Happy New Year

It's a quiet New Years Eve for me this year. My husband is off trying to kill Bambi so I'm home with the kids with nothing much to do. Not that I'm complaining--after a whole day of taking down the Christmas decorations and giving my sewing room a much needed organizational enema I'm perfectly okay with a quiet night. Well, relatively quiet--the neighbors started up the commercial-grade fireworks around seven and it's been going strong since. Ah, hickville.

Anyway. Did I mention my broken sewing machine? This is what I came home to last week. 

I was happily humming a little Christmas tune after a short music practice at church, and I walk in the back door to see my sewing machine in pieces. Aaaaerrgggh!! See, my machine (which is only two years old) had been acting kind funky, making weird stitches, not aligning properly, etc. So my husband, being a very industrious electrical engineer type, took it apart while I was off playing guitar. The prognosis: (other than it being packed full of batting lint--whoops) the motor that moves the needle was kaput. The cost to fix? A measly $700. Sure! No problem! Let me just pull that out of my back pocket!!!

I was bummed. 

But being (as previously mentioned) very industrious, my wonderful husband managed to find a suitable replacement motor online. For sixty dollars. I'll take my 640 dollars in change thank you very much. It came in the mail, he took it to work and fiddled with it, and voila! Fixed sewing machine! Happiness ensues! Queue choir music!

And today I gave it a test drive by making some blocks for January's do. Good Stitches bee. 

I have no New Years Resolutions to share with you (mostly because I think they're pointless--my philosophy is carpe diem! Poop or get off the pot! Don't buy a pig in a poke! Uh...wait...) but I will say that I intend to be a lot more mindful of the blessings I have while I have them.

Like a working sewing machine.

Happy New Year friends (and blog stalkers!!)

Rainbow Around the Block

So, as if the Swaziland quilting madness wasn't enough, or the scenery painting for VBS, I'm also making random quilt blocks for Anna Maria Horner's "Rainbow Around the Block" project. Yesterday I whipped up five blocks (I made two each of the squares within squares ones) and I found it pretty satisfying. I was just going to send these but I might make a few more before the first deadline, I think.

In other news, I dug up my whole main garden bed and started solarizing the soil...time to build a new light box and get ready for fall seedlings!

peculiar pancakes plus pumpkin procreation

i've said it before and i'll say it again: i'm shamless about trying rack up as many "mom is hilarious" points as i can while the kids are young and still labor under the mistaken notion that i'm actually funny. one of my favorite things to do in this pursuit is to make, as they call them, "silly pancakes". 

now, my mom used to make smiley face pancakes for us when we were little, and i have lots of memories of her standing over the pan with a spoon trying to drip fat swaths of batter into the curve of a mouth or giant eyes. so that's where i started a few years back, and i've been slowly perfecting my technique since then. first of all, i am a firm believer that it's important to have the right tools. behold my weapon of choice: the leftover infant medicine dropper. 

second of all, don't rush. a beautiful work of pancake art requires precision, yes, but patience as well. the design needs time to darken before the rest of the batter is applied or your face will be faint and wan. and there is nothing funny about a wan pancake.unless it's just the way those two words sound together. wan pancake. wan PANcake. WANPAN cake! okay, i'm done.

this morning i also got the opportunity to facilitate some botanical sex. get your mind out of the gutters, pervs, i mean of course that i was out bright and early this morning using a paintbrush to pollinate my pumpkins. we're having a real honeybee crisis as you might know, so i was just, ahem, giving my cucurbits a helping hand. the flowers were huge and wide open this morning, but this is what they looked like a few hours later:

i guess all that baby-making action tuckered them out.

i was tempted to photoshop in a few cigarettes, but thought that might be crude. 

preserves, and a fun to-do list

the other day our neighbors sent their kids over bearing baskets of strawberries. apparently they had too many and they were going bad, so they decided to share. well i'm not gonna say no to strawberries.

and they were awesome. more perfectly red strawberries you will never find at the grocery store--not a hint of white in the middle or anything. two baskets were used up immediately with some strawberry shortcake. i don't do that nasty twinkie cake thing with cool whip (shudder). i make big sweet biscuits and whip up some cream from scratch. no pictures because it was inhaled by the family pretty much as soon as it was done.

the other four baskets were getting rank pretty quick, so i decided to make preserves.

i'm not a huge fan of jellies and preserves personally, but my husband goes through jelly like donald trump goes through bad hairpieces. i figured some extra wouldn't go amiss, and i love making things out of stuff i got for free. i do actually like strawberry preserves despite my general apathy, especially when it's slightly tart. so i stopped by our local farmers market to get a few stalks of rhubarb. i can't honestly say i know what the point of that plant is other than helping make preserves--it's absolutely vile uncooked. but paired with strawberries it's DELISH.

this was my first easy preserves-making experience, because instead of just winging it and hoping that hours of boiling would make it jell, i actually bought pectin. like 20 minutes later i had six jars of the yummiest jam ever, and some leftovers in a bowl. i went to church, and when i came home my husband guiltily admitted that he and my two older boys sat down with hot tea and some spoons and ATE THE WHOLE BOWL. man, russians are weird. 

also, this week i have a weird to-do list and felt like sharing.

lastly, i leave you with this: i cut these blossoms off a tree outside, and it's been smelling up my house since saturday. it looks nice with the afternoon sun shining through it i think. is it weird that mason jars are one of my favorite things ever?

why i shouldn't be trusted with sharp things

me and my current quilt are not getting along. 

first there was all the craziness of trying to get the fabric i wanted from like eight different sellers.

then there was the getting on a roll only to run out of fabric, spend hours finding fabric from eight MORE sellers, and then waiting for days while the time till my deadline runs down. oh yeah, i still don't have my fabric. 

then today...i decided to just try to eke out a few blocks out of the scraps i've got so i'd be DOING SOMETHING. cause y'know, i hate doing nothing. well, i was happily cutting and piecing and humming pleasantly to myself when ZIP goes my brand new rotary cutter right over my left index finger. hmm. i had that giddy feeling like i did NOT want to look down to see what i'd just done. so i calmly betook myself to the kitchen to get a paper towel for the blood, only when i tried to bring it near my finger yelled, "NO!! WHAT THE #@&!!! ARE YOU DOING??!!" and then of course, since it was being so rude and loud, i had to look down to see what was up. 

the whole side of my finger next to the nail is gone. bye bye. i giggled. then i put a band aid on it. i mean, what else do i do? i had to cover the band aid with tape cause blood was leaking out.

then i went in and saw the cleanly sliced off bit just sitting there on my cutting mat. ew. i then fed it to my curious four-year-old.

so i'm not talking to my quilt right now. she's totally in the doghouse. that is, until the UPS guy shows up with my fabric, then everything will probably be right as rain.

missed connections

if you haven't seen this blog yet, i demand you go there RIGHT NOW. i can't tell you how ridiculously lovely and interesting i find both the illustrations and subject matter. i'm drooling over a few of her prints, so if anyone, y'know, wants to buy me one i'll TOTALLY give you my address.

wake me up

right now i think i would give someone this

in exchange for this

last night i was crying. why doesn't matter, what matters is i totally dehydrated myself by leaking fluid from my eyes and nose, then fell asleep. had a bunch of crazy fever dreams, then woke up at 6a.m. to the sounds of hungry baby. it was dark outside, and rainy. my eyelids were swollen and my vision blurred. 

gah! i said. i need coffee.

but is there any? nope. can i get any? nope. it's too bad nobody has a coffee delivery business cause i'd be a faithful customer. 

i've tried working today but i just can't get my brain and body in gear. oh, and i broke four needles on my sewing machine trying to work on a quilt. so now i have no coffee and no sewing machine needles. 

i think i'll go back to bed.

thursday, and the return of frank

today i have a date with an old friend.

after nearly a year of frank living with my brother, and another few weeks of him staying with my friend james, frank is finally coming home where he belongs.

frank is my guitar. i don't even remember at this point how he got this name. anyway...

here's a glimpse of what i intend to do today.

what's on your to-do list today??

i'm not gonna lie...

...i'm becoming increasingly obsessed with fabric.

today i had a car, and on my way home from getting my poor baby checked out and shot up with vaccines i stopped by the fabric store to spend the rest of my gift card. i had a coupon, too, so i got extra. and THEN when i got home, what should be sitting on my doorstep but a box from anna maria horner?

oh, it's so pretty, and my thanks once again to susan for having such a rad prize on her giveaway! i'm so glad i won! and see that ziploc full of scraps? well, apparently that's my reward for being patient, as the fabric took awhile to get mailed out. not only do i have a stack of pretty fat quarters, but i have some nice home dec scraps to play around with, too! 

and this weeked i got more paper and some new pens, so i'm planning a few more drawings. and i got grey fabric to finish up my stash buster quilt (ha! that's a laugh. as if it can be busted when new, pretty stuff keeps getting added to it).

a fundamental lack of supplies

i hate when this happens. i'm on a roll, i'm all inspired...and i run out of supplies.

i have 48 pretty quilt blocks sitting in a stack, and i can't put then together because i need fabric for sashing. look how pretty! i love this. i need grey fabric! (right now it's sitting on another quilt so i could get an idea of what it would look like)

i have about fifteen ideas for new drawings, and i just ran out of paper.

i'd like to bake something fun on this dreary, overcast day, but i have no butter, no milk, and no eggs.

all of these things could be remedied, if i didn't also lack a car. *sigh*

i could use some of these pretty new fabrics i got as a birthday gift (thank you again elizabeth and gina! it was really fun to go the fabric store and just blow money with no guilt!) but i'm saving them for something special. i just don't know what that will be. yet.

i suppose i could go clean the bathrooms. that is, if i haven't run out of cleaning supplies as well. one can only hope...

sprucing up the nook

slowly but surely i'm trying to make my house feel more like home and less like an apartment. living in cookie cutter cubicles for ten years sort gives a person that rootless, transient feeling, and i'm trying to divest myself of that. it's hard for me. i don't know why.

so i decided to start putting down real roots a little bit at a time. my little reading nook seemed like a good place to start. mostly because it's small and therefore manageable. and it doesn't require new furniture or a lot of rearranging. basically all i had to do was add some artwork for the walls and switch out the old, non-working lamp for one that works. this is what it looked like before:

 and after:

this is also my little "showcase" corner for artwork not done by myself. okay, a few of them are mine but the big painting my husband did, and the cool stencil that you can't really see was a birthday present from justin nelson, whose flickr photostream you should go look at right now if you haven't already. also there's something that i, ahem, don't tell anyone, just printed out on regular printer paper. i figure it will have to do till i can afford a legit copy.

oh, and look! another birthday present i got from my friend esther--she made me this rad bible cover with trees on it. i love it. have i ever mentioned how absolutely fabulous it is to receive handmade things from other fellow crafty people? well, it is. more so because i know exactly how much time and effort it takes to make things rather than just go out and buy them. 

anyway, it probably seems like such a small thing to be happy about, but oh well. it's these little things that make me feel like maybe, just maybe, i'll be here for awhile. and that's a nice feeling indeed. 

i give up

i just can't make this blog look cool. no matter what i do, i just make it worse. i'm throwing in the towel.

not that i'm done blogging, but i am officially tired of screwing up my blog every time i try to change the background. it's just annoying. if anyone has any tips, feel free to let me know. otherwise--boring white background it is.

UGH

sorry, my dumb blog got all screwed up. i'm trying to fix it. come back later!!

tagged!

my friend susan over at whatsoever things are beautiful tagged me. i'm it!

i guess i'm supposed to write seven things people might not know about me. hmmm. i'll try. some things i think people are bound to know. most things are from long ago. still, i'll try.

1) i have a black belt in taekowndo. i used to be part of a demonstration team, too. we would go to schools and stuff and break boards and smack each other with nunchuks. it was pretty fun. kind useless, because i'd probably get beat up in a fight now, but still.

2) i used to be the president of my college's speech and debate team. nerdy, i know. i enjoyed it, though. my last year competing i won third place in the national competition. there were like 700 people competing so it was no small feat. but a nerdy feat.

3) most people know this already, but i had my first baby (who is now almost SEVEN--i can't believe it!) at home. it was great. the best part was not having a nurse barge in every fifteen minutes to check my vitals, so i actually got some sleep the first night. also, spending my first morning with a baby sitting on my own couch looking out at the ocean was pretty rad. it was just such a nice, relaxing experience. i mean, as relaxing as giving birth to a giant baby with no drugs can be.

4) like susan, i don't wear deoderant. i switched to baking soda a year ago and haven't looked back since. so far, no stink, so i'm happy. and my breasts are happy, too, because they didn't like the idea of aluminum filled tumors residing within then. TMI, right? oh well.

5) i have a subconscious need to organize things according to the color spectrum. like my fabric, and thread, skittles, etc.

and if it's candy we're talking about, first i separate them by color, then i eat however many i need to to make the piles of equal number, then i line them up according to color. THEN i eat the rest. it has been suggested that i have a little obsessive compulsive disorder in there somewhere. i just like to think that i'm highly organized. ha.

6) i have a few major pet peeves: banana noise, use of the word "moist" in any context, the song "friends are friends forever", and when you're talking to someone and that have that white gunk in the corners of their mouth and you can't really let them know without embarrassing them or throwing up.

gah! chocolate MOIST cake! disgusting!!!!

7) the most nervous i've ever been about anything, EVER, was this one time i had to sing "friends are friends forever" (please see #6) at a funeral for a kid i didn't know and his whole high school was there and there were tv cameras and everything. oh, and they told me at the last minute that they didn't have a tape player, so i had to do it a capella. AND they made me sit in the front pew with his whole family which felt so super weird because i didn't even know the guy. then, for some inconceivable reason, i decided it would be a good idea to say something while i was up there. i have no idea what i said i was so terrified, but i saw his mom nodding and bawling so i don't think it was too bad. still. i had the shakes for hours afterward. it was by far the weirdest, scariest, most surreal experience i think i've ever had.

okay, i think that's it. it's kind of hard to think of interesting tidbits of info about myself. which is why these are all pretty boring. :)