The best of intentions

Our $5 quilt club starts in March so in December I decided to get my act together & actually design the quilt for 2009. This project was going to be a bit of a challenge for me since I wanted to do it in EQ6 and hadn't even taken the wrapping off the EQ6 box yet. I also wanted to use our Accucut machine that I've had collecting dust for more years than I am ever going to admit to!

So I sat myself down and forced myself to learn EQ6 and designed a queen sized quilt! I was EXTREMELY proud of myself.

I figured out how to send the EQ6 images over to Corel Draw where I wrote up all the instructions, had EQ6 figure out yardage requirements (then checked them myself because I didn't trust it) and was generally thrilled that I was actually finished and WAY ahead of time too.

I should have known that my being organized and ready months ahead was too good to be true. I swore that the AccuQuilt dies I had were for a 12" block so I designed the quilt around 12" blocks. WRONG. Lori made up the first block and told me it only came out to 8 1/2". Of course I was trying to figure out how the heck she screwed it up since all the pieces are die cut . . . . she didn't screw up, I did.

I'd already shown the graphic to some of the 2008 participants and told them it would be queen sized. Some had already bought their background fabrics. Now what?

Back to the drawing board. I went back into EQ6 an tried to make those 8" blocks work. Nope. I finally gave up, went online and ordered the 12" dies. Then I called Lori and told her to stop making the 8" blocks.

Since I have TWO of the 8" block sets - don't ask - one will be going on Ebay very shortly! (Update - I sold the second set to a friend who has a shop in CA.)

Look for our $5 Quilt Club to start the second Friday and Saturday of March in two colorways - 1800 reproductions and batiks. There's a $10 cost to join, you will purchase your background fabric & setting triangle fabric and then if you finish your block, show up to one of the meeting on time each month - you get the next block free. If you miss or are late, your block is $5. A finishing kit will be available in April & will include the 13th block, sashing, borders, binding & the finishing pattern. Call the shop to sign up.

This will be offered as a mailed block of the month for $25.00 the first month and $13.95 for the next eleven months after & will include everything needed to make a queen sized top & binding. See the details on our website under block of the months.

Warm Weather, Fair Skies

This is where I was LAST Thursday.

This is where I am this Thursday.

May I just say BRRRRR!

Jim & I went to the FL Keyes last week with my older brother & sister-in-law to surprise my Mom for her 75th birthday. We went a little early, stayed a little late and managed to spend 6 days in the warmer weather! A VERY nice break from the cold we've been having here at the Jersey Shore. We left Atlantic City airport in a snowstorm and came home again in a snowstorm.

While in Key West on Saturday, I stopped into the Seam Shoppe to visit. They sell one of my patterns & I had a nice chat with Cindy who owns the shop. This is Cindy standing under a sample of my Pinwheels at the Beach pattern.

After hiking the "1/2 mile" my younger brother told me it was to get back to the shop from where we parked - yeah right, it was more like THREE MILES David - I nearly missed them as they close at 2pm on Saturdays but luckily - for David - they were still waiting on a customer.

Nice shop with some great tropical prints and exciting to see my patterns somewhere other than my shop!

We spent the week just below Key Largo and enjoyed ourselves immensely by snorkeling the first day, Key West another day and then basically laying around the pool the rest of the time. It was lovely.

My Mom was more than a little stunned to find my older brother, sister-in-law, Jim and I in the restaurant they'd stopped to eat in. My two nephews have been having a really good time playing mind games with their grandmother for the past few weeks. She thought Jim & I were arriving a week after we actually did and didn't think my older brother was coming at all. We ate at the Fish House in Key Largo and they stuck a candle in a fish as her birthday cake.

All in all I'm glad to be home, but boy do I wish the weather here was 70 degrees and sunny instead of the 19 we have today!

Super Bolt Sale

I'm mentally gearing up for our Super Bolt Sale this coming weekend. Since nothing goes into the sale room (which for this sale is the classroom) until the night before the sale, I tend to think about what I'm going to do and change my mind at least 9 dozen times between now and Friday.

When we first started this sale about 9 years ago, it was always done on Super Bowl weekend and we called it the Super Bowl Sale. Back then the Super Bowl was the last weekend in January & this was before the NFL started enforcing their trademarked term Super Bowl. Ok, maybe we started more than 9 years ago . . . time flies!

When we wanted to advertise the sale on our TV ad a few years ago, the ad guy shook his head and said, you can't use the term Super Bowl. So Jim came up with Super Bolt Sale instead.

This year we will be holding the sale a week early since Jim and I will be away the last weekend of the month. All bolts in the classroom will be on sale for $4.95 per yard. Only two rules - minimum cuts are one yard and you must take the remaining amount if it's under a yard. Our aim is to MOVE THESE BOLTS OUT - basically so I can buy new ones!

If you're going to be in Jersey Jan 24th and 25th - stop by and take a peek at the approximately 400 bolts we will have in our Super Bolt Sale!

Paperwork - ugh

One of the dirty little secrets of the quilt shop world is the amount of paperwork that must be dealt with. Paper comes in catalogs, sale sheets, monthly info from sewing machine companies, BILLS, notices of changes, notices of meetings, notices of this, notices of that . . .

I have papers EVERYWHERE - the break room, my office, my home office, in my tote/briefcase, the kitchen counter, everywhere. One of my resolutions for the month of January is to somehow regain control of all this paper and get rid of the piles laying almost everywhere.

Remember when computers came into vogue? How they were going to make us a paperless society? HA! Now I have tons of information in the computer and still have tons of paper everywhere else - who trusts the computer enough to throw all the paper away????

Like you, I watch all those organization shows, I read the articles in the magazines and I try to follow what they say. I stand over the recycling bin while looking at the mail - just how much junk mail does one person really need to get? - and bills go into the Jim pile (oops, that's how piles start!), stuff I need to look at goes in the Debbie file and another pile is for the shredder. Then I'm bored with that and I walk away, leaving the piles to be dealt with later. There's mistake number one.

The problem is, most of this stuff can't be thrown away. It's stuff that needs to be held onto so it can be referred back to, or paid, or a phone call is needed, or something and then your office ends up looking like this.

So last week I took the tiger by the horns (that saying can't be right) and tackled the office at the store. Papers, papers everywhere - some went into the recycling but most were sorted and put into one HUGE pile to be filed - there's that mistake number one again!

Yesterday I did better at the home office. I kicked Jim out of one of the drawers in the file cabinet at home and started sorting. Most of the four piles I had spread around my computer went into file folders & kept.

I still have to tackle piles on the kitchen counter and in the sewing room. Jim's piles? They are definitely JIM'S problem!

No butler dang it.

If you've been following the http://www.myquiltvillage.com/ blog, you'll know that I wanted a butler for Christmas. No butler was under my tree, nor has one shown up yet. I've given up & resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have to organize my sewing room myself. UGH!

But think about it for just a minute. A butler sounds like a way out, crazy idea but - do you really like organizing your kitchen cabinets? Can you REALLY find that piece of paper that absolutely has to be mailed today? Do you really like cooking EVERY night? Is your sewing space as organized as possible? Just looking at Karen Snyder's pictures on her Anna Lena Land blog is enough to make me lock the door to my sewing space and throw away the key. And it WAS really that neat when I visited her last spring. I'm thinking Karen has a butler . . .

I've been psyching myself up to tackle my sewing "studio" and I use that term VERY loosely! - by telling everyone who reads my weekly shop emails how to do theirs. Am I following my own advice, ummmm, NO. I did clean off my cutting table, well cleared a bigger space anyway.

No, I won't be showing you pictures (read the last blog about why would anyone show their messy house on designed to sell) until I shoveled out the junk that I've accumulated. I do like Karen Snyder's organization idea of 30 minutes every day. I just have to force myself to do it.

There are organized sewers who have a place for everything and everything is in it's place. They are far and few between mind you but they're out there somewhere. My new year's resolution is to get the sewing room at least presentable for the furnace guy & the sprinkler system guy who have to wade through it every year to get to the furnace & the electric box.

And I really want to be able to sit down and sew without having to clean something off the sewing table first. Maybe the thought of Lurch from the Adams Family as a butler isn't so bad after all . . . .

Calling Lisa LaPorta!

Why is that when you get the Christmas decorations out, you end up redecorating most of the house? Suddenly curtains that have worked for longer than you want to think about - don't, chairs don't fit where they're supposed to and things that HAVE to be displayed to make it really Christmas, need more room than you have???? How can that be?

Jim & I enjoy watching Designed to Sell on HGTV & like Lisa LaPorta & "Clivey's" shows the best. And would someone tell me WHY ANYONE would let their homes be shown on TV in the state some of those are???? My mother would die of embarassment! And I'd never want anyone to see the state of my sewing room - Lisa would spend her $2,000 budget without ever leaving that space!

I was wishing Lisa & Clive would show up at my house for the past few months and tell me just how to get a TV, love seat, couch, end tables & a treadmill into my family room. The problem with the room is the fireplace - one whole wall is bricked, it's gorgeous, we love it but it makes getting everything into the space not an easy task. Double windows take up a huge hunk of the second wall, the third "wall" is a huge opening into the kitchen - leaving one full wall to put furniture on. Of course that wall is directly across from the double windows meaning the light reflects off the TV . . . .

Of course Lisa would just take out the TV, arrange the furniture with the fireplace being the focal point and spent $400 on accessories - but Jim would have a meltdown over the no TV. So for two years we've been looking for a corner TV unit. Have we found one that would fit into the 46" we have? NO!!!!

This all came to a head this year as my Santa collection sat in boxes waiting for the mess we've ignored in the family room to be resolved & an "inherited" (meaning a piece of furniture one of the kids no longer had room for but didn't want to get rid of) ended up in our family room while I was in TX. This entertainment unit is huge and DID NOT fit in the 46". I lived with it for a month, then said it's got to go. We moved it down to Sara's bedroom where it is still HUGE but thankfull out of my sight for the moment!

Back to the stores looking for a corner TV unit. No luck. We tried bureaus, tables - nothing worked. Finally last night Jim took the old TV unit that was too big down to his workshop, cut some of it off, put the side back on & it fits perfectly.

The Nativty & my Santas are displayed, Christmas can come now.

Christmas Shopping for Myself

I grew up in Massachusetts. My Dad watched baseball , which meant the Sox and Yaz, and football when the Pats still played in Boston. Soccer hadn't take the US by storm back them, the Celtics I don't remember much and we didn't start watching hockey until Bobby Orr arrived at the Boston Garden - how's THAT for dating yourself!

Yesterday was the first day you could buy Red Sox tickets. I've been saying for years now that I wanted to go back to Boston to watch a Red Sox game. Yup, I am a life long Red Sox fan living in Yankee country. It makes for some interesting conversations during baseball season! I can't quote you statistics, but I know if they've won or lost and let me tell you, until the last six or seven years, they lost more than they won. I can name most of the players, but not all and I can't tell you who is pitching when.

BUT I love to go to Fenway. I've been to other stadiums and there very nice but the seats I can afford are so far away from the field, watching on TV is better. Fenway Park is the oldest baseball park in the US. It's small, crowded and yes, there are poles in the way of a bunch of seats. But it has something not many other ball parks have anymore - character and history. Here's some Fenway trivia for you - the first official game played in Fenway Park was April 20, 1912 - the Sox beat the Yankees (back then called the Highlanders!)

We did make it to a game this September. Our boys bought us tickets and we talked my older brother & sister-in-law into going with us. (Didn't take much talking, Laurel said yes and Sooky had no choice!) This is Laurel with Tim Wakefield in Yawkey Way before the game. We had a great time and I decided then & there, no more excuses, at least one game every year from now on.

So that's how one computer at the store was tied up yesterday trying to get chosen randomly to buy tickets to see the Twins (Jim is from Minnesota) play in April. Jim kept on long after our boys had given up and was rewarded! Four tickets are ours! I am sure Sooky complained about how cold it will be in Fenway in April - but we skipped over him and went straight to Laurel - who said "We're In!" He'll grump, but he'll go and give us a running commentary on stats and players & we'll eat ice cream even though it's freezing - cuz we're from New England & ice cream is a way of life. We'll just drink cocoa with it!

So that was all the Christmas shopping I did yesterday. Cards aren't written, all the gifts aren't made but I have Red Sox tickets, the kids are all coming home for Christmas - it will be a good one!

Till next time.