Orange You Glad

I had an idea today for a new quilt to hang in the kitchen, and once an idea starts percolating in my mind I need to jump on it quickly while it's still fresh! I think it's going to have a lot of different foods, mainly fruits and veges that you would find in a kitchen. I decided to start with a bowl of oranges which is exactly what you'll find on my kitchen table right now. Though my real oranges are in a wooden bowl, I love the combination of a blue bowl holding juicy oranges...

When deciding on a background fabric to use, I found one of the Denise Schmidt pieces I picked up a couple of weeks ago. It's such a good quality cotton and 'handles' so nicely for applique. I think I need to go back and pick up some more!

When One Door Closes...

...it closes smoothly! I am beyond excited that we got a new front door and storm door today! We've put up with our storm door missing the bottom half and the cats scratching the front door to death. Not to mention that the door was original to the house and terribly energy inefficient. The threshold had also expanded over the years (before we bought the house) so much that you needed to use a lot of pressure just to close the door. What a difference! Why didn't we do this years ago? Oh yeah - because it's not cheap!




And on the sewing front, thanks for the feedback on the yellow block. I'm glad I wasn't imagining that I had the wrong fabric to go with the rest of the blocks. I decided to still applique it down, as I really like it, but I will use it by itself and not as part of the finished quilt.

And now, just for fun - look what I found on the toilet seat this morning...


Yes that would be kitty paw prints. Their water bowl was empty so they just found the biggest water bowl they could instead!

The Retro 4

I have 4 retro blocks underway now. The two in the middle are appliqued down, and the two on the outside aren't. I'm loving the juicy fresh colors of the kona solid backgrounds. Just what I need to work on to get out of the gloom of Winter and into the freshness of Spring!


I'm not sure how I feel about the applique fabric on the yellow block. It's one of Amy Butler's new Soul Blossom fabrics but I think it blends in too well to the yellow background. I may have to switch it out.

I just haven't had a lot of time to sew this last week, so thanks for hanging in with me through the lull in quilting. Between gardening (I did the first lawn mowing of the season today!) and school volunteer duties it's been a little busy around here. Tomorrow we get a new front door installed and I get an oil change for the car, so the busy life isn't ending any time soon. You wait until you see the before photo of our front door. It's not a pretty sight. I'm not even kidding! Come back tomorrow to see the transformation!

Anatomy of a photo

After a very nice day of church, a dinner not made by me, and family game night, I told my hubby to take a photo of the kids and I. After all, it is Mother's Day! So he started clicking and clicking and this is what happened...(It was all good until the bunny ears started in just the third photo!)




















I hope you all had a wonderful Mother's Day, and that at least one of you can relate to the photos above!

Digging

Not a single bit of sewing has gone on in this house today. Yet. (It will!) Instead we went to garage sales all morning, and then we worked in the garden all afternoon until dark. One of the garage sales had JUST perennials, as in 1000 pots of them, and they were only 50 cents! So I stocked up on things like strawberries, rhubarb, tomatoes, basil, and other herbs.

We also visited my friend Brenda who loaded me up with day lilies, lambs ear, and decorative tall grass. She also suggested that I turn the a strip next to the front walk into a skinny garden and plant them in there. Now Brenda along with being a prim quilting guru, is also a gardening guru, so I came home and did exactly what she suggested. Who am I to ignore such greatness?!!

Digging out the sod was not fun, (that's a 28 foot strip there - yes I measured!) but now I have my strip for planting. I think I want to edge it with some bricks down at lawn level to keep the grass out, and hopefully our front entry will be a little bit more attractive.

While I was still carting away the sod in the wheelbarrow as it was getting dark, my daughter and our neighbor's boy were playing four square in the driveway. In the dark, and in the rain! A few days ago we laid out a four square with painter's tape and so far it's survived all the neighborhood kids and two days of rain. Maybe we'll make it more permanent with paint one day, but for now it's working great!

You can see we even had some ghosts come to play...



The kids LOVE these photos! They are telling each other it's a "Ghost App". Kids these days. Fancy knowing what apps are!

Sewing Together

Sofia and I have our sewing machines next to each other in the quilt room. Tonight she asked if we could have a 'date' and sew together. How could I say no?! So we did, and I had to take photos of her from my vantage point. And what were we sewing? Well I did take photos of that, but I'll let her do a post about it on her blog tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Thrifty Thursday

Last Saturday I picked up this hand embroidered pillow at a garage sale...


How much do you think it cost me? And no it wasn't free! How much would you pay for it at a garage sale? $5? $3? $1? 50 cents? How about 5 cents! Oh yes my friends, I paid 5 cents for it! It was at a garage sale in a very well to do area of town where they obviously don't appreciate the value of vintage stitchery! It was a son selling off everything from his deceased parents estate. It had been originally marked as 25 cents - yes, outrageously expensive, I know - and we got there near the end and it had been marked down to 5 cents.

My only problem is that I seem to have a plethora of pillows already. I took a photo this morning of all the pillows piled up on the loveseat just how the kids left them last night...


See? Too many pillows! So I'm thinking that perhaps I should just cut off the front, re-embroider the green criss cross parts that need doing...


...and repurpose it. Perhaps even just frame it and hang it? So many options! But hey for 5 cents, I can't go wrong, right?!