

Last night was Halloween and we had quite the gang this year. Last year we had no one come to the door for treats. This year I recognized a handful of the neighborhood kids and the rest were carpooled over. I didn't really care as we had all this candy and I wanted to get rid of it anyway. Since we never know if we'll have trick or treaters, we always stock up in anticipation.

We took a break from the Quilt show today and we will go back tomorrow for the last day. Featured above are the purchases I've made so far. This is what $300+ will get you at the quilt show. Yikes! (The cutting mat is mine and was purchased years ago.) Sometimes on the last day, there are even better bargains to be had. So maybe I'll be a little bit poorer after tomorrow. Today I made a baby quilt out of the charm pack fabric I bought yesterday. It's cute. Luckily I had some matching fabric I can use for the backing. Tonight I made binding for B's cat quilt and sewed it to the top side. B is going to do the hand stitching to the back.

Today I received the tracking numbers for 19 boxes of fabric shipped on Wednesday. I went to the web site to see where the boxes are located now, but there's no information. I hope I'll know before the day they get here. Since the boxes have a signature requirement, I don't want to miss the delivery. It's all very exciting.

This morning dog and I went for our morning jog. I hadn't been able to go for a couple of days so it felt pretty good this morning. We will jog again tomorrow morning and then B and I will head off to the quilt show. It's been a good vacation so far.