A Wilderness Vacation

We are currently vacationing in Tennessee at Wilderness in the Smokies. If you've never been, so far it's a great place to take the kids. We got here last night and have been enjoying the water parks all day. It came time for dinner and I decided to check out Trip Advisor for a good place to eat. We were not disappointed. One of the suggestions was an Italian place called Little Italian Kitchen. Let me just say, if you go by first impressions, you might not walk in (it's in with a gas station). And if you go by second impressions, you might not go in (you order off a board). But if you can get past all that, go in. Definitely go in! And eat. Eat lots and be prepared for it to be amazing! I got butternut squash ravioli with roasted red pepper sauce while hubby got rigatoni bolognese. The kids got pizza (of course) and it was all so wonderful. The owner is Italian and all the food is authentic. We ended our moral with a desert they called Chocolate Lasagna. Three words: heaven, heaven, heaven! We are trying to figure out how to get the kids to go back tomorrow. I don't think it will be a problem.
Oh, and I totally forgot to mention, I saw a store not too far from here that appears to be a discounted place for fiesta ware dishes. I may have to ditch the fam and go check it out!

Vacay Starts Today!

We are leaving for vacation right after church today. I am taking my Nexus 7 but I can't promise I will be able to post anything...not that there will be any sewing going on anyway. I'm going to take my red and white hexies so maybe I will work on those, but I have been hand stitching the back of the binding on my Bottled Rainbows and my fingers are sore. Does anyone else have bad hand sewing habits like pushing the needle with the wrong side of your thumb nail so it's basically like pulling your thumbnail backward every time? Makes for a very sore thumb, let me tell you!
Gotta finish packing so have a great week!

Stash Building

Well, our guild president posted yesterday that a lady had contacted her via our website that her mother (a quilter) had passed away and she wanted to get rid of a large portion of her stash. I wish I'd taken a picture of it. Unreal. She had it portioned out by color upstairs in her house and it was covering surfaces in 3 bedrooms and all over her hallway. An entire table devoted to purple, a chest covered with green, a box full of red. She also had 3 boxes of quilting books. I picked up a book on Sashiko and last year's 100 blocks magazine.  I also picked up a bag full of fabric and only spent $20.

Approximately 16 pieces are around fat quarter size, and the others (about 9) range from 1-3 yards. And I really could have bought more. I'm going to go back and look through them and see if I can pull a blue and green together for a baby quilt for my new little cousin and go back for a brown to go with it. She also had tons of creams and whites, but it's hard to know what you're getting there. Plus she had a large PVC quilt rack used to hand quilt, and some miscellaneous Pellon products.

I've got my Bottled Rainbows binding sewn down in the front and it is pinned and ready to be hand stitched down in the back. That will be a sitting in front of the tv project. I also need to get some traveling sewing projects together since we leave for vacation on Sunday. Finally!

Remember When Schools Were a Priority?

Remember when: 

• school supplies meant a backpack, a pencil and some paper?

• bathroom supplies on your child's supply list would have seemed ludicrous? 
• every politician in the United States wasn't trying to cut spending so instead of increasing taxation in the upper class who can afford it, they slash school funding?

Sorry for my rant; I just returned from spending $70 at Walmart for school supplies and that didn't even include tissues, a roll of paper towels, pencils, and a 3" ringed binder because I already had them at home...and a 5 pack of pocket dividers for her notebook because Walmart didn't have any. I am not aiming this toward the schools. I have worked there. I know and I understand. I am just sad that America is supposed to be such a wealthy country but we can't afford to outfit our schools with what is needed for our kids.

I also had to hit Aeropostale which may be my saving grace this year. My 10 year old daughter looks more like a 13 year old (height and physical maturity-wise) but she's still a 10 year old inside so she's fighting how she looks. She wants to wear cut off jeans and big baggy boy shirts to school. I told her she was going to have to compromise with me somehow I wasn't going to send her to school looking like a bum. We actually found 5 shirts to start off so I feel much better.

Also, I have been having problems with blogger lately. Has anyone been having issues with blogger 'whiting out' parts of their posts? I will write a post and nothing looks wrong on the post page, but when I try to publish, some of the sentences are just long white rectangles and can't be read. I usually have to rewrite and move it around until I can make it go away. I can't tell you how may times I had to rewrite portions of this post to get it to stop.

WiP Wednesday

Bottled Rainbows is quilted! That's about all I can say for this week, but that's saying a lot!

I am working on the most recent Round Robin Mystery Mini as well. Hope to get that finished and sent tomorrow.

Holy Frijoles, Batman!

I am officially freaking out. I was cooking dinner last night when hubby came in carrying a small box that had been left on the porch. He said it was for me, and he kept grinning. I was a little scared to open it. But when I got inside I saw a tablet. A Nexus 7 tablet! I was stunned. I started immediately running down the list in my mind. Birthday? Nope. Anniversary? Nada. I even asked him if he felt guilty about something. Nyet. He says that I talked about them and he assumed I wanted one. Uhhhh... yeah, sure. I remember telling him about an article I'd read where they were saying this one was a good deal in comparison to what else is out there, but wow! I wasn't expecting one. Especially for no apparent reason.
I'm kind of excited! A kid with a new toy! Of course, it will have to be hidden from my daughter. She has been dying for a Kindle Fire. Hello? You are 10 years old....and if I don't have one, you can't have one either! Of course, I can't say that anymore. I was going to check out a drawing app Lynne talked about on her blog but I saw that it was Touchdraw which appears to be a iPad only app. So I'm still looking. Oh, and you know this means I've got to make a bag/cover!

On another happy note, I noticed a new addition to the family on FB this morning. I don't know if anyone remembers Reagan's quilt I made in remembrance of my cousin's child who died about two years ago. She was about 18 months old. Yes, this story gets happier. There's a new baby in their family...meet Lincoln.

Isn't he a cute bug? I may have to make a play quilt for him. 

Yule Pop Options

I was playing around with ideas for my Yule Pop quilt. Instead of variegated bubbles I thought it might be cool to have the bubbles/ornaments in a specific shape... a Christmas shape since this is a Christmas quilt. I thought a Christmas tree might be pretty cool. I bounced the idea off Allegory and she thought it would be best to do a little sketch to figure out how it will work so I've been doing a little sketching and coloring this morning.

The top is a guess at what the tree would look like in the colors that are present in Jovial. I removed the whites and it probably won't be quite so uniform but I was just trying to get an idea if I used white as my bubble color. When I did it, I thought it looked too much like an arrow instead of a tree so I tried some ideas on the bottom. I sketched out the blocks in a regular way (looks like an arrow), and then I sketched them with the squares alternating instead of being lined up. This looks more like a tree but my bubbles won't be lined up so now I don't know what to do. I'm not sure whether to keep trying to make the tree work, try another shape, or just do it haphazard and call it done. Think, think, think...!