Helpful Friends

Saturday could not have gone better for my big yarn sale.  Ok, if it was a little cooler and I hadn't gotten a sunburn, maybe.  Amazingly enough -- I sold about 500 skeins of yarn.  No, I'm not kidding.  First my friend Colleen arrived with her daughter Samantha and together we got the first half dozen bags of yarn out of my house and out onto the tables.  Next Tanya and Kim appeared and took charge organizing the yarn on the tables to encourage their sale.  Tanya got on her cell phone and started making calls to all the knitters she could think of and they soon descended on my stash reduction sale.  Next she helped me haul more and more yarn out of the cubbies in my Craft Cave.

There were bargains to be had.  The only way the prices could have been lower is if I was dead and  my roommate was 'getting rid' of my stash.  Where else on Earth can you buy Cascade 220 or Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride for $1 per skein.  And I sold them all by the end of the day.

I'll be having another sale in September but the bargains won't be quite as cheap.  Nevertheless it will be good for someone seeking out sweater quantities of yarn.  Good yarn.  I'll have more of the yarn I won't ever use out there too.  I just can't knit like I used to and like Kathleen said, keep only what you know you'll knit for special people like your grandson.  So true.

While I may have had pangs of sadness, my friend Chris reminded me that I had fun buying the yarn.  Most of it I remembered exactly what I was going to use it for.  Now someone else will enjoy knitting with them.  I'm sharing the love, $1 skein at a time.

Tonight my friend Mary and her husband Paul came over in the 90º+ heat and helped me replace four rotten boards on my fence.  The kind linesmen at Detroit Edison destroyed one of the boards when they replaced the telephone pole and Maggie could have walked right through it.

And in more exciting news, I had no cavities tonight when I had my dental check up -- woohoo!!!

Yarn Sale and More

I'm having a **MAJOR** stash reduction yarn sale tomorrow, Saturday July 14th starting at 9 am.  Sadly, it's time to come to grips with my inability to knit as much as I'd like.  I'm practically giving it away. **$1 per skein for Cascade 220, Lopi, and so much more!**  There's no sense in me storing it when YOU could be knitting with it!  I'll have other craft supplies too -- thread racks, Hinterberg quilting hoops & stand, rug hooking patterns, and more -- they won't be $1 but they'll be cheap!!

Email me (spjonescreations@gmail.com) for directions!

P.S. It's also the annual Royal Oak Garage Sale this weekend so stop by my house first!!

Been Sewing.....

....all week!  Need to add two more borders to Denver's quilt top and it will be done.  I still need to pick out a backing for it so I might stop by the quilt shop on my way home from work today.  Stay tuned for pictures!

Weekend's Over

Well, another weekend has come and gone.  The heatwave has subsided, for now.  Today it was only 85ºF so that's cool compared to 102ºF.  Everything is relevant.  I got a haircut and color Friday after work.  The jury is still out on the cut.  My stylist cut quite a bit more off the back than the rest of my head.  We'll see if that works for me.

I finished sewing the borders on the pink quilt top and today I got busy on Denver's quilt.  The first pieced border is more snowball blocks.  I had to mark the diagonal on 160 2" squares.  Let me tell you -- that was really, really fun.  Not.  Then I had to sew them to 40 4 1/2" squares and now I'm squaring them up.  I always think I sew so carefully but I've always got clean up work to do when I'm done.  I've got to sew those blocks together and attach them the sides of the quilt top, then three more borders and I'm done.

I ran over to JoAnn's today to use my 50% off coupon on another roll of Fusi-Boo batting for the pink quilt. I have to piece the backing for that quilt and then sandwich it all together before machine quilting it.  I'm on a roll lately!

My Mom came home from the hospital today and I sure hope she understands her dietary changes so we don't have a repeat visit to the hospital in another two weeks.  My sister Renee has done a great job of taking care of Mom and making sure she gets good treatment from the staff there.  She keeps a notepad with her so she can write everything down and keep Mom from getting more confused.

This week at work should be interesting.  Both my boss and his boss should be back in the office after their vacations so we'll see what happens next with my latest test project.  In the meantime, I'm off to square up the last of my snowball blocks.

Have a great week!

No Power

At 4:54 a.m. today my cell phone beeped when the power went out.  Darn.  No power at home until late tomorrow night, at the earliest, and possibly not until late Saturday night.  After work I'm taking Maggie to the vet's for a haircut and boarding until this is over.  Not sure what my roommate and I are doing yet.  I'll see if I can tough it out. Obviously no sewing for me for a few days.  Arghh.  And I have new fabric being delivered today -- shoot!

Plans, Shplans

Last night I finished sewing two strips to complete the first border on Denver's quilt.  Never mind that I actually started it nearly 18 months ago.  Next up is the pieced border, which I was all set to sew today.

Today is the fourth of July.  Not a holiday anywhere else but in the US.  Work is so crazy that it is the only day off for me this week.  Lots of my co-workers have taken part or all of the week off but not me.  One of my teammates is AWOL so I need to pick up the slack.

So I was really looking forward to having today off to do things I WANTED to do.  No luck.  I called my Mom to see if we could have lunch (sandwiched between a day of sewing).  Uh, no.  She needed to do her grocery shopping.  Reluctantly I volunteered to take her, then realized on my drive out there that there was no way in 95º heat that she should be out.  That left me to do the shopping alone, which I did, and man was it hot.  Had I known I would have headed out there by 8 am when it was much cooler.  Anyhow, I got the shopping done, picked up lunch for us at Boston Market, and cut up the fruit I bought to make a fruit salad for her to enjoy for the next several days.

Once I got home I noticed the electric company had done more work on the telephone pole adjacent to my fence and broke another piece off my fence, leaving a hole definitely big enough for Maggie to get out or some other critter to get in.  I measured the dog eared fence board and drove over to Home Depot.  Amazing, or maybe not, I was told they could not rip the 5 1/2" boards they had down to the 4" board I needed.  Really??  So I drove next door to Lowe's, where they were all too happy to help me pick out the boards I needed, carry them over to the cutting station and cut them down to a 4" width and lop off 1 1/2" on the bottom, to accommodate the dirt shifting that the electric company did.  Service with a smile instead of attitude -- I love it.

We had some more wicked weather today.  Storms, wind, and HAIL -- 

When it was all over this leaf was stuck to my front door:

Now even though I didn't sew a single stitch I am still looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.  Oddly, today feels like Sunday.  Hmm.  Anyway, tomorrow after work I'm getting a very much needed massage.  I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that!

Sew and Sew

The last several days I've been dealing with oppressive heat, a water main break, and a lot of shopping, yet I managed to finish a quilt top tonight. Woohoo!

Here's a closer shot of the block pattern:

I'm auditioning border fabrics.  Do you like the pink or green fabric better???

One my biggest gripes about sewing is running out of bobbin thread.  In the first picture I went on for miles and miles before realizing I was out.  Ok, maybe that's a slight exaggeration.  

In this shot I was about 1 1/2" away from the finish line.  Arghh!

Back on Saturday I headed out to a couple of quilt shops.  Material Girls in Dearborn was brand new to me.    Barb stocks lots of Asian fabric, and I mean made in Japan, not just Asian prints, and also a lot of Aboriginal fabrics from Australia.  I also stopped by Bits N Pieces in Wayne.  There Julie helped me pick out several must have Moda solid fabrics plus thread that was new to me but has been out for a while.  I'm looking forward to trying out these spools of Presencia 60 weight, 3 ply cotton thread.  Seems Harriet Hargrave has been touting its virtues for a while now -- what did I know?!  Plus you can get it for $2 less/spool than I paid.  Arghh!

I'm hoping that the thread will melt into the fabric, unlike the mystery cotton thread I used in my latest project.  

I bought fabric for two more quilts over the weekend so I better get going and sew some more!  Both projects are totally different from what I'm usually attracted to, so they should both be fun to create.