Quilting Stuff

Even though I haven't posted much about quilting, it doesn't mean that I've not been busy sewing away. Below are many of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple of weeks.

The below log cabin type quilt is from the June 2008 issue of McCall's Quilting. It's the quilt called Caribbean Blue. My quilt is completely made from green, blue and teal batiks.

Closeups of the quilt
The next couple of photos are house blocks from Bonnie Hunter's quiltville.com Happy Scrappy Houses. My yahoo group (Redthreadquilters) is doing a scrappy houses swap. Many of us will be making these houses in sets and then we are going to swap them so that you end up with lots of different houses from all over the country. Below are examples of two of my sets. The first one is from leftover fabric from my Orange Crush quilt and the second is an example of my fabric love, very bright and bold fabrics. I also had to add a little Scottie dog in the window in honor of my dogs.

The next quilt is a graduation gift for my niece. She just graduated from High School the end of May. If you check out this post, you will see that I made a similar quilt for my other niece who graduated last year. The only difference is the fabric. The below quilt is made from all batiks that I've collected through online swaps.
And last but not least is my Orange Crush quilt without borders. I still need to add my borders but wanted to share how it has turned out so far.

My Baby is growing up

Even though I'm very proud of my little girl, M., I'm kind of sad that my baby is growing up. It's hard to believe that yesterday was her last day of Kindergarten and she is now a 1st grader (Just in case you are wondering why in the world she was in school until the end of June, it's because of a teacher's strike last Oct/Nov. Instead of getting out the end of May we ended up going to school until June 26.) M has grown so much during these past 9 months of Kindergarten. She started school not being able to read and now she can read to us. She made lots of new friends and adored her teacher. She was sad to have School end because she loved going there everyday. Her teacher's comment on her last report card was that "She is happy all the time and always has such a positive attitude towards school." I'm so glad that her first year of school was a positive experience and that she has gained a love of learning.

Below are photos taken on her first and last day of Kindergarten. She even looks a lot older. Congratulations M on doing a great job in Kindergarten and I hope you do just as well in 1st grade and beyond.

Mean Mommy

Look at this cute and innocent little face. E is now at the age that she doesn't like it when I tell her no. Instead of throwing a major fit, she now tells me all about her frustrations. The latest is "You're a mean Mommy and I don't like you anymore" The first time you hear that it's kind of hard to handle as a Mom. I just say to her that "I'm sorry that you don't like me, but I love you"after those comments. She is now saying to her sister that "You're not my sister anymore" so I'm not the only one she gets frustrated with.

This weekend she was in rare form especially on Saturday. Her morning started off bad when I said she couldn't have a cookie for breakfast. This of course made her mad and she said she was going to "bite me" because I was being mean. I told her go ahead thinking that she was just blowing steam and didn't really mean it. I guess I should never underestimate her because she did come at me with her mouth open with the intent to bite my leg! Later that morning she was still angry at me because she had to stay in the car with her Dad while I ran quickly into Walmart with her sister (had to buy flowers for her dance recital later that day and she couldn't come with us). Her Dad was trying real hard not to laugh at some of the things she was saying. He wrote a few comments down for me and thought I would share.

"Mommy is not being nice. I don't like her anymore"

"I told you I am messing me up" (I think she was tyring to say that she's mad)

"I am gonna check mom out because she is a failure"

Nothing like a 4 yr old telling you that you're a failure!

Later that day all was forgiven because I got big hugs and lots of "I love you Mom". I guess I wasn't that bad after all.

Dance

Last night E had her Dance Recital Dress Rehearsal. Her actual recital will be this Saturday. She will be doing only one ballet dance. I tried to take a few pictures of her last night in her costume, but she wasn't too cooperative. This was the only photo I got of her prior to her dance. Hopefully on Saturday when she has all the makeup on, I can get a few better photos. Later I figured out why she wasn't looking so happy. She wasn't feeling good and Mommy didn't realize it until after I went back to the dressing room after her dance. I just thought she was still kind of waking up because she took a little nap this afternoon. She was running a fever by that time and later that evening she got sick all over the car. Poor thing. Even though she wasn't feeling good, she did a great job and went on stage (with no tears) and did her dance.

Congratulations M!

M has been in gymnastics since she was 3 years old. Now at 6 she is becoming quite the little gymnast. So far she loves it and rarely never complains about going to the gym and is always happy to go into class. This past year she has been on our gym's precompetition team or the 1st level for the precompetition teams. On May 31 all the girls on both levels put on a little show for family/friends to highlight all the skills that they have been working on throughout the year. M has been recommended to go to the next level which will mean more hours at the gym for her (and for me). Starting next week she will go about 9 hours a week and that will continue throughout the next year. If she continues to do well, she will then be able to start competing at a level 5 the following year. This summer will be a true test to see if she still really loves it. So far she is excited about moving up so I'm hoping that excitement will continue even when her practices are 3 hours long in the very hot summer. We are very proud of her accomplishments!!! Enjoy some photos of her show:

M and her blue team coach. M just loved her and she is one of the main reasons why M has enjoyed gymnastics and why M has done so well. Unfortunately, this is the last year she will be her coach until M is older and in the higher levels of competition. She is the gym's competition team manager and mainly coaches level 7 and above.

Orange Crush Update

I kind of left you hanging about the Orange Crush quilt since I haven't posted in over 2 months. Sorry about that. Life has a way of getting in the way and posting here hasn't been a priority for me. I have been working steadily on the OC quilt and am now trying to finish step 6, the final step. I have about 1/4 of the quilt top sewn together now just need to finish, hopefully sometime this week. I will now post photos of all the steps of my quilt up to the step 5. You will just have to wait a little bit more to see the final quilt.

Step 2 blocks

Step 3 blocks

Step 4 blocks (step 1 blocks are the 4 patches in the corners, I forgot to take a photo of that step before I sewed the block together)

Step 5 blocks

Sneak preview of what the final quilt might look like.

New Quiltville Mystery-Orange Crush

I've decided to do the next Quiltville Mystery, called Orange Crush. The first steps for the quilt will be posted on April 1 so I'm so patiently waiting until I can get started. I've gone through my fabrics to get some idea of what I want to make. I'm really going to try and be good and only use fabrics that I already have on hand and not buy anything new. I found a great floral type print that has wonderful colors that I'm going to pull other fabrics from my stash to coordinate with it. The colors are going to be rust/orange, green, black and the accent will be periwinkle blue (I don't have a lot of this particular color so I may have to buy some). I haven't decided if I want to make my quilt scrappy or control the colors. I do have enough of one fabric for the all the lights to be of one fabric and I'm thinking about doing the same for all the darks (these are the 2 and 31/2 inch strips that Bonnie uses from her scraps). Below is a photo of my fabrics that I've chosen so far:

This is my inspiration fabric, the fabric that I'm using to pull all of my other colors for the quilt.

These are my fabric choices so far. The light fabric on the right will be used for all the light scrappy strips that Bonnie uses in the quilt. I haven't decided on which fabric to use for the dark scrappy strips yet.

Finally some quilting

It's been a while since I've posted anything quilting related. I have been working on a couple of projects but it's just been slow going. Mainly because I haven't had the time and also I think a little of the Winter Blues. I haven't even felt like sewing for a while. I think I've rekindled the bug this week because I've actually finished up a couple of quilt tops that I've been working on. The first is the Quiltville Mystery, Carolina Crossroads. I finally finished adding the borders last night. I really love how the top turned out and I'm getting excited to actually get the machine quilting done. I'm waiting on a wonderful thread order that will be coming my way before I start. The members of the Redthreadquilter Yahoo Group that I founded were so kind to me and did a Thread Surprise while I was in China. They were really kind because I was able to order 25 different cones of thread. All I can say is WOW and a HUGE THANK YOU!!!!! I will be getting about 10 spools of my favorite piecing thread (Aurifil) and 15 spools of 3000 yd Signature Thread for my Machine Quilting.

Carolina Crossroads

Another quilt that I've been working on is from the book One Block Wonders. This book is basically a variation of all the Stack-n-Whack Quilts that I've done in the past. I made one kind of block out of the same fabric and then the twist to the quilt was the layout. The center of the quilt is all the same block made from the same fabric. You get such a wide variety of colors when you make it from the same fabric which enables you to have fun with the all the design possibilities.

A photo of the fabric that I used for all the kaleidoscope blocks.

Some of the individual blocks

The finished quilt top.

After posting about our trip each day, I realized that there were a few little incidents that I forgot to write about. Our first little mishap happened on the day we were to leave. It happened even before we got on the plane. I had packed all of our bags and they were all together in my bedroom. We had to be at the airport early in the morning (6:45am) for our first flight to Newark. With a 45 minute ride to the airport that meant we all had to be in the car NLT than 6:00am. I was up early, got a shower, dressed and got ready for the long trip. I then woke M up to get her ready. In the meantime, DH was up too and trying to get himself ready to drive us to the airport. I wanted to wait until the last possible moment to wake E up so about 5:45 I woke E up and DH was suppose to be taking all of our bags to the car at that time too. I didn't pay any attention to see if they all made it to the car because I was trying to get E awake and saying goodbye to her. Thinking all was well, we all got into the car and headed to the airport. DH pulled up to the departure gates, M and I got out of the car, and DH was putting our luggage on the curb. I looked at the luggage and said "Where's my red suitcase?". DH said "What red suitcase?". It was at that moment that we realized that my red suitcase (the one with most of our clothes and extra shoes) was still sitting in my bedroom at home. DH immediately hopped back into the car and took off. So much for a nice goodbye! He was driving at a high rate of speed so he could get back in time for us to make our flight to Newark. He was making great time, when a few minutes ahead of him a truck had crashed on the interstate, thus blocking the whole North bound lane. DH doesn't like to show his credentials but had to at that point in order for the State trooper to let him pass and so he could get home. If that State Trooper wasn't as kind as he was, M and I would have had to make the trip to China with very little clothing and a few other necessities. In the meantime as the minutes ticked away, I'm starting to get a little nervous that we would be without a valuable piece of luggage. I could purchase stuff for M but not me. I don't think there are too many 5'9" larger women in China. With 30 minutes until our flight was scheduled to leave, DH pulls up, gives us our red suitcase, and then hugs M very quickly because he didn't get a chance to do that earlier. M and I checked the bag in and went through security as fast as we could, and headed to the gate (this time we were lucky and the gate was actually at the beginning of the terminal and not the end as it is usually in my travels). We were about the last people on the plane but we made it!! Our bag made it to China too!! Moral of the story: Double check to make sure all of your luggage is in the car before you leave the house!

Our second little incident happened at the Newark Airport. This incident wasn't as stressful though. M and I were the lucky ones to get the random search boarding passes. That meant that we were going to have our check in bags searched and have both of us patted down when we went through security. All went well until they were checking my backpack (the one that had the DVD player, camera and all of my items to keep me occupied on the flight) for explosives. The machine beeped and printed up a red ticket for traces of TNT. Holy Cow! How could that happen. Here I am probably one of the most law abiding individuals (I don't even like to drive over the speed limit because I don't want to get pulled over) and my bag has traces of TNT. They had to get another TSA person over to thoroughly search my bag again. The bag and contents had to be sent back through the xray machines. Both M and I were sitting on the chairs very nicely to not cause any other problems. Finally the TSA agent said we could go. Now 2 weeks later, I finally figured out why my bag tested for explosives (I wish I would have remembered the reason while they were searching through everything). On Chinese New Year Eve, the family that we were celebrating with gave M a little firework (a sparkler type firework). We didn't set it off at the house because M was getting tired and we were going to go back to the Hotel. I put the firework in my backpack to take it back to the hotel. We still didn't get a chance to set if off while in China so I had to throw it away because I knew we couldn't bring it back to the US. This firework left enough traces of explosives in my bag to set off the explosive detection machines. Moral of this story: Never put a firework in any bags that you plan to carry onto a plane!

In Honor of President's Day...
Have fun solving this jigsaw puzzle.

Sunday, Monday Feb 10-11, 2008

Our trip to China is over. We checked out of our hotel around 11:00 and then had to wait around for a couple of hours until it was time to head to the airport. We had our last lunch in China while waiting. Can you guess where? Well, McDonalds of course. Had to find something for M to eat because I knew she wouldn't eat any of the airplane food. Our guide and driver showed up around 1:00 pm to drive us to the airport. Our plane departed at 5:00 pm for Newark. Our flight left right on time. M and I both ended up sleeping quite a bit on this flight mainly because we were flying during the night. Before we knew it we were over Canada and getting closer to Newark. Everything on this trip went so well so far. We weren't going to be as lucky on our way home. Our first indication that we might have problems was when the pilot came on the loud speaker and said that we will have to be in a holding pattern for a while due to high winds in the Newark area. We probably had to circle for about 30 to 45 minutes until we were allowed to land. The whole time we circled it was pretty bumpy. We did finally land and had no problems going through immigration. We did have to wait about 1 hour to get bags before we went through customs. I was getting a little worried because we only had about 1 hour before our next flight left for home. Finally our bags came down the belt and we headed through customs quickly and just as I was going to leave our bags to get rechecked, the guy told me our flight was cancelled. Bummer!!! We had to go to the ticket counter and make other arrangements. The soonest flight would not be until the next day at 11:50am. Thank goodness the airline took care of us and provided us a hotel room and food vouchers at no charge. We were able to get a good nights rest before we headed out the next morning. Our flight the following day was delayed also. We finally took off after 1:00 pm. I was never so glad to finally land at our hometown Airport. I do have to say that M was a real trooper and she did great for me even with the delay.

M finally has been able to go back to school today, Thursday Feb 14. The evening we came home we were hit with a pretty bad snowstorm/ice storm. Schools were closed for 2 days! At least M had time to get over jetlag and we didn't have to deal with her being tired at school.

Saturday, Feb 9, 2008 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, M!!!!

6 years ago today, a very special little girl was born in China. What better way to celebrate your Birthday but in the country where you were born. Today M was so excited to be turning 6. Happy Birthday!!!


Our day was another low key day with not a lot planned on the original tour but our guide offered to take us to the Pearl Market in the morning. I wanted to visit the Pearl Market again because I had some people from home who wanted some pearls. Unfortunately the Main Pearl Market was closed due to the Chinese New Year. I was bummed. When our guide had the taxi pull up to the front entrance to the Temple of Heaven, I was a little confused because I knew we had just passed the Pearl Market building that I've visited before. That's when I found out that it was closed and we were just going to another Pearl Store located within the grounds of the Temple of Heaven. The store was all right and I was able to find some good buys for our friends and some stuff for the girls. The guy who helped us in the store was very kind and when he heard it was M.'s Birthday, he gave her an extra pair of earrings to go with the pearl necklace I bought for her. (M doesn't have her ears pierced yet but I'm sure when she does, the earrings would look beautiful on her). When we first entered the store, we were shown a real oyster and they opened it for us to see how many pearls were inside (we both took a guess before she opened it and boy were we wrong). M mentioned a little later that she wanted an oyster and the salesclerk gave her one that was opened and they were just going to throw it away. Have you ever cleaned out an oyster in a hotel room? Well, we did and we removed about 30 tiny pearls for M to keep. We also cleaned up the oyster shell well enough so that we could bring it home in our suitcase.


The afternoon was a another trip to a local fair. This one was called the Temple Fair. There were just as many people at this fair as the other one and I had to keep a tight grip on M's hand again. This time we were able to see a few different things but not much. Most of M's view again was about the level of all the people's behinds. I at least had the advantage of height so I could see over top of most of the people. M again was able to get some more Cotton Candy. As we were leaving the fair, we were so fortunate to be standing at the right place to see the little dance/drum routine. M was able to be right up front and see everything. I didn't bring my video camera to the fair (mainly because I totally looked ridiculous with a both a digital camera and a video camera hanging around my neck) but I did remember to take some movies with my digital camera so that we could remember the sounds of the fair.





After the fair we headed to our dinner, Imperial Cuisine. Basically it was just another tourist type restaurant that prided themselves on serving food that would have been served to the emperor and such. By this time, I was kind of getting tired of eating Chinese food but managed to fill my belly. M actually ate something at this meal, fried rice. It was the first time that we had fried rice served and M does loves fried rice. At this dinner, we celebrated M's Birthday. The tour company provided a cake and candles for M's birthday. After dinner we all sang Happy Birthday in English and Chinese. M was a very happy little girl that evening. It was wonderful celebrating her Birthday, but it was also a little sad knowing that our trip was almost over. We would be heading back home the next day.

Friday, Feb 8, 2008

Today was the exciting day because we were headed to the Great Wall of China at the Badaling pass. When we were discussing the trip and I told M that she would be going to the Great Wall, she was so excited. Well today she was going to see it in person for the first time. On our way to the Great Wall we made a couple of other stops to some more local sites, the Cloisonne and a Jade Factory. Our first stop was the Cloisonne factory. I was a little disappointed because we didn't go to the same factory that I've been to on my previous 2 trips to Beijing. This one just wasn't the same. They just had some tables set up inside the building that just demonstrated the process so you can see how the Cloisonne was made. Since we were also the only group in the building, M was able to try her hand at putting the enamel onto a vase. We ended up buying some tiny panda ornaments for all M's classmates at School and some bracelets for her teammates at Gymnastics. For some reason, I thought the prices were a little higher than on my previous trips but that could be because the dollar isn't as valuable anymore (7.1 yuan to 1.00). Our next stop was the Jade Factory where we had a little lunch. This wasn't my favorite lunch on the trip but at least it filled my stomach. We had a little tour on how they carved all the jade pieces. We were also given some ideas on how to determine if a piece is genuine jade or a fake. I only picked up a couple of little items for the girls. I had purchases both girls a nice jade piece on my previous trips so I didn't buy a lot this time.

We were finally headed towards the Great Wall after lunch. We went to the same location that I've visited on both my trips, Badaling. M was very impressed with the Great Wall and was very excited to be able to walk it. It was very windy and cold on this day but we braved the weather and started to walk. M was having some problems with her coughing (she had been coughing all week due to her illness that she had right before she left home) due to the cold winds and her over exerting her body. We only walked as far as I've walked in the past, the tower at the top of the hill pictured in the top right photo. I'm proud that M made it that far because she was coughing so hard that she told me she almost threw up one time.

Now to one of the highlights of our trip, the Ice Lantern Festival in Lonqingxia. We headed north of the Great wall to a resort area called Lonqingxia. The festival was at the base of a dammed up gorge. It was totally amazing what they had carved out of ice and snow. They made lots of different buildings inside the enclosed area out of ice. The ice was also lit up which made it all the more beautiful. There were ice sculptures everywhere. If it only wasn't so cold inside, I would have liked to stay a lot longer. M. was getting very cold and after her little mishap at the squatty potty, she didn't want to walk around anymore. It was getting close to about 6:00pm and we still haven't eaten our dinner yet so we left the area to go to the restaurant. Dinner, that was another experience. The only parking close to the festival was in front of different restaurants and if you wanted to park there, you had to eat at that particular restaurant. Let's just say, I'm glad I didn't get ill. The restaurant wasn't up to our clean standards and I was worried about eating anything. I was the polite tourist and tried some things but the whole time I was hoping it wasn't going to make me sick. At least we had our guide and driver to order foods that were probably more eatable than others. We both got so chilled from this trip that it was tough for me to get warmed up after we got back to the hotel. I was up at around midnight taking the hottest shower I could stand just so that I could feel warm again and get some sleep.