Hopping Around

I feel like I'm in a whirlwind right now. Husband took Monday off, so now I have my days mixed up and it feels like Tuesday instead of Wednesday. Hopefully watching The Biggest Loser tonight will help me straighten my days out. :P

I did get to experiment (with some frogging!) on the Tri Rec Tools, Companion and Easy rulers. I need to work on my seam allowance a little, but soon I should be comfortable with them and be producing pretty flying geese and rectangle triangles. Scrappy, of course! :)

Yesterday was quite a bit of running around. Husband forgot his briefcase and asked me to bring it to him on his lunch break. I figured since I'm going out, I might as well get some stuff in the mail too. And then after I had dropped off the briefcase, but before reaching the post office, I stopped at Walmart to get a blender. I had received a blender for my birthday in November 2004 and after blending up over 200 shakes for me and quite a few other stuff, it finally just spun it's blades in whiny protest and was declared dead. :) The new blender? It stinks. I'm just gonna use it to hold me off until I can go to Costco again and get a better blender for the same price. That's one thing I love about Walmart - they're kinda forgiving about returns and don't exactly have a time restriction. I should know...

When I first got married I took my mom's 20 year old Kenmore sewing machine with me. Apparently it was used to sewing out a couple pieces of clothing every year for the first 15 years of it's life, not more heavy stuff... like lots of chain stitching, every day! :P It squeaked through for a couple of months, and depsite lots of oiling and cleaning and head scratching it was slowly starting to bite the dust. Well, actually it whined it's way to death too. What's with me and whiny machines? It was bad enough that my husband could tell something was wrong... but what was I to do? We were newly married and hadn't exactly had much money to spare. Finally one night I was trying to load the bobbin in... again and again and again and again and again... If you know what I'm talking about, bobbins that are front load tend to take two "clicks" to be properly in place. First you wiggle the bobbin in place and it clicks in, then you need to pull a little on the case's handle to get the second click. Well, the machine was taking the first click, but I could never get a second click to happen that night. I'd lower to the needle to grab up the thread... and the whole bobbin and case would fall out. Finally I burst into tears, ran into the bathroom and cried my eyes out. Just probably too much pressure from all the weeks of fighting with the machine and constantly hitting a dead end.

What's my poor husband to do? Buy me a new machine, of course! ;) Yup, at 11:30 that night we headed over to Walmart, studied machines for half an hour and finally picked a Singer. That was October 2004. I spent the next 4 months hunting around for a sewing machine. Well, actually I was trying to decide exactly which Bernina I wanted (Quilter's Editions or the 1230? 1130? 1260?) and in the end of January 2005 I won a Bernina 150 QE on eBay. Believe me, it felt like I was going from a broken down 1980 car (Kenmore) to a poor fitting, too small car (Singer) to a new top-of-the-line Mercedes (Bernina). Can you tell that I'm still thrilled with my Bernina? :D

The point? More than 6 months after I had bought the Singer, I boxed it back up, took it to Walmart with the receipt, asked to return it... and they took it, no questions!! Well, they wanted to know why I was returning it, and I told them it was meant for a right-handed person (the foot lever was flipping to the right side, had to use your right hand to lift it, yuck!) and I'm left-handed and I don't want to deal with it anymore. "Ok, here's your money back." And with that wad of cash, I promptly spent half of it on fabric! :) So they're surprisingly easy with returns, and that's what I'm gonna do with my blender as soon as I have a better one. :)

At the post office I mail the bills - one was one day away from being due - that's never happened to me! I was so mad at myself that I accidently overlooked it and I'm not sure if I squeaked by or not. I'm NEVER late on paying the bills. Never, never, never. They were late in mailing it to me, so that messed me up. Yup, that's my excuse. :) And I also got the 9-patch swap in the mail. So in about a month I should get a large variety of 9-patches. Place them with snowball blocks and I'll have a pretty scrappy! :)


After my husband got home yesterday, I spent several hours grading his student's articles. He accidently forgot that Student Progress Reports were due and was in a bit of a snit trying to get everything graded and into the computer. Grading articles is something I can do because I have this index card that tells me what mark off for such and such. I'm an evil person, I'll ruthlessly mark them off. It probably helps that I don't know these people and I'm not gonna have to deal with their whining at low marks. :P But come on people... how hard it is to have the summery paragraph, opinion paragraph and fill the ENTIRE page? And a paragraph isn't one sentence. So there! :) But so, no sewing yesterday.

Today in the mail I received a box of 4-patches in BRIGHT kid colors. They need to be trimmed down and then I'll make quilts out of them. They're really great because they could be both the front and a backing of a quilt. And the colors! So bright and cheerful. :) Pictures will come soon.

A few hours later the UPS knocks and drops off two boxes! One turned out to be the set of kitchen knives that I asked for from my parents for Christmas (yes, we're late on giving each other gifts... so what?) and the other box turned out to be a 15 year old quilt from a family friend! I knew she wanted help in finishing it, but hadn't been expecting the quilt any time soon.

Mrs. P said that she was working on the quilt through a class 15 years ago, but then she went into labor with her daughter and everybody knows how time-consuming newborns can be, so she never got the quilt finished. I told her to send it over to me and I'll try my best to salvage it.

I've gone over it and it shouldn't be too much trouble at all, but wow, it shows its age! Bonnie was talking about little dot hearts fabric... I wasn't exactly sure what she was referring to, but this quilt has no less than three different heart fabric! Ohhhh. Now I know what the fabric is. :) Also, there's no rotary cutting instructions. Wow. I haven't used my scissors for anything but thread and trimming dog ears or triangles off. I'm rotary all the way! But I'm gonna enjoy finishing this quilt. Poor Mrs. P, I think she wanted to make sure she got EVERYTHING that possibly goes with the quilt, so she sent me her supply baggie with needles, bobbins, a few spools of thread, and whatever other sewing stuff she's accumulated over the years. Tucked in with the instructions for the log cabin quilt was her own sewing machine manual! I had a nice laugh and I'll be sure to send it back. :)

Leah