It’s a New Year!

A lot of changes going on around here. I am very excited about one in particular. Starting in another week and a half I will be working full time at a new hospital less than 4 miles from my house. I have never in my life worked so close to home. I cannot believe I will not have to drive an hour to get to work anymore and I will be working day work! No more night work for me! I may just turn into a regular person. I am very excited. The kids are not too excited but I think they will change their minds once they see I am not a zombie anymore.

My booth at The Meeting Corner did wonderfully the first 2 1/2 months and I am quite excited about continuing selling items there. I will  be adding hand made  candles and room sprays beginning in February. They are not made by myself but by a very talented artist.  I will give more information on that when it gets closer.

My booth right now is looking a little empty and still has a few Christmas items left. I have not crafted in over two weeks because the entire house this time of year is always sick and we have been busy with so much other stuff.  I am hoping to work on some items this week and maybe rearrange the booth also.  Notice the little “anti-thief” sign. The owner put that up since we had a couple sticky finger incidents. I love that little sign. She is so creative! I am sure if someone is going to steal the sign wont make a difference but maybe it will make them think twice about it.

Here are some items I have taken in recently:

These two were hand appliqued blocks I had done but never finished the other blocks for the wall hanging. Why let them go to waste right.

These two were going to my booth but ended up selling before they made it.

I have been stitching some blocks that I will be making into two coffee quilts/throws. They are all done in DMC 801 and each done on a different neutral background. At first I was going to put them into one quilt but I decided two would be nicer. They will be going to my booth when they are finished (if they make it – I have several customers asking for first dibs). Here are the first six, I think I have twelve to fourteen all together. I have not pressed them yet so they are a little wrinkly.

The kids had gift cards they wanted to spend from Christmas so we took a trip out to the mall and since I got a new job we celebrated by eating at the Japanese restaurant. I have not had real sushi in so long, it was so wonderful!!! I could eat it everyday!

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Years, I know we did. I worked my last Christmas Eve and New Years Eve nights I will ever work, very excited about that.  I actually have not made a New Years Resolution for this year and I most likely wont. I don’t think I need to since our lives will be changing so much for the better anyway with this job change. I would love to hear what you are going to tackle this year!  Please let me know!! I am off to stitch on a coffee quilt block.

Have a great week and don’t forget to find some stitching time!!!!

~ Jennifer ~

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Alice the Designer

My youngest daughter Alice is a gal who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to work me hard to get it. She likes to draw little critters for me to stitch or sew all the time. I promised her yesterday I would sew one up for her.

And then sewed it up three or four times until she was happy with it. There were lots of changes along the way. She says she loves it but I can see in her eyes it is in need if more changes.   I went ahead and sewed together one of her drafts because I thought it was cute also.

My eldest daughter Natalie wanted me to make a Narwhal for her boyfriend ‘s Christmas present. I found a great little freebie pattern on Craftster.org by Angel Callie – here is the link. I made him one and made one for my booth.  I love how they turned out. I will be making more because they are so fun.

Here is another creation by Alice. I made the horse and let her decorate her. It is the “Love Pony” she says for Valentines. She is already thinking ahead. I still need to attach everything for her, I think she came out fantastic.

I also took these items up to the booth on Saturday.

I finished stitching the flowers on the Snowman Sampler wall hanging and it is at my booth.

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And I have these I stitched and need to make up into something the next couple days.

I am beat. I am supposed to be sleeping because I work tonight and I stayed up all night sewing and vomiting from a bad migraine. I  couldn’t sleep so instead of laying around in pain I kept working which made me feel better but worse. Crazy, I know but I have needed to get things down and stop making excuses. I did go to the doctor yesterday and she put me back on Strattera for my A.D.D. I am so happy, I cannot wait for it to kick in. I have been putting that off for sometime and it has been getting real bad. I get it under control and get lax about it until my head is such a mess I don’t know what is up. I am sure I will be feeling better in a bit. I am really going to try to sleep now. I am turning off this computer and phone and cover my head with the blankets.

I hope you are having a wonderful week and finding a little stitching time.

~ Jennifer ~

Busy Times

We are all so busy this time of year. Oh how I wish for childhood again when your only worries are those of thinking about the Christmas school vacation, the visiting family,  the anticipation of waking up on Christmas morning and finding all the brightly wrapped presents under the tree. I do enjoy seeing all of these emotions in my children but  these times also bring a little stress to us.  I have managed to not  get too stressed this year.  I keep checking myself and making sure I don’t get to wrapped up in the craziness.

I have some new booth pictures. Actually, it is not the same as pictured since the Christmas quilt sold but it is the last pictures I took on Saturday. I will be taking a few new items in the morning..

Here are some of the items I took in last week.

I took three Christmas lap quilts in and they have all sold.

A friend of mine, Tammy,  who lives in Colorado and I did a trade recently. She is owns a company called Avani, which she started when her daughter (one of my daughters best friends) had developed severe eczema and skin problems because of allergies. She knew I was having problems with rashes on my arms that wont go away. I went to the dermatologist and they did a biopsy and told me it was Granuloma Annulare and eczema. There is basically nothing you can do about it. They gave me a cream which does not help so I have been using the soap for several days. I am using the unscented of course because of my severe nasal allergies. I am loving it. I feel so squeaky clean, no soapy residue like regular soaps. I will try the body butter after another week. I don’t like to introduce too much newness at once. I traded Tammy this little horse I had made. The good news is I will also be carrying her soaps at my booth. I received the first box  today so I will be taking them in tomorrow.

We celebrated Alice’s 10th birthday this past weekend!! Hard to believe my baby is 10.  And I cannot post without a snapshot of little Prancer, he is becoming such a little handful!!

I hope you are having a terrific week and not getting too stressed out. Don’t forget to find a little stitching time, it always helps my mood!!

~ Jennifer ~

What’s that smell?

We bought our home as a new build back in January of 2007, little by little we have been learning that our builder or at least his employees did not seem to have any attention to detail or care enough to fix their mistakes.  Of course many of the things that have gone wrong have been on us since the builder files bankruptcy with each neighborhood he builds, how convenient for him. The newest thing has actually been going on for some time but we never realized what exactly it was until we just recently had a septic system issue.

We have this small pantry closet just off of the kitchen.  I use it for unconventional fabrics, batting, folded up boxes, just junk stuff because we have enough cabinets in the kitchen to hold everything else. At one time I had stored a large bag of Alpaca roving a lady down the road had given me. I ended up taking it out because every now and then you could smell a musty smell when you opened the door, we thought the roving because it still needed another wash had been the source of the smell. The smell never went away but we always thought it was from maybe the items in the closet soaking up the Alpaca wool.

Our sink in the kitchen kept backing up so my husband kept plunging the sick, big mistake we have found. Then the septic backed up in to toilet in the half bath off the kitchen. We had the septic guys come out and they pumped the septic and were on their way. After they left we flushed the toilet downstairs and it all came up, the problem was worse then an over full septic tank. So the guy told us what we could do to fix the clog. My husband got to do the dirty work and it was dirty. We were able to remove the clog and thought once again our problem was solved. It was not solved.

We still had this horrible smell coming from the sink area. After posting on Facebook about it, Kathy Schmitd was nice enough to ask her husband, who is a plumber, about it and he said it was most likely the studor vent under the sink that needed replacing. He was right. After waiting for Friday payday, a long stinky, cold wait (we left the windows open downstairs). Our handy friend and neighbor was able to replace the piece in about 3 minutes. It took care of the smell from under the sink.  Problem solved – right?

Wrong. My husband mentioned Saturday that when he opened the pantry door the smell was really bad, maybe some got trapped in there from when the sink was stinking. I opened the door before work last night and about fell out it was so bad. Just like from under the sink. How could that much be trapped in that little closet. Well, after I went to work last night my husband got a little curious and started poking around in the closet, he knew their was a plumbing pipe in the wall next to the closet. And guess what he found.

Yep, apparently the knucklehead who installed the closet shelves screwed into the plumbing pipe while hanging them. When we had the backup it  pushed the screw out and soaked the drywall. My husband tore out the drywall that was wet and looked through to the floor and under the house and there was no more leakage. As soon as he covered the hole in the pipe the smell was gone. But I told my husband I am willing to bet that the other 3 shelf screws are probably screwed into the pipe also, they were just too high for the backup to reach. So we will be getting this fixed this coming payday. I feel like we are rebuilding this house sometimes.

We keep thinking we are going to be able to get the kids some Christmas presents when the next payday rolls around but something else happens. We now have a non-working dishwasher, non-working microwave oven, broken garage door and a busted pipe.  We all need to go to the doctor or dentist for some reason or another.  On the bright side, our “million dollar” puppy is healed, and our septic is clean and our sink is fixed, so I should be happy with all of that. I am frustrated but I am not down, at least not right at this second. We all have troubles and woes and they all will pass. I am trying to keep a happy heart but sometimes it is such a struggle. I will just try to keep laughing about it because if I get serious I might never laugh again!

On a lighter note, last year I  traced out hundreds of holiday stitcheries so I always have something to stitch on. I think I am finally on the last 50 or so for Christmas. I should have written on the back of them who they were by but I did not so now I cannot remember what designer they are from. Sorry about that. I finished a couple last night and I know the first one is from Buttermilk Basin but I am not sure about the second.

I did want to mention the fabric in the Santa stitchery. It was part of a fat quarter bundle I had ordered years ago from a company called Cherrywood Fabrics. The fabric is all hand dyed and the most wonderful texture you can find. I had a difficult time ever using the fabric but little by little it gets used now.  It is quite pricey but that was the days I used credit cards like a mad woman, now I would definitely get it if I had something special to do or if I wanted to use it in place of wool, it has a suede like feel to it. I actually have a wool project I am doing for someone and I am using some other pieces from the bundle in place of the background wool. It is going to be quite lovely.

Well, I need to get stitching! I hope you had a great day and found some stitching time!! And remember – do not plunge your clogged sinks if you have a studor vent on it, bad to do!!!

~ Jennifer ~