Going Home

I mentioned that my Dad had a birthday last week so Mr. P and I drove to my folks place this past weekend to pay a visit. It's about a three hour drive north of here and we haven't done the trek since Easter. I always refer to my parents place as "home" even though I've never lived there. I guess that proves that home is wherever the people you love are.

Even if they pull faces like this...

I warned you that was going on my blog Dad.... don't ever dare me. You know you'll lose.  

I took this picture on the drive up  to deliberately freak out all my friends in the US because it looks like we're driving recklessly and wantonly on the wrong side of the road. I wonder how I'm going to go with changing sides of the road  when we're away and whether I'm going to spend my days in a perpetual state of agitation about crashing. 

I spent the car ride finishing sewing the binding onto Home on The Range (when I wasn't taking shots of the road and firetrucks to show Little P )  so I could give it to my Dad when we got there. There's nothing like bringing a finish down to the wire.

And Dad loved it. And I loved it so much I used it all weekend to keep warm since my folks live in Antarctica.

I'm so happy with how this turned out that I may have to make a scrappy tumbler at some point just for me. 

Love the back almost as much as the front. It makes me want to go out and find a boot scooting class. 

While I was at my folks I raided my Mum's garden for goodies to bring home. And I dreamed of putting in a vegie garden at our place and then dismissed the thought because I have a black thumb. I figure as long as my Mum gardens I can just steal the fruits of her labours. 

I spent some of the weekend working on more hexie flowers. It's getting to be  a decent sized pile, but still feels like its taking forever  ...and now I'm looking for a volunteer to peel the paper out. Anyone want to put their hand up? 

And finally I have something to link up to Elizabeth's monthly linky party!

Tumblers, Strings and Other Things

I went back to working on a few things this week . My sewing ADD kicked into full gear over the weekend and I drifted from one thing to another quite happily. 

I learned that the sky wont fall when I change my mind about a project. I'm pretty much over the string quilt blocks so I decided it was OK to finish that quilt at 48 x 60 inches for a lap throw instead of the mammoth 72 x 72 I originally planned.   I'm 17 blocks from being able to put it together, having completed 10 more this week. 

The reason for the change in the string selvage quilt was because I had the brilliant idea to make  selvage star string blocks instead. This was my test block. I think a quilt made from these in all the colours of the rainbow will look gorgeous and much prettier than a plain string quilt. It's also a but more of a challenge for me. I could make plain string blocks in my sleep since I've probably made 1000 of them in my quilting lifetime. 

Out of nowhere on Sunday I decided to make this for Rachael at Blue Mountain Daisy who has done a shout out for people to send her house blocks. 

I stole the idea for this block from here. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it.

And the tumbler quilt got basted, and is half quilted so I may even have another finish soon. Happy Days!

So I blitzed the weekly 15 minute challenge over at Kate's this week. Pop over and see how other crafty individuals spent their time. 

Still here ...Just Hiding

I took a mini break from blogland over the weekend to concentrate on other things. They say a change is as good as a holiday. That's crap. I didn't feel like I was in a tropical vacation spot. I felt like I was vacationing in Antarctica all the while dreaming of our trip to Hawaii in a few months. 

This long weekend has been full of sewing and relaxing and other good things. My life needs a good shake up and this was the first part of it. 

Friday Night I was talking on the phone to Little Miss Sunshine while putting together and sewing a row of my Tumbler quilt. Talking and sewing can often lead to disastrous results as evidenced by this screw up.

I'm not unpicking it. This quilt is being put together randomly and the fact I have two identical blocks next to one another just reinforces the randomness of it all.

I managed to finish the back for the quilt on Friday night without any major disasters like sewing over my own finger, sewing something backwards or swearing (much) 

Saturday saw my monthly Farmers Wife group get together at Tazzie's house. It was a lovely afternoon of eating and chatting with Tazz, Claire and Loz and I even did some sewing, although not on my Farmers Wife blocks. In fact not one of us did anything Farmer's Wife related. The likelihood of me finishing that quilt- ever- is so slim that I have publicly started referring to it as my Farmers Wife pot holder. 

So, I worked on my hexie flower garden quilt and got 4 more flowers done. Since I was on a roll I got another one finished on Saturday night.

Tazz has the most gorgeous quilts stashed all over her house but this one took pride of place in her dining room. Its called Nearly Insane. I felt crazy just looking at it so I cant even begin to imagine what it must have been like to actually make it. It's even more gorgeous in person. 

If you want to see what an actual FW quilt looks like nearly finished pop on over to Tazzie's blog. If I didn't like her so much I'd be muttering about classic over achievers.  

I slept in late Sunday and then spent hunks of the day working on my tumbler quilt while Little Miss Sunshine worked on a quilt of her own. We did this together despite the fact that 2000 kilometres separate us. Facetime Sewing rocks! I'd encourage everyone to do it. 

And on Monday I worked my backside off to finish the tumbler quilt top. I'm breaking with tradition here and naming my own quilt. It's called "Home on The Range ". It makes me want to go out and square dance or something.

Two more hexie flowers were also completed today but I'm too lazy to take pictures, so you're going to have to imagine them instead. I will get to emails and blog commenting at some point this week- I'm just not sure when !

So in summary, this weekend was spent finishing a front and back for a quilt I started last week (insert round of applause here ) , sewing 7 hexie flowers, gossiping Saturday away and teaching myself to sleep in past 7 am. I'm call that a success. 

Cue the Twilight Zone Music

I feel like I'm living in an episode of the Twilight Zone this week. 

On Thursday I managed to go to work with my undies on inside out and wore them like that all day without even noticing. I guess I should be grateful I didn't discover I'd gone to work commando.

On Friday my Dad ended up in hospital and it wasn't even anyone's birthday. He's OK now but I'm starting to suspect his forays into hospital are some weird pensioner plot to save money on his home grocery bill.

Saturday I discovered we had run out of tissues so I'm using toilet paper to blow my nose until Wednesday because I'm too lazy to go to the shops. We NEVER run out of tissues. Normally I have 43 boxes in my tissue place stash right next to no less than 89 toilet rolls in case there's a world toilet paper shortage, or a flu pandemic.  


On Saturday I managed to double delete my entire email inbox and I have no idea how I did it. It's like I had an electrical force field around me that sucked all the emails into the ether.  So if you emailed me in the 24 hours between Friday and Saturday and I haven't responded, I'm not being rude, some dumb arse deleted my emails. 

I spent some time Saturday morning pondering the fickle nature of life, and  decided to just go with the flow. If the universe wants to chuck weirdness at me I'm not going to fight it - I'm going to go right along with it. 

And so, I started making a quilt back for a quilt front that I hadn't even started yet because I'm one wild and crazy girl. 


And on Saturday night I discovered I am a mere 1.5 metres short of being able to finish the back and make my binding, so the universe really did have the last laugh. Not to be deterred, I ordered extra fabric online to finish it up and I'm showing what I've done anyway. 

Sunday dawned looking particularly foul so it was a good day to stay inside in my pyjamas (any excuse will do)  

 I cut 324 of these little blighters.

and even managed to get some of them sewn together into  a couple of rows

I also made a big run at my Selvage String blocks this weekend,  prompted in part by this pile of goodness sent to me by Sue at Craft The Final Frontier Thank you Sue. 

By the way my "big run " was 10 whole blocks. I better get a wriggle on because I'm planning to finish this quilt by the end of the month and at this stage I still have 96 blocks to make. 

After a while I got bored with that and went and tortured my oven . Mr. P got banana bread...

and I braved making whoopie pies for the first time since my oven was resurrected.

Finally!  Woopie Pies that don't look like pancakes or have the consistency of Chinese throwing stars. 

I've been meaning to show this pork belly off for about two weeks.  I've cooked pork about three times in my life and this was one of them. I think I'll be cooking it again because it was DELICIOUS! And it looks pretty too-like something out of a food magazine.

Last but not least, I'm at the "finishing the binding" stage for the Hourglass quilt. 

I started that tonight while I watched Downton Abbey. I wonder if I can pull off three quilt finishes for June? 

I hope your weekend has been fabulous. Mine was nowhere near long enough !