Touching Base and Baby Pics

Last week was very busy and hectic, but topped off with a wonderful weekend spent with my mother and my friend, Kathy at the Ogallala quilt retreat in Ceta Canyon. For those of you that have never been there, you drive through the flat fields of cattle and hay and all of a sudden you drop down into a canyon. At the bottom of that canyon is the church camp, Ceta Canyon. It is a beautiful place. The project was fun (more on that later - with pics) and the comraderie was great. Got to see people I haven't seen in a year and just spend time sewing, and sewing and sewing.

This week, even though calmer than last week, is still really busy. Last night I worked volleyball at PHS and Friday night I will be working VB @ OHS. My two teams will be playing each other in a cross town rivalry. It will be interesting to see the outcome. Both have great players, but neither one has been able to get their acts together enough to consistantly win. It is really frustrating watching them, because I can see the potential in the players, but can't figure out what they need to take that next step up the district ladder. Like I said, frustrating.

Tonight I have spent some time scanning in pictures of me when I was younger. These are the pics I gave to my grandmother at one time so they have her handwriting on the back telling who they are of (ME!!) and when they were taken. Here they are for your enjoyment.



The above is me at 3 months and the below is me at 6 months. I was born with pitch black hair that gradually lightened as I got older and unfortunately is now getting darker. Life sure is weird sometime.

Classes - both quilting and school

Just finished typing out 3 - count them - 3 proposals for teaching at the Ogallala quilt festival. One is to teach how to make a simple bag like this one:



One is for this quilt, divide and conquer.



And the last one is for the spider web quilt.




All of them would make good classes and I might just propose them for the Andrews store, also. They weren't the ones I was thinking about for Andrews, but any one of them would be great. I think I can make the divide and conquer quilt with a jelly roll and a charm pack. I just need to sit down and do it. I know the bags can be made with a jelly roll, since most of my bags are made up of left over jelly rolls.

I got a lot accomplished this weekend, but there is still a whole lot more to do. (like lesson plans for tomorrow, yikes! gotta get busy)

New Liberated Quilt

Just finished quilting and putting the binding on my newest quilt. All I have to do now is flip and sew the binding to the other side and add a label. I think I will then throw it into the wash and see what happens. I don't usually do that, but on this quilt I think I will. It's a small wall hanging measuring about 18" X 24".



I saw a quilt similar to this somewhere in the blogs and decided to do my own version. I used wavy strips a la bumble beans and then cut the quilt apart, inserted a section and sewed it back together. That looked good, but it needed another strip going the other way. Then I cut the top right hand corner and added another 3 strip section and WHAT!! it didn't line back up. My deduction was that the insert was too thick for all the parts to realign, so I had to take it out and go with a single strip. Hmmm. Looks good, but it needs something. I know, I will use the 3 strip section I took out from the top right and put it on the bottom. I laid it out a couple of different ways and voila! The perfect balance. Now, all I have to do is square it up and quilt it. Because I used really, really wavy strips - probably way to wavy and if I do it again, I will not use strips with that much curve on them - this quilt needed a lot and I do mean a lot of quilting. I think there is one little bit of a section that is about 1 inch apart, but the rest is quilted around 3/4 of an inch or closer.

I love it when a plan comes together

Ha, ha, I know, yesterday's blog posting was not fun (even though I got a chuckle out of it) So here, today, I am going to add - - wait for it - - pictures!!!!!!!!! I know, most of you thought I have forgotten how to download pictures or maybe I forgot how to take them. So, here, without further ado, is a picture:




Bazinga! (as Sheldon would say) I know, not what you wanted to see. even though he is beautiful, but a little bit blurry. that was taken with my new camera with a major zoom in and I need to learn how to hold still while I take a picture. On to more stuff you would rather see than my baby boy.

I am a bit on the excited side. Since my towels weren't delivered and I still don't have hot water, I had my class go through the kitchen today and find out exactly what type of tools we had. We found the rubber scrapers, but they are in poor shape. Don't know what they did with them, but I will be looking to purchase more of those in the near future. After about 6 phone calls, I finally have towels to begin tomorrows cleaning. However, I still do not have hot water, so we won't be doing a thorough clean. Here are a couple of pictures of my kitchen at school.



The stoves/ovens in the top picture sit back to back with the stove/ovens in the bottom picture. It is really quite large! In the bottom picture you can see a wooden top table that is part of the pastry center. Then in the back are a shelf of spices. In front of the spices are a couple of long prep tables. It really is a great set up. I would like a prep sink that is separate, but am lucky enough to have use of one in the other room that used to be the schools cafeteria. Since we are just an annex type school where all the students are bused in from their respective high schools, we don't require a cafeteria. Yea for me that they left an octopus, a large dishwasher and the sinks when they removed the majority of the kitchen at the end of the year. There may be a deep fryer and an ice machine in there also. Oh, yes, the best part is a walk in refrigerator and freezer. Even with all the struggles I am having I asked myself if I would have taken this job knowing everything I do now and I said yes, so I guess I will put up with everything this year and make it a perfect place next year.

Another thing I am excited about is that the paint purchase order finally went through and my maintenance man started painting this afternoon. He taped everything off this morning and was cutting in the bottom half of the wall when I left. I think he will have all the bottom part done by tonight. Can't wait to get back to school and see what he has done. The bad part is that it has been really humid here and I don't know if it will dry enough for him to do the large "chair rail" done before I leave school on Friday.

here is picture of the room's old colors. I wish I had taken pictures of the whole room before I took down the "lovely" decor. The wicker cornucopias stuffed with some greenery and hanging haphazardly were my favorites.




Below is a picture of my samples I painted on the wall of the colors I chose. The top is called key lime pie. (I know, sooooo me) then the bottom is twilight meadow. There will be a faux chair rail of brown velvet that will be a cinder block width since that was the easiest for the painter and I think it will balance nicely. That gold frame thing hanging on the wall in the picture above will be painted the chocolate brown, also. There are two other ones that are not that large that hang on another wall. I also have a nice raspberry color that I am going to use for some accents and canvases.



Now if I can just come up with a new name. I will be all set.

Wordless Wednesday

Okay, it's supposed to be wordless and there is supposed to be a picture here. However, the camera is still downstairs and it is getting late so the only pictures I will be seeing are the ones in my dreams. good night.

Yummo Cotton Candy!!

It's fair time again and my friend and I went on our annual trek to see the sights. Not much there, but we enjoyed what little we saw. Along with trying to win a hand carved wooden pin (2X and missed one by 1 number, shucks), we mostly sat and visited with friends, ate some fair food, (not traditional this time, fajitas) and wandered the commercial exhibits and campers. Of course the final purchase of the night was an extra large bag of fresh, right out of the spinner, cotton candy. It always makes me smile and brings back memories of the South Plains Fair in Lubbock. Of waitng around while my parents and 100 others make plans for opening the ACU Hamburger booth (or ACC for most of that time). Of getting out of school early with free fair tickets and going as a family to enjoy the hamburgers, rides and games. Of going to some GREAT country concerts such as Dolly Parton, The Oak Ridge Boys and many, many others that the fair brought in every year. Of getting old enough to go to the fair with a "date". or at least on a group date with a boy you really, really like. Of coming home from college on fair weekends and begging my mother to go with me just so I could go and get me some cotton candy because, unlike today, the fair was the only place you could get this delicious spun sugar and it was a rare treat only gotten once a year. I noticed that the convenience store had some bags of cotton candy for sale this past week and was sorley tempted to purchase some, but I decided to wait until the fair opened and I sure am glad I did.

School, dinner and shoes

YUM!!! I am sitting here at the computer enjoying my dinner. I stopped by Schlotzsky's for some potato and bacon soup and an original. I am so angry at myself. I always tell them to make it without the onions and this time I didn't. I had to pick off the onions. Now, don't get me wrong, I have been picking off the onions (and other stuff I don't care for) most of my life. I am just angry with myself that this one time I didn't do it and now my room smells like onions. There were a lot of onions on this sandwich today. If I were to chop them up and measure them, they would be about 1/4 cup. That's a lot on a sandwich. While I was waiting for my "onion" sandwich, :) the lady in front of me threw out a piece of paper from her car. DELIBERATELY!!! I couldn't believe it. It looked like a receipt, probably the one from her order, that was folded over and over on itself until it was about 1/2" wide and then that strip was folded in half. (what is the deal with all my fractions tonight?) I wanted to get out my car, pick up her paper and hand it back to her along with a couple of trash items from my car and say, "ma'am, I believe you lost this and as punishment for littering you have to take some of my trash." Then I would smile and tell her to have a good day and walk back to my car. Of course, being the type of person she is, A Litterer!, she would probably just throw her paper and my trash out the window. Just for the record, this woman was well over 50 and definitely should have known better.

I stayed late and worked on getting an ISS assignment together. I am putting together a generic packet so that when one of my students is put into ISS, the teacher there can just pull out my packet and the student can work on the assignments there. I have one that it going in on Monday for a 10 day stint. He must have done something really bad. However, not bad enough for him to go out to the alternative center or even jail. I got 4 days done and brought the rest home to work on this weekend along with my lesson plans, quilting and watching movies.

I wore my Gee's Bend shoes to school today and the people that saw them loved them. I did, too! I will have to remember to take both pairs to Bee tomorrow. I can't wear them because then, I would have to untie them and take them off to sew, slip them back on to walk around and then back off again to sew. Yes, I am one of those people, a bare-foot sewer. (notice I did not get and exclamation point) When I was teaching apparel class at the high school I had to make sure I wore shoes I could easily slip off and on just in case I had to sit down at some one's sewing machine and work on it. I know, I have it really bad.

Blog, blog, blog

Okay, Ree in her blog yesterday (Pioneer Woman) said to blog no matter how you feel. Yesterday I knew I needed to blog and felt like blogging, but got sidetracked by reading all the blogs. Today, I am excited about blogging and I am going to come here first before I venture off into blog land to read what everyone else has been doing today. I finally picked the new colors for our restaurant at school. The top will be a color called "Key Lime Pie" and no, I didn't pick it because I happen to LOVE!!!! key lime pies. It just happened to be the perfect color. At about chair rail height, there will be a band about a cinder block width of a deep chocolate brown called, brown velvet. It is luscious! Then on the bottom of the wall is a turquoise color called twilight meadow. Together these three colors are dreamy! After it gets painted I will post pictures of the before colors (ugly brown and ugly maroon) and pictures of the new room. I am sorry I didn't take pictures before we took down all the gaudy ugly decorations, but I will post what the restaurant looks like once it gets its paint job and decor. It will be fantastic. I can't wait. Enough about school. That last class wore me out. Trying to take notes with a class full of chatty Cathy sophomore girls and one boy that seems to feel like it is his duty and honor to interrupt you every 5 minutes!! It was like pulling teeth with them. I am going to have to do something majorly different in that class tomorrow. The sad thing is that 1/3 or them don't plan on going into the food industry. They are just biding their time until they can be in cosmetology as a junior. Hopefully they can learn at least a little bit. I am just trying to make it through safety and sanitation.

One of the reasons I was so excited to blog today was that yesterday I got my new shoes!! (can't transfer picture, but you can go here) I started to wear a pair today, but my feet were calling out for some sandals. I was glad I didn't have them on when I hit my elbow on the side mirror of my car this morning spilling my coffee all the way down the front of me causing me to go back inside and change clothes. Let me tell you, it was a rocky start all the way around this morning. I got to our faculty meeting without my calendar, because I went straight from my car to the meeting (one minute to spare). Luckily I had a notepad and calendar in my purse and was able to transfer all the info to my other calendars. Next time we have a faculty meeting I will not be trying to get a little more shut eye as a reward for not having zero hour. I will just get up as usual and get to school early.

Jelly Roll Sampler Quilt Top

It is now finished along with the back and a bag to carry it all around. Yes, I am talking about the Jelly Roll Sampler quilt that I have been working on for several months. I know it's a really bad picture and I apologize, but it is the best I can do at this time. The top has been finished for awhile, but I was waiting on more fabric to complete the back. Plus life got in the way and now it is ready to sit around and wait for the time to be quilted. Everything is good to go. Top, backing, binding and a bag to carry it all around. One more checked off the to do list and placed on the need to be quilted list.






I have really enjoyed making bags to match my quilt tops. It has been really convenient and easy to find said tops. Now all I have to do is look for the bag. I can store everything that goes with the top in the bag and when I get ready to have it quilted, I know where everything is. It's a win, win situation and I have fun designing the bag and practicing my machine quilting.