News and notes and nattering

My current afore-mentioned project for which I now have a makeshift design wall (see previous post) is on hold. I’ll tell you, however; a wall vs. a floor makes a HUGE difference!!!! I have blocks I’m ripping apart now for various reasons (too much of one color, needs more cowbell (inside joke), etc). I have a lot of those done and after other things are out of the way (or I get frustrated beyond belief with my emergent projects), I get to make NEW blocks out of the old blocks! :-) Sound tedious? It is. But this quilt is for ME (okay, our spare room). I love the fabrics (and probably chopped them all too small, but there’s nothing I can do about that now) and I’m flying without a pattern for the first time, so I want to take a little more time and planning so it can be as close to “I like it” as I can get it.

Why is it on hold, you ask????? Mom gave me the baby quilt to appliqué (not going as well as I had hoped - the design isn’t terribly forgiving ), so that’s one emergent project. What’s the other one, you ask?? So even though I have this nice list of projects that I actually look at now and then, I FORGOT that I wanted to make a quilt for Bill’s brother for Christmas. WHOOPS!!! The theme is pirates (arrrrr...) and I have a large panel, so that helps TONS for reducing the amount of the piecing I have to do. One thing I want to do (about the only thing I’m sure I want to do) is to put compasses in the corners, so I’m going to be doing some paper piecing. In fact, I’ll be starting that tonight at Girls' Night Out with Roxanne Carter. I get to “hog” Roxanne for a little while since she said a while ago that she knew an easy way to make them. So easy even I can do it? That remains to be seen.

Speaking of Bill’s family (and I was, but you probably forgot by now because I ramble), his parents are going to be here October 10-22. We’re not going to get all our pictures hung, so we’ve got to get them all out of the spare bedroom :-) and get that looking more like a bedroom than a storage room. We only have a few décor touches left in that room, so that’s cool!

Further décor update: The kitchen was the first room we decorated since it had been updated already (the only room in the whole house)... that’s been done since last year. The master bedroom walls are now fully populated (don’t even talk to be about window treatments in ANY portion of the house yet! :-p The spare bedroom walls are done as well, so we’re making progress. We’ve got one wall of the living room done (two to go), and some of the photos we want in the hallway. We’re hoping for more family pictures from Bill’s siblings’ weddings - we have two (plus one from our wedding). Bill’s Mom said that it took a while before they thought of taking family pictures, but we’ll see what she comes up with to bring out with her that we can copy. We have one picture hanging in the dining room... how sad is that? ;-) Hopefully we can handle hanging up the five remaining things that are going on that wall before the company arrives. There might be a few accent mirrors might be added to that workstatement, depending on how it looks when we get the main things hung). Then we have a whole other wall to deal with in the dining room (let’s hear it for windows!), but we don’t have frames for all those prints as of yet. I have an idea where the bathrooms are going, but they’re a little harder since they haven’t been updated since 1977 (no lie), so I have to “make” my desired décor look right with a butterscotch toilet and funky linoleum. ;-) I’m pretty much ignoring that in my decisions, and there’s a shelf I want to use that I CANNOT find anywhere!! I thought I’d seen it recently (before I wanted to use it), but I can’t find it again. I guess I’ll have to spend some time in the garage and see what I can find. Dumb dumb dumb since one part of the ensemble was in a craft room box, one was in a family room box, and who knows where I saw the shelf. *think*think*think*

Another note in the décor realm, I am SOOOOOOOOOOOO proud of myself. I bought some 5x5 beveled mirrors and some 5x5 wood frames, and guess what I made? Accent mirrors!!! I’m such a smarty pants!!! ;-)

And speaking of smarty pants, No, Jana, I DON’T have pictures yet. :-p But feel free to keep bugging me... that’s the only way I’ll get to it eventually.

That’s it for now... stay tuned (ha). ;-)

Blessings!
Kristin