Fiesta!

I'm still waiting for my machine to come back from the spa, but I have managed to baste together the fiesta table topper that I was working on. A bit blurry but for some reason lately I must be moving the camera as I click the shutter. I apologize for the view of the trashcan, lol. The kitchen in this apartment is very 'cosy' to say the least.

I've never gone this long without a machine.. I've been knitting socks and am ready to do the toe grafting so I can finish them. Whew. That was a lot of knitting considering I didn't even learn how till last May. But it was fun and next project is the slouch hat on the cover of the Winter 2009/2010 Knit Simple magazine. That baby alpaca is sooo soft.. they said it knits up fast so I am looking forward to this project.

Otherwise, I had to get a new rotary blade again today because I dropped the cutter on the floor and nicked the blade on the tile.. sigh.. so now I am all set to start preparations for when Nina comes home from her spa visit !! I have missed that machine sew much ... we'll both be happy to have her sitting on her little table again. Only ten more days till she comes home.
Can't wait... meanwhile I have some hand stitching to do on an autumn design that I'd purchased two years ago. It will be good to get that done. Busy, busy!

more pictures

In the fall, we took a trip to Fort Knox and the new bridge in Prospect Maine.
We'd been over the old bridge to Bar Harbor a few years back, and some of the holes on the road deck were big enough to swallow a car. That whole lane was closed, and it took forever for cars and trucks to go across, with the speed limit and the one lane traffic..
Here's a picture of the old and new bridges from the observation deck, 40 stories from the ground.. it's an awesome place to visit !
The old bridge is on the left and has been closed.
Fort Knox is being restored, and what a cool place that was ! We felt as if we were in the middle of a Horatio Hornblower movie.. you could almost see the soldiers in your mind's eye..
The fort was never the site of an active conflict, but if you click the link at the beginning of this post, you can read about the history. It was fun to see what the old ambulances looked like, too.
We've already decided we'll go back again next summer.

It's funny how often my mother talked about going to the fort, and in the 10 years we've been back in Maine, we never got there before. We passed it several times but never stopped.

We should try to visit more of the state's great sites.
I want to get back to Pemaquid Point in the summer too.
For now, I can only dream of summer and hope the winter doesn't drag out too long.

Catching up !

yikes. I haven't posted in so long..

Here's what I've done lately. I finished a pair of socks, knit with Opal yarn.

Been working on a class with the Braid Runner pattern, and doing some variations on it, so I can help Lynne at the Heath Hen Quilt Shop to sell more patterns and books on French Braid quilts. I've made a Lollapalooza handbag from a StudioKat Designs pattern, and

over the summer and fall we painted the dining room, the bathroom, and the dining room again when we realized the color was horrid... we also had several large 90' tall trees cut back or cut down completely, so I helped my brother split and load several truckloads of firewood...

finished machine quilting that Warm Wishes quilt and got it bound.. started quilting a quilt top that my mother had made for DS 28 years ago. I stay pretty busy with my hands but it just doesn't translate well to my blog, I guess.
Hopefully now that I've broken the dry spell I can remember to add more posts.

snowman nearly done..

which is good, as it's spring now, lol.. (Thanks, Val..)
I've done a grid pattern across the diagonal and the corners are free motion with the BSR foot. Oops.. my bread is done and I need to remove it from the oven.
I'm making a 7 grain bread recipe from my bread machine cookbook but have recently discovered if I use the dough/pasta cycle I can take it out and bake it in the oven and get a much better bread.. the French bread was out of this world!!

Back to the snowman. Here are different views. The first, I've done a view of the grid pattern. I love the Bernina walking foot!!
I had to skip over the appliquéd letters and the snowman but it wasn't hard, just a lot of clipping of threads when I was done.
I'll use a green stripe that coordinates with the brown stripe for the bias binding. The corners had a nearly solid brown fabric so I thought they needed a bit more interest. I did a free motion star and curlicue for those, which was fun....

Hope they show up okay.

Now the bread is actually ready. It needed five more minutes when I checked it last time. MMMMM it sure smells good..

I'm planning to spend more time blogging and reading blogs, and I've also set myself the task of watching the videos I've purchased of thequiltshow.com and the Fons&Porter tips.. I paid for membership at QNN so I really ought to be using it.. got to keep the little grey cells working.
Bread awaits..

geez louise!

Well, now I know just why I haven't blogged in a while...
It took me the better part of an hour to get the images uploaded, and I ended up emailing them to my laptop and then it was simple. There is something radically wrong with the settings on my PC because I never had trouble with Firefox or the cable internet, but now with that G3 thingy I can't type a half decent reply on Delphi forums without it stalling and I have to select all my stuff, copy it to Notepad, then control, alt, delete, and stop firefox, then restart it and try again. I keep getting the " Firefox is not responding" so I even deleted the darn thing and reinstalled it!!!!!!!! I hate playing games with computers. This is also why I had so many gazillion backup disks, because whenever I had problems with previous computers, I would make backups of everything I thought I might want to save.. problem was, I didn't have a sensible sorting system. Now I have decided when I back things up, I will make it easier on myself, AND label the cd as well.
Insert expletive here! LOL.
I hope to have more pics to upload soon but right now I need to get back to quilting a grid pattern across a snowman wallhanging I started last fall. And force myself to finish projects in a reasonable amount of time... and not start things I can't finish, and...
sigh.... I am my mother after all ....... yikes..

Playing Catchup

I've spent weeks organizing my backup files and downloaded embroidery files which somehow had been duplicated half a zillion times... I also had 3 cd's worth of bernina pdf's from their old site, and all this stuff was on dozens of 'backup' disks that were nearly impossible to search. A few months ago, I got a portable hard drive, so I decided to upload every disk I'd made and sort them... I've been doing this for going on four weeks now!!
Then I thought I'd machine quilt that Warm Wishes quilt.. what is it with me and impossible tasks ???
I've got about two thirds of it done and have removed it from the machine temporarily so I can work on other UFOs.. eek.
I am hoping to have more to post soon. This connection is not the best but it seems to be my settings, not the G3 card.. I'm still researching causes.. bear with me. I'm trying to get it to stay connrcted long enough to upload a pic :((

More pictures..

I do love these old pictures, and since Erika reminded me that others do, too... here's a couple of pics of my FIL and his brothers, one labeled 1925.

This third picture is of my son and his cousins, taken in 1980, and this one is everyone's favorite, so it will go on the quilt too. They had a blast together that summer. DH was in school in San Diego so we went home to visit and the boys played outside all summer long..

Picture number 4 is one of my favorites.. It's DH and his brothers.. there are a lot of males in the family, can you tell ? Since I put in his dad's cowboy picture, I had to put in the one of DH and his brothers.. DH is the one in the middle.. Don't you love how his older brother is standing at attention and his younger brother is getting ready to "Draw!" ? Love the big old key rings, too..