Prom night at Conor Byrne Pub

 

Carina went to a Prom night at the Pub that she likes in Ballard last night.  I bought this dress for her when she was around 15 or 16 for Prom at her school and she ended up not going to Prom, I could have killed her, but anyway, she decided she wanted to wear it to this event, the problem was she has filled out a bit more since she was 15-16 and I needed to alter it.

 So, I opened up the back and sewed a white panel into the top half, the bottom half already had the white panel in it.  Then I sewed some button holes and threaded red ribbon in it, that was Carina's idea, it turned out cute!  The last picture is one I copied off of Facebook that someone had posted of a group of them at Conor Byrne.

Accuquilt Barn Quilt Design Contest

 

 I am so excited, I entered several quilt block designs in the Accuquilt Barn Quilt Design contest and not just one, but two of my blocks made it into the top 100 designs.  The first one here is # 5 on the list and the 2nd one is # 14.  Voting for the blocks is going on from April 11 through April 18, then the top 20 blocks will go to a panel of celebrity judges.  I can't imagine how excited I would be to make it to the top 20, that would just be amazing!  I am hoping people will go vote for mine, here's the link Vote top 100 designs

# 5

 # 14

Fabric Organization Progress

Well, I'm getting there, slowly but surely, I have 16 bins full as of now, I still have more fabric though, but mostly what is left is bigger pieces that I am storing on full sheets of Magazine Boards and putting in my drawers, I also have a bunch of really scrappy stuff that I think I will cut into squares and chuck the excess, enough is enough already, it is hard for me to not save it all, but this is getting ridiculous. Most of the fabric in the picture below are fat quarters and fat eighths or around that size. All of my yardage is going on the bigger boards. I have them all put away now and back on my shelves. I also haven't even begun working on my "other" fabrics, what I mean by other is anything that isn't quilting cotton's, I don't even know where to begin with those.

Fabric Organization Project

Here is my OCD at it again. I decided to organize my fabric stash, I have been collecting fabric for many, many years, some of it is just left over from projects, some I bought on great sales and some just showed up, I have no idea where it came from, hehe. My husband thinks I could open a fabric store with all of my fabric, but he just doesn't understand that quilters are generally fabric addicts, it is not our fault, we are lured in by these beautiful colors and textures and it just overtakes you. Anyway, I started with the small stuff first, and sorted according to color families.

I put the medium size scraps in bags by color order until I could get to them. The small ones where put into either strips or squares catagories and I put them into containers all nice and neat.

These pictures in no way represent the real mass that I have collected, the larger fabrics are in the drawers, I have been sorting them as well and pressing and folding them onto Magazine Boards that I get at the Comic book store. I haven't gotten to the other three drawers yet.

So far I have gotten the medium size blue fabrics sorted and the tan/brown fabrics. I am cutting my Magazine Boards into 2 1/2" by 8 1/2" rectangles and ironing and folding the fabrics onto them and putting them into my new Office Depot containers that I found. They fit perfectly. I also decided this would be a good time to weed out the fabric that I know I will never use and give it away, but seriously, I know that 80% of this stuff won't get used, I couldn't possibly live long enough, but I just can't part with that much and it looks so pretty all stashed away.

After I get this all ironed, wrapped and somewhat sorted, I will go back and do some further sorting of the colors into more color families and then from dark to light in each color family, did I mention OCD!

Quilt Binding Tool

So I stumbled upon this handy little tool while aimlessly searching the net. There is a video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex2PajesRvU
that shows how to use it. I always have a heck of a time getting this part of my binding right, I measure, pin, remeasure, pin again and finally I get it done, but it is such a pain. I love the idea of this tool. Anyway, I couldn't wait to buy it online and wait for it to arrive so I made my own, I also saved about $10.00 by making it myself. It isn't as pretty as the original, but it works exactly the same. I ran up to Lowe's and bought an 8" X 10" piece of acrylic for $1.98 and a little $3.00 cutting tool and whipped it out! I figured out the measurements by watching the video on YouTube, at one point they laid the tool down on a cutting mat that has 1" markings on it, so I paused the video at that point, it was pretting easy to figure out. It is 8 3/4" long and 2 1/2" wide, from the end to the marking is 6 1/4" then you just cut a 45 degree angle and cut off the 1/4" tip and there you have it. I used a sharpie to mark it, I wrote backwards on the underside, that is why my writing looks funny, I got my "U" backwards, lol. I did a test with it, and it comes out perfect. I can't wait to try it on my next quilt.

Here is the original.

Videos of Snowmaggedon

This was the beginning......

This was on Wednesday 1/18 about 7:15 AM, no sweat, but today is a different story.

Snowmaggedon 2012

Up until today I have been able to make it to work, but this morning, not so much, on top of all of this snow is a thick layer of ice, it has pretty much made it impossible to drive. Right now we are having freezing rain and people all around here are losing power from the falling trees and branches, so far we are just seeing flickering lights.

Here are our snowpeople that Carina and Dan made yesterday. They are loving this weather (The snow people that is), Carina and Dan are bored out of there minds, Dan has been stuck here since Tuesday night.

I thought our bench looked really cool. The snow is about 6" or so on each of the slats. It doesn't show up well in the picture.

The pond is frozen over, I forgot to get the pond ice ring thing in there, but as long as I don't disturb it the fish should be fine, it wouldn't be the first time that it has frozen.

Unfortunately our Laurel bush took a beating, this section just broke, but luckily Laurel grows quickly and by summer it should be all filled back in. The cedar tree is sagging really low, but so far none of it has broke off.