Spring Break-- it looks a little like winter!

In between 2 weeks of travel, I was able to convince Big Daddy to take us over the mountains for a little break.  I wanted to go to see this quilt show.  Kristin is such an amazing quilter.  We met SO very long ago in one of Tonya's quilt alongs. (I am betting that Kristin finished her quilt and mine is still hanging out in the craft room somewhere.) Last summer all three of us were able to hang out in Sisters during the Quilter's Affair.  FUN FUN FUN to meet cool people online and then find that they are cool in person as well.--- more on this show on another post.

We were able to find a cute little house (isn't my brood cute?!) (Brownie and his rocker hair-do!) a block from the park and just a short walk downtown.  Sometimes the best trips come together at the last minute, just how I like it!

We went to the sno-play park for the first time!!!  Yes, I have lived here for over 20 years and this is my first "serious" sledding excursion.  It was GREAT!!  Everyone had a wonderful time.  Did I forget to mention earlier that another reason we went away for a few days was to mark Blondie's BIRTHDAY!  He is now 6 years old!!!  He was so at home in the snow.  Since he was in-utero I have thought that he was going to grow up to be an extreme sports enthusiast.  His antics on the sledding hill told me that we need to get that boy a HELMET!  On one trip up the hill to meet me, he "accidentally" dropped the sled and had to retrieve it 3 times... endless energy.  What a little bundle of love!

At one point I looked up the  (Big, BIG) hill and saw Big Daddy getting ready to slide Mango down the hill on her snowsuit.  Of course I gave that the big "NO" frown, only to find that it was all "little" Mango's idea.  She saw a big boy going down on his snow pants and she thought that she should too.  The only thing that I can come up with is that we get these kids A LOT of supervised snow experience while they are young so that they can be somewhat savvy when they get older and Mom is not around.  I am going to have totally white hair by 40!

No trip to the high desert would be complete without a tortoise shot?  A man brought a tortoise out for a walk to the park.  It was just really funny.  Weird, but funny.

The joke of the whole trip was my never ending knitting project.  I have finally realized that I like the knitting almost more than I like the finished project.  I also am a HORRIBLE gauge swatch knitter.  I am just always off and not too consistent.... blah blah blah.  A few birthdays ago I bought this BEAUTIFUL yarn for myself.  I finally knit is up in to a simple cowl, wore it sledding, and decided that it was too wide.  My husband was kind of shocked when, on the way back from the mountain, I unraveled the cowl and began to re-knit it in a smaller width.  I think that if I could just keep knitting that yarn for every project I would be a happy girl. (I should just buy another skein or two and be done with it!)

Brother Jon's served us some mighty fine grub and their sentiment is sweet and direct!  A new motto for me!

In the meantime I have been working on some patterns and tutorials... you know, just trying to figure out my way in the world.  March was my month in the EMQG bee so I came up with this to make an "X" block.  I always like to find a way to "liberate" another quilter!


I am a little reluctant to say it, don't want to jinx it-- but I feel like I am more accepting of this "new normal".  The normal without my mom daily in my life.  I finished the session of grief classes that I talked about a few months back.  I made myself go to the first three (it felt REALLY awful), but then I continued for the next four.  It was really nice to have a place that was really safe to express how sad I am about losing my mom.  A place where I am not worried about scaring my kids with my grief.  It was so nice to hear from other "eldest" children about how responsible they feel for all the little details of their parents affairs.  It was comforting to learn about how other people are struggling with their own "new normal" and to just not feel crazy.  My class was through hospice care at the local hospital.  I am going to continue when it starts up again in May.  I would really recommend trying it at least three times.


So many times the past few months I have thought of these lyrics by Mat Kearney-


... fear is an anchor
time is a stranger
love isn't borrowed
we aren't promised tomorrow

we'll never be ready if we keep waiting
for the perfect time to come


--JMB

A lot has been going on here... is it REALLY December already?

Hi,

Long time no blog here... I have been blogging over here, but it is mostly the nuts and bolts stuff about starting a group (Eugene Modern Quilt Guild). I was driving in the car today and thinking..."wow, our little guild has come so far" and "what was I thinking when I threw this together". We have had 2 meetings and 2 sew-in sessions... and I have met SO many great people, right here in my own back yard. It feels good. Oh yea, and I have also been getting ready for this. This year is my "building" year apparently, or "attempting" year at least. I have done a number of things that TOTALLY scare the poo out of me, and I have lived... and even liked it.

So in the interest of "attempting" things... I whipped up this SWEET advent calendar (if I may toot my own horn...) The best part was IT WAS ALL STUFF I HAD LYING AROUND! Oh my goodness, I have SO much crafting stuff. I like it all! PAPER... GLUE... STAMPS... ZIPPERS... AND THE FABRIC, "my [gosh] Putty" THE FABRIC! GLUTTONY THY NAME IS JESSICA (a.k.a. jmbmommy) I could go on and on, but what would the point be? Getting ready for the Cuppajoy sale has been a blessing, because I now have a better handle on how much stuff I have. I need to use it or lose it.

Using it:

To make this calendar I just did these few things,

1)Brainstormed with the boys about things they might like to do for the holiday season (I did write down "Go to Chucky Cheese" because I do love those boys.

2)After they went to bed, I punched out 24 circles and glued them to 24 tiny clothes pins (big ones would work too, but tiny things are so cute)

3)Wrote down 24 different things to do on little green papers. In years past, my OCD might have made me make these all the same size... but I am being CRAZY, and they are ALL different!! (I did try to plan some of the bigger activities for when they both are out of school. There were some small activities too, like "crazy hair day")

4)Assembled it all together on a piece of museum board that I had cut for a different project that never quite panned out... LUCKY ME!

5) The middle looked rather Large and Black and Blah (you know, LBB?!) So I just stuck a piece of fancy schmancy paper there. I even USED some of my fancy schmancy scrapbookery-type letter stickers (I can't be buried with them... they are 2 years old!) I added something simple and classic, kinda catchy.... Merry Christmas... on top of that and VOILA'!

Another advent calendar DONE! And I only started it a day late!

There was ANOTHER flickr swap... yes, My name is Jessica and I am a flickr swap addict. BUT, this one was small, just a mug rug (translation: smaller than a placemat, bigger than a coaster). I was stricken Thanksgiving week with a MOST HORRIBLE strep throat... I did not want THOSE cooties anywhere near my rug, so I finished it just in time AFTER I took the antibiotics. Phewwww...
You make... but also you receive.... here is my beautiful new afternoon coffee friend! I love it!!! The little deer is such a dear and it makes me smile when I look at those backwards letters. Thanks!! It was from this nice new friend.

That is the short wrap up... I have so much to share. I believe that if I just make a plan that I will be able to blog all the things that I want to... we will see if I can make that a reality too. Thanks for sticking with me... I was just thinking, if you too forgot to make an advent calendar this year, you could always adjust it and make it a "12 days of Christmas" calendar. Your kids will still like it.

Peace in this Season

JMB

More to learn, always...A tutorial.

This chard, besides being tasty, looked interesting to me today, like a piece of flesh or an organ. (yikes, that sounds kind of morbid.) But an interesting thought--veins in a leaf--veins in a heart. Homology in the universe-- Talk amoungst yourselves...
My village is coming along. I pieced together the middle piece last night, after it had been laying on the design wall begging to be dealt with. I decided to take out a house that I was feel ill towards and I made the light one on the end, and finally I felt that it could be sewn together. I am not totally happy with the edging that I put on. I think that it needs to be spruced up. I love the print of the fabric and the neighborhood has so many bias edges, that I thought that it needed to be "gated" before I left it to hang for much longer. I think now my study of wonky houses needs to continue...I am going to make a bunch more of the "sub-urban" houses around the outside and cobble them all together somehow.

We will see what happen. This is the MOST experimental I have been with my quilting. This is not going to be my masterpiece (Not that I am ready to make a masterpiece, I find that I am freer to try different things if I state that at the outset.) This is going to just be a exploratory large quilt, so that I can see what I can do if I am not trying to make some thing look "a certain way"--I am not sure if I am explaining myself properly--But I tend towards a "product-minded" out some rather than a "process-minded" outcome (could I get more analytical?? Please!) This project has really made me excited about the process of quilting. I have been working on this piece in fits and starts, letting it rest when I haven't been able to figure out where to go or when I have felt frustrated with my skills.

Making the pink house in my swap quilt (if you want to see how it was received you can look here.) helped me make something that was more "pretty" and increased my confidence so that could continue with this neighborhood quilt... We will just have to see... For our tutorial today:

Changing rotary cutter blades.

1)Change blades often, it reduces wrist fatigue when cutting through multiple pieces of fabric. A sharp blade also decreases the incidence of a wavery line when you are cutting over multiple seam allowances. 2)Have care when reassembling the rotary cutter with the new SUPER sharp blade. If it falls, even from a short distance, it will slice ANYTHING, your finger, the door in your growing neighborhood....ANYTHING.

3)Be prepared, when the door gets sliced, to not flog yourself too terribly. Remember there are no accidents, only (re)design OPPORTUNITIES!! Yeah me! At least it wasn't my finger??

JMB

Just when you think you are almost done...

I really want to share my quilting knowledge. So, I thought that I would post a tutorial (these samples were made purely for this "tutorial", wink-wink). Above is an example of what can happen when you are quilting late at night, maybe after a crazy day, maybe you are just trying to pound out the stitches....what-have-you....

I am going to continue in a step by step format, because I feel that it will be more obvious to beginners about how these problems can and do happen... and how if you are "experienced", such as myself, how to AVOID them.

1)When free-motion quilting, make sure to sew faster than your eyes can see. This enables you to sew through any number of layers of fabric and not even feel it.
2)Make sure that you have lots of floppy extra fabric so that when you are sewing at top speed, it can fold over and create neat pseudo-reverse applique effect.

3)Make sure that you do this to at least 2 corners of your project, and don't notice it all at once. This way you can use your seam ripper on the first corner. You will release all of your pent up swear words. Then when you see the second, much worse corner you will be able to expand your technique to little scissors and thread pulling.

4)Make sure that you are listening to a podcast while you are perfecting your fabric destroying technique. (Something crafty is preferable.)

5)Laugh at your mistakes....ALOT. It helps also to remember that, it will happen again, maybe not today, or tomorrow....but most likely on a project that you are trying to finish on a deadline.

Everyone needs to just try free-motion quilting, you might like it!

:)

***Helpful hints***

At the quilting stores they have these "fancy" gloves with traction fingers and super-grip and stuff. DON'T BUY THEM! They are like $12.99, and they are the EXACT same things as the ones sold for the "dudes" at the home building store (Like Home Depot...) I think that I paid between $2.50-$4.00 for mine. (OK, I know that mine are black and the ones at the fancy quilting store are lavender...black is far more slimming!) This incarnation of the "dexterity" gloves is the best so far. They are thin, non-smelly and have GREAT traction. I have tried just about everything else...the little finger condoms, baggy knit gloves with the dots...they all are simply trash as far as I am concerned.

Don't get ripped off because you don't know, go to the tool section and get yourself a pair of sticky gloves.

My kids were so cute this morning...my husband has been off hunting this week and I am not a morning person... but the oldest one smiled for the camera and the youngest had on a "ducky-Moses" headscarf... How could I stay grumpy when faced with these mugs?

JMB