Just Keep Swimming

Today the purging continued apace.  About half of the boys' toys got audited, and about half their books boxed up to go to a storage unit.  I pulled out my ottoman that houses embroidery stuff, and yoinked a good whock of stuff out of it to go to my guild.  I put two coats of polyurethane on the Featherweight table; one more goes on in the morning.  Then I get to figure out how to fix the little latch that Jazzy half-ripped out of the table.  We also sallied forth and got paint for the two interior doors that never got their final coat....

Not bad for three-quarters of the household being some degree of sick.

Busy Day

I spent some time working in the garden today, finally getting the herb bed amended, planted, and mulched.  At the end, it looked like this:

The boys and I took some of the scrap bricks and made a little path to the fountain.  Right now there's oregano, two Italian parsleys, a bee balm, a couple clumps of garlic chives, a lemon verbena, and some lemon thyme in there.  The new plants have tomato cages over them to protect them from small boys and cats until they're established.  I'd like to add a lavender plant and some flowers.  And put one of my mint plants in the big planter behind the verbena, now that I've moved the chives out of it and into the bed.  Only two more beds to go!  (Three or four if you count the ones in front of the house....)

I also pulled this project out of the garage:

This is a Singer Featherweight card table I bought at an estate sale many years ago for $8.  It was in rough shape - holes, gouges, duct tape residue all over.  Knowing what it was, I snatched it up for a learning project.  I sanded it down, filled the holes and gouges with wood putty, and set it aside.  For a long time.  Today I pulled it out of the garage, dusted it off, conditioned the wood, and stained it.  The light bits are the "stainable" wood putty.  (It lied.  I've touched the putty up with a brown and a red marker so it blends better now.)  Tomorrow I start putting the first of two poly coats on it.  I don't have a Featherweight, nor am I particularly interested in acquiring one, so I texted my friend Debi and asked her if she was still looking for a Featherweight table.  She is.  So hopefully next week she'll come take a look at it and buy it from me.  Last time I checked they usually go for around $100, so that's what I'm asking.  Given that the sanding, staining, and finishing supplies cost me around $40, it's not as much of a markup as the original purchase cost of the piece might make it seem.

And, finally, this is what's under my needle at the moment.  I've just about run out of the orange thread I've been using to quilt the blocks, though, so I've stopped until I can hit up Joann Fabrics in the morning and get another spool.  Since there's so much blue and green in the nine-patches, that's what colors I pieced together for the back.  And I'm thinking a dark brown print I have, if I have enough, will be perfect for binding it eventually.

Sick Children and Sewing On.

One and a half sick little boys.  What fun!  Particularly since Jazzy, who is still nonverbal, is much the sicker of the two.  A regular little snot factory at the moment.  Nonetheless I hied all three of us out into the garden this afternoon to do some cleanup work and let them rob the blueberry bushes.  Squiddle, at least, can be told to only pick the blue ones.  Jazzy as yet has no such discernment.  On the other hand, Jazzy will happily eat tomatoes, while Squiddle still just makes a face and spits them out....

I got the vintage orange-sashed nine-patch basted today and around one-fifth of its blocks quilted.  I only have maybe one quilt's worth of batting left on the roll.  Plus a king-sized packaged batt I bought years ago.  Plus some scraps I could maybe Frankenbatt together into a wallhanging (as I did for Christmas Landing).  I might be batting-free when we move, which would be well-timed.

Today I also typed up the minutes for my guild secretary job and sent them out to the other board members to beta-check before Tuesday's meeting.  I'm not looking forward to telling them that I may be moving out of the area mid-term. :(  But I did bite down and enter Nancy's Quilt in the Orange County Fair.  Given the reactions to it from both my guilds, I have a good feeling about its chances.

Busy Weekend

Biting the bullet and accepting that it's time to move means starting to do all the little things to the house that will shiny it up to entice buyers.  Like painting the exterior where the water heater tank hut used to be.  And accepting that even taking a sample in still doesn't mean a perfect paint match, alas.  Still, it's a lot better than the gaping unpainted patch it was.

Also out in the side yard, I pulled the dying blueberry bush from the garden bed and replaced it with a healthy one of the same variety.  And planted more leek and bean seeds to help remedy the patchy germination where cats decided to sprawl, roll about, and god knows what else shortly after the initial planting.  I've also dug amendments into about half the herb/fountain bed, the rest to be done tomorrow.

I completed the Christmas Landing wallhanging and plan to enter it in the Orange Grove quilt show this year:

I also completed my block for the President's Quilt for Orange Grove:

And I went through my stash of mostly vintage quilt tops and pulled out one that will be relatively easy to quilt - sashed nine-patches, with just one tiny repair to do on the border.  I pieced together a backing and wrote out the label... and just need to sew it on and get it basted.  But today I kind of lost my mojo and had to push through things to get stuff done.  No sewing..

Results; Efforts

Chalk pounce: dismal failure.  I'm willing to try it again on something that's not a string-pieced border and see if it works better there, but for this project... yeah.  Nope.  Nonetheless, I got the Christmas Landing all quilted, and I pulled bits of fabric from my Christmas scraps bin and made a scrappy red binding, which is maybe a quarter sewn down to the backside now.

The boys have been so admiring of the volunteer pumpkin plant at Nana's house (one of the pumpkins is already the size of a basketball) that I told them if I could get the big bed cleared in the kitchen garden, I'd put some pumpkins in it.  I got it three-quarters cleared yesterday. I also finally got some straw mulch put onto one of the unmulched beds.

Today, since we have a realtor coming to give us advice tomorrow, I'm trying to tidy up the house a little.  It's an uphill battle all the way, but I've got at least the master bed and bath looking decent.  The boys' room is okay.  Now I just have the rest of the disaster areas to consider.

And, of course, there's the little voice in the back of my head pointing out that if we're going to move, I'm not going to be here to enjoy the garden, so why am I trying to put effort into it.  I shut up that voice by pointing out that I don't know when the move will occur, and a healthy, flourishing garden will look better as far as selling than a dead, weedy one.

Busy Stuffs

Over the weekend I got the Christmas Landing wallhanging basted and I have it about half quilted... just the two borders to do.  I pulled out one of my grandmother's cable templates out and will be using that for the outer border.  I got a chalk pounce for $2 at last month's Orange Grove Quilt Guild meeting, so I'm planning to experiment with that and see how well it works.

We've been wrestling with several things lately.  One of which is getting Squiddle toilet-trained.  He's been doing so well with not wetting himself overnight that last night he got to wear big boy undies to bed, rather than the overnight diapers.  So, of course, this morning he wet the bed for the first time. :/  Sigh.  We invited Murphy in, I guess.

We've also been dealing with the school district.  Squiddle's supposed to start Transitional Kindergarten (pre-K) in fall, but his assigned school is very poorly rated.  And the system is sufficiently labyrinthine that we missed the deadline to request a transfer.  So now we need to decide - does he not go to TK (it's not required), do we try for a fall transfer (which means he goes to that school for 2-3 weeks and then gets uprooted to a better one), or do we let him attend the assigned school for a full year and then transfer him (it's only TK)?

Corollary to the school district woes, we've also accepted it's time to move.  We want to be in a better school district, in a house with either one more bedroom or a dedicated office.  The thing is, I love our home and all that we've done to it in the last eight years, and all that we could still do to it, but... even if we built on to it, we can't improve the schools.  So now we're faced with cleaning, repairing, selling.  The realtor who helped us buy Greenwood is coming out on Friday and we hope he can tell us where we should be focusing our money on improvements prior to selling.  On the bright side, this is sure helping me decide to lighten the load and purge stuff!

Finally Friday

The reorganization of the sewing nook has taken it out of me.  However, it's now mostly done... just the one heap of stuff lined up along the back of the sofa that needs to be sorted through and dealt with.

That said, how is it that I keep getting rid of huge heaps of stuff and it never makes my remaining stuff take up any less room????

Grar.  Whatever.  In celebration, I finally took 3" off the too-long Lilo and Stitch pyjama bottoms I'd made Wonderful Husband for Christmas.  And yesterday I got some stitching time in and got these two sets of blocks finished:

The first set is a Rail Fence variation for Block Lotto. I already had my box of 2.5" squares by the machine for a scrappy Double Irish Chain I'm slowly working on, so why not?  The white strips are from the leftover scraps of the dishtowels that had the embroideries for Nancy's Quilt.

The second set, the blue Friendship Stars, are for the Orange Grove Quilters Guild block of the month for next month.  The blue came from this set of scraps that I snagged from the Orange County Quilters Guild freebies table:

(And, no, this is not the reason why the sewing nook refuses to compact.  Most months I don't get anything. My theory is that rearranging everything makes it fluffier.)

I've pulled out the next time-sensitive project, a block for the President's Quilt for OGQG, which will also come from the above set of freebie scraps, but it's that time of month so we'll see if I can get any sewing in today or not....