WIP

Any good crafter knows that WIP means "work in progress." And like most crafters, I have a few going right now. I have two more Free Motion quilting fillers from Leah Day's FMQ Project done and waiting to be posted, as well as one I tried my hand at (I think it's a good concept, but it will take a better quilter than me to bring it to life). I have many different knitting projects on various needles including an afgan, what I am going to call a bolero- or a long sleeved shrug with cabling across the back, a scarf for my DH (dear husband), a double knit scarf, a lace shrug, and an experiment with colorwork that includes ladybugs and dragonflies. I am spinning some of what I hope will be a fine yarn from some great Cottswald roving, and some friends gave me a fleece off a Cottswald/Border Leicster mix named Bella. So I've got my hands full, not to mention the now four year old Tiny who is always keeping me busy.
I started cleaning Bella's fleece today. I really understand why other bloggers and shepherds reccomend wearing gloves, but it did help soften them up after a weekend of yard work. I have some great photos of the whole process that will be going up shortly.

Until then, wish me luck and quick fingers!

Day 3 Sort of... Sashiko Shells

Third time's the charm? You decide...

This is called Sashiko Shells. It is basically an overlapping arch inspired by Japanese quilting. I decided to change thread, but I can see that while the yellow looks nice in person, it doesn't show up as well on camera. I'll have to rethink my color choice a bit I guess, but as promised here is also a picture of the back, green flannel with green thread. Not an exact match, but closer than the front for sure.

This one seemed easier for some reason. I have some sort of weird fine motor control, even in handwriting, I can do small things pretty well, like this design, and large things well, like writing on a white/chalkboard in a classroom, but that middle ground of quilting normal things and writing on paper is somehow not quite right... Oh well, I guess I just need more practice.
I also quilted this one at a higher stitch speed, and that seemed to help with the jerkiness of my machine. The smaller stitches that were made gave it a more gradual line which was easier to hide mistakes in.

Well, for a couple days I am going to take a break from following Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project, where I am getting these quilting patterns, to quilt a blanket for my husband. It's not anything too fancy, he's rather a minimalist, but it's nice to make something that he will like. After quilting almost the first quarter of it all I can say is that queen sized quilts are BIG. Wish me luck and straight lines.

Day 2- Free Motion "Cursive F's"

Here is my 2nd attempt at The Free Motion Quilting Project.

It's not super even, and I did change scale alot, but I think it's better than my Shadow Waves. Though, to be fair, this is a design I have been doodling since sometime in middle school, so I have a bit more muscle memory for it.

After looking at more of Leah's videos, I am seriously thinking about getting a Supreme Slider. It is just constant work to move my square around, though I think part of that is because I have such a small boarder...

I've decided to go in order of difficulty for the quilting patterns instead of chronological. I figure this should work out better since when Leah started this project she knew 2 free motion fillers and I know (knew, can I say I know these others now even though I'm not very good at them?) one, stippling, although that was just me looking at a stippled blanket a friend made my daughter for her first birthday and trying to recreate it.

Of course using the blue thread on the gray surface is going to make the stitches stand out more, and you will be able to see my slip ups. Next time, I will take a picture of the back with is green with green thread and we can discuss how much better it looks when thread blends.

Confession, I broke thread between each row, but since Leah says this would be good for a thin edging or boarder, I figure it's ok. 

Well, that's all for now. Hopefully the next one will get better too!

Day 1 Free Motion Quilting- Shadow Waves

Here is my first attempt. 

Not at bad on the computer as it looks in person. I need to work on having more consistent stitches. Some are very long, and others are very short, plus I'm not very good and smooth lines yet. Everything feels very jagged and jarring. Maybe it's because of the size, it was getting a bit stuck in the various levels of my machine.  Hopefully the next one will be better, but overall I'm not too upset with the end result.

New Projects

Working on a couple of things:

   One, as any woman always does, trying to loose about 15 lbs. Let's say I am currently 81 lbs and am trying to get to 68-65 lbs.. Don't freak out, I'm a full grown adult and don't have any type of eating disorder, I'm just not too keen on the idea of posting my weight online for all to see, so I already subtracted several dozen pounds.
   I started last week at 83 and am down to 81 after just my intake and monitoring what I ate on www.fitday.com. Clearly it worked pretty well, but all week I have felt tired, crabby, irritated, and lacked motivation to do anything. So that is not going to work again. This week, I am going to try to allow myself to eat, but change the types of foods I eat. The plan is to eat fruits from when I wake up until noon, vegetables from noon until dinner, dinner is fair game (my family is not on a diet, just me), and then work on protein after dinner. I might need to inject some things like oatmeal or protein in earlier in the day, but that is the general plan.

Two, I found this great Youtube Channel and corresponding website, www.daystyledesign.com. Here Leah Day has a collection of over 365 free motion quilting filler designs. So I went to Joann, got some solid fabric and am going to try to work a few each week. I think I will just follow her order and start here.

Wish me luck, here we go.

Birthday Time

Tiny turned 4 today. My goodness, she is big. We had her party yesterday so as not to interfere with church. She has a princess party, with a few friends over. Here are some shots of decorations.

 These are the tutus I made for Tiny and her friends. I just hung them on a coat rack so they wouldn't be all over the floor or our very limited seating. 

 No princess party is complete without a castle cake!

 Eighty-seven balloons strung on thread reached from our front door, through our kitchen. I liked the effect the streamers gave when taped to the wall. I did this to make sure our cats wouldn't pull them down. The different levels were made to accommodate the bathroom door.

 

 Very happy Birthday Girl!

I was working on a quilt for her. She knew all about it and ever picked out the fabric, thread, and stitch designs, but she was still pretty happy that it is done.

I worked on this over many months, but I did sort of keep track of how long this took be measured in the books I listed to and movies I watched while making this. Yes, I watched movies on my laptop while making it, that could be why my blocks aren't quite the same size...

1. Harry Potter 1-6
2. You've Got Mail
3. Moulin Rouge
4. Paper Towns
5. Exodus
6. The Great Gatsby
7. Heart of Darkness
8. A multitude of articles for grad school and bits of other books

Experiment

So Tiny is going to be 4 in two weeks. In the mean time, between finishing her quilt, planning her birthday party, working on my dissertation for graduate school, and babysitting, I am going to be gathering materials for an experiment with her "school".

I have at least 5 months before I might be getting ready for a new school year teaching full time. So my plan is to make letter concept boards. We'll do a letter a week and cover the board with pictures of animals, objects, jobs, artists, countries, states, and other things that pertain to that letter, and then do some appropriate "research" on those things together. Here is my Pinterest Board for the letter A.

We're also going to be getting back into this book. We started the book in October or November and she just didn't have much interest. Hopefully, she's matured a bit and will be ready. She has a much greater interest in books now, so that's good. We'll see how it all goes. Wish us luck!

Book Reviews

Hello, It's been a while, but we are here and doing well. We had a great Thanksgiving at my parents and are now gearing up to go to the in-laws for Christmas. I will put up Holiday pictures after Christmas.

I have been very busy quilting, but we'll save that for another day as well. Right now I'd like to go over a few of the books Tiny and I have been reading.

Of course with winter here, we hit the ever popular The Mitten and Trouble with Trolls by Jan Brett. These are great for sequencing and Trouble with Trolls has a great, clever girl as the main character, but I'd like to point out some lesser known books, at least they were lesser known to me.


Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett is a fun book in general, but being a knitter, I really enjoyed it. There is a girl, Annabelle, who lives in a small town where everything is either white from the snow or black from chimney smoke and soot. She finds a box of yarn one day and discovers that it is magic and will never run out of yarn. Of course the box contains rainbow yarn, and she proceeds to knit sweaters for the entire town, including the animals, trees, and houses. When a greedy Archduke finds out about her box, he offers to buy it. Annabelle rejects his offer, so he steals the box. When he returns to his castle, he opens the box and finds it empty. He throws the box out the window, where it lands on a piece of ice, and floats across the sea, back to Annabelle.

Again, a good strong female character for my daughter to mix in with the Cinderella's, but also a look at what other people do with knitting, how we can be kind and generous with our talents, and how things don't tend to work out for you when you are greedy.

Pirate Princess by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen and Jill McElmurry is another fun books for girls. Princess Bea decides she doesn't want to be a princess, so she runs away and joins a pirate crew. She tries one job after another, but fails pretty badly, and is forced to walk the plank. Then, at the last minute, she smells the treasure. The pirate crew follows her directions and finds more gold and jewels than ever before. She gets to stay and becomes a valued member of the crew. 

This is a good book that shows that what you imagine might not always work out. Things might not be as easy as you think. But, being a children's book, it still ends happily.

Ok, now for some seasonal books. 

The Adventures of Snowwoman by Katya Arnold is fun for Christmas. Snowwoman is made so that she can deliver a letter to Santa because none of the children in town have a Christmas tree. A little dog is supposed to be her guide, but when the dog runs off after a fox, Snowwoman gets lost and the wind tears her apart. All the forest animals help to put her back together once the dog explains their journey, and they get the letter to Santa just in time. 

Another fun story was The Snowflake Sisters by J. Patrick Lewis. Two snowflakes travel through the country through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even end up in Time Square for New Year's. From their they join a snowman in Central Park and stay until winter is over.

This one sparked a few crafts for Tiny. We made coffee filter snowflakes for days after this book. She loved it. 

We are also going to be doing some salt painting soon. I'll let you know how that turns out.

Happy Reading!

We're Going Places

Finishing my quilt for Quilts for Kids this week put me in the sewing mood, so I finished a project that I have had for a while, made a Christmas present sample test, and sewed a simple tote bag.

 Here is the Tiny in her new World Quilt. Before you get too excited, the actual map is a print, and I just quilted it through the longitude and latitude lines onto some fleece. Tiny has been trying to snuggle this blanket for weeks, and now she finally can. Last night as we were going through bedtime stories, we talked about how each color is a different place, and then spent a couple minutes with her pointing to countries while I told her the names.

 Here's the Christmas present test. I need to make a pencil roll for my niece and a car carrier for my nephew. Pencil rolls are pretty simple, but the car carrier needed a bit more thought, so I tried one for the Tiny. These are special smaller cars from one of the quiet books that comes with toys. Now, I just have to get sizing for some matchbox cars, but I think I have the concept down. I even got to try some new techniques, such as novelty stitches for quilting and button holes, though I sewed the buttons on my hand, and I won't be putting buttons on my nephew's. 

So here is a list of my projects, both sewing and knitting, that I have to make by Christmas, or have already started.

Sewing

• Colored Pencil Roll- Christmas
• Car/Toy Carrier- Christmas
• Desk Organizer- Christmas
• Twin sized quilt for the Tiny- Still in the cutting process
• Queen sized quilt- I've had this fabric for years, but now I shared the layout plan with the Hubby and he nixed it as too busy, so now I'm on the lookout for some background fabric.

Knitting

• Sock Pattern
• Pi scarf- Yes, a scarf with the digits of pi. I've actually started two of these...
• Free Form Sweater- I'm working on a sweater without a pattern. I tried this with a sweater for Tiny, and it worked out alright until I got to the hood.
• Long Sleeve Bolero Sweater- I've been working on this one for about two years. I got halfway through the first time and realized I didn't have enough yarn to finish. The yarn had been discontinued so I had to unravel it to the cuff and tweak the pattern, now I'm almost done with the first sleeve and am still on my first ball of yarn.
• Short Sleeve Bolero Sweater- This is a lace pattern, but some of my yarn is back in New York...
• Blanket- Working on a modern log cabin type style, but still in the very early stages
• Requested Tiny Mittens

So, I've got alot of work to do.

Leaf Unit

 

Tiny and I read this book today. It has great information and goes through all sorts of trees and how the leaves look different. In the back there is even a page about where leaf color comes from, it even uses the chemical names like anthocyanin, so be prepared for that if you plan to read it.

We also read The Little Yellow Leaf. It is a story about a little leaf who is too afraid to fall off the tree. It nicely goes through several "milestones" of fall before the Yellow Leaf finds a Scarlet Leaf on the same tree and they decide to drop off the tree together.

 

To go along with these great books we did some crafts. I cut out a tree shape a glued it to a background page, and then Tiny put yellow leaves on.

 Here she is working on the second "Mommy Tree" after having completed the original "Daddy Tree" below.

For this project and others I have been letting her use the Creatology Glue Pens- she is holding one in the picture of her working. I love them. They contain liquid glue- which allows the glue to stay wet for long enough to work with, but have a sponge cap at the end- which limits the amount of glue that can be used. The sponge tip can be unscrewed for when larger amounts of glue are needed, like in a Calm Down Jar (which is why I originally bought these, sooo glad I couldn't find and regular clear glue that day).

Previously we have worked with glue sticks, but she can never finish her project before the glue she has put down dries. We've also used regular glue, but we had the usual problems of too much glue causing problems and making a mess. An additional bonus is that it is a cylinder which allows her to practice proper gripping skills. We are going to be getting these for a LONG time. They come in a pack of three pens, and I got them for less than $2 at Michaels!

Previously, we had gone out and collected an assortment of leaves and a couple days ago, we decided to sort and count them. See, Daddy is an engineer and is not fond of pictographs, being a former math teacher, and currently working on my master's in education, I don't see any reason in making things simpler than they need to be because adults think kids can't understand. Tiny had a great time sorting our selection of leaves by color and counting them. I then drew the bars, and you can see that she colored them. We even talked afterwards about how big rectangles mean lots of leaves and she told me that there were the most yellow leaves!  It's not something I expect her to do on her own, but it seems as good of an introduction to graphs as many others.--Daddy was very pleased with it when he got home too.

  Here is a shot from the first day of our Leaf Unit with a few of our books spread out and some light-weight foam oak leaf shapes. We sorted them by color (Tiny loves to sort and arrange things, I blame Daddy and his side of the family :p, though it only becomes a problem when she starts to rearrange displays at the store), and then worked on some patterns for the first time. She did pretty well with the concept of an ABAB pattern, and we tried and ABCABC pattern, but that was a bit too much. Then we used the colored leaves to make "picture patterns." 

We've got more days of leaves ahead!

Photo Fest

So, I've always been bad at the daily aspect of a  journal/diary. Here are a few photos that I will put stories with...soon I hope.

Ok, so I am having a Fall Mary Kay Party next weekend and am working on some recipes to see how they work. Here is the first recipe I tried.
http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-pumpkin-2-159672

I rolled them into balls to make them look like pumpkins, but then as my hands were covered with pumpkin/marshmallow goo, I remembered this party is for adults, and adults don't usually care what their food is shaped like. We'll see how well they stay together in "pumpkin" form before final shape decisions are made.

I guess she is big now...

So, the day has come...Tiny can use a mouse. I'm not sure if this is good or not. It happened on Wednesday at the library, she was playing a Dora game and could do one thing, but today...she was navigating a whole website.

I guess it was inevitable considering that laptop is older than she is. I guess that is just where we are in American society. Kids on computers before they can read. It's nice that the site is to easy that she doesn't need to read, it's nice that she can amuse herself in another way, it's nice that I don't have to stop what I am doing to help her, but what is her life going to be like when it revolves around screens. We'll just have to work on getting outside more often I guess.

Milk and Soap

In addition to Brown Bear, we have also been doing other color projects. We tried this milk, food coloring, and soap project found on Pinterest. Tiny LOVED it and asks to do it all the time. Here is a shot from the first time we did it.

Brown Bear

We are starting school with Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle. I wanted something that would be academically easy for Tiny as she got used to the routine of school. Especially since we don't have those natural bookends of actually going somewhere else. We are focusing on the color and the animal. We've gotten through Green Frog and Tiny already has the book memorized. She knows exactly what comes next and will yell at you if you say the animals out of order, but I think she is getting ready to move on as she is starting to say the wrong colors as a joke. Only a few more days.

Everyday, we color the animal from the book. She already knows her colors, so I am not picky about what color crayon she uses, but this is more an exercise for fine motor skills, and when she wants to she can color quite well and even stay within the lines at times, although it is hard to get her to stop coloring once the animal has been filled and she often scribbles over what she has done so nicely. She is much more interested in coloring these days. The first day of school, Sept. 17th, she spent about 5 minutes coloring the brown bear, and two nights ago, she spent three hours coloring pictures of My Little Ponies after we got done with Blue Horse. We're making progress. 

Introductions

Hi. It's me. I used to be a teacher, but then we moved and now I am staying home with, and homeschooling, my three year old daughter, Tiny, I have a Mary Kay business, I am working through a master's degree, I am trying to make my family healthier, and I finally have time to do some of the things I love like knit, quilt, and read.

I have found that it is easier to stay busy then I once imagined, and now that I am back on track after a bizarre issue with my back, I wanted to keep track of all the things that are going on.