P&L and the new oven saga

I promised you pictures of Suzies block when I finished with it. here it is the last time you saw it

not too bad but a bit empty. though I do like this fan seam treatment

 and this little bit of sre, the butterfly was a piece of jewelry from one of the girls that I kept he looks comfy sitting there in that branch doesn't he?


now for the new stuff, its not much but it makes this corner look more complete.

I added 2 MOP chinese characters that used to be earrings I no longer use.

 since Suzie loves all things oriental I thought she would like them.
 I also added more bitty butterflies and a fuzzy catterpiggle.

uh-oh, he looks hungry!

there plenty of room for the others and it looks "finished".

 In other news, I got a new oven! woo!Woo!

our best guess for the old on is that it is original to the house.

that would make it almost 50!

It looks 50, doesn't it?

poor old thing it worked hard over the years

 our problem was finding a new stove that fit in the dimensions of the old, cause if you notice the dishwasher has Just thees much clearance.

when we put the new stove in the 1st time it was 1/8th of an inch too wide,

AHHHHGGG!

so a week of the new stove in the middle of the floor
yes, we plugged it in and made pizza anyway!  ;)

then we had to dismantle the bottom shelf of the cabinet overhead and raise the stove up 4".

4" is a lot when your trying to horse a 100lb stove into a precise hole with two people!


but it's in! YAAhHHHH!

I'm making cookies!

Pearls and lace RR

 remember that pile I showed you earlier?

well It had some more stuff in it,

I'm currently doing the Pearls and Lace Traditional #3(?) RR with Talia, Pam, Therisa and Donna







this is Donna's block

isn't it lovely?
she wants to make it into a purse when we're all done with it.

what i find hardest about being the first person on a block is knowing when to stop.

I want to get my idea's down but I don't want to take up all the real estate either








what I have done so far is to frame the center with lace, motifs and pearls








I took one of the motifs she left in the bag a fan and embellish that with my own hand dyed flowers and a few fronds

then added this little fellow to watch over the proceedings






 this is Suzies block 

she had to drop out of the official RR unfortunately. she had a windfall and is going to be moving away (WAA!)

but we didn't let that stop her form participating!

we all meet every wednesday and can pass it off any old time,  she gets to have fun when she can make it in.

 I have a few more things to throw at this one so I'll show you the finished picture later.

catching up

 my to do pile is growing!











 she is going to be a pouch/purse at some point

right now, she is misbehaving and being very difficult to pin down

the pearblossom boy is also being recalcitrant!

I have gotten this far with him and he refuses to help me with the rest!

*SIGH*







skellie is the only one of my "artsy" projects that is at all cooperating.

I added a row of beading
and some more fill under the chair. also filled in the eyes and hearts.
those ribs are going to be interesting though........

scissorland

I'm a scissor girl!
are you a scissor girl/boy too?



like anyone who deals with sewing or fabric I have a special relationship with my scissors.
Therica over at pigtails and quilts is running a ginger giveaway through kens sewing center so if you want to try for a pair I recommend them.









 I have 2 pair 1 pair pinking shears that were my Mother-in-laws, they came to me after she died in 93, and are still sharp cutting 4+ layers at a time! the others were hers also and they are my go-to pair for anything dressmaking pattern wise




my other pair of  go-to's are 3 olfa cutters and my pink skull and crossbones fiskars which are sharp, sharp, sharp!
best for piecing and patching. I can make nice clean edges with these babies!

they live with my Viking Lily whom I LOVE in spite of her tension issues.





this pair are actually cuticle scissors masquerading as thread snips, they came in one of those manicure kits you never use but always used to get from relatives who apparently think we as youthes were laking in hygiene

the fob is made from a rosary give by my grammi ( it was blessed by pope jp)
poor old thing was terribly neglected
( i'm an atheist what am I going to do with a rosary?) but it was a gift from grammi so there it sits appreciated for it's utility and not the purpose for which it was meant. 

old ones

 these are my traveling scissors I had to get a new pair as the old ones were dull as ditch water. the new are cheep DMC so I don't mind loosing them. they are a pretty purple and go with me when I take classes,go to cq group or travel anywhere else.
 

 these are the first pair of quality scissors I ever bought for my self back when I worked for Hoffritz cutlery, in highschool. I was so proud of them, they are now my utility cut paper or whatever scissors




 everyone should own a pair of hemostats but do they count as scissors?
meh!
they are uber-useful so why not?











this brings me to my pair of Case scissors, whisper silent and sharp as the dickens! don't get you finger caught in these, It will hurt....A LOT!  

and my "real" thread snips they are so old the their corners are nicely rounded.
the fob on this one is special too.

I made it from beads and ric-rack I had on hand when I moved to washington 4 years ago so I would stop loosing them under things.
the netsuke I found at the puallup sew expo at a time I was really missing my girls. It seemed to be kismet and reminded me of the two of them, as one or the other always seemed to be dragging the other around, depending on which way up the piece was!

my youngest was nicknamed mouse the day after she was born because she made little hummy squeekie noises when she slept, that sounded like a pet mouse I had as a child.
My eldest girl on her 7th birthday we took a visit to china town in chicago and came across a 10 gallon tank full of about 50 1" baby turtles being sold for $10.00 each all 3 begged for a turtle she was the only one who took care of her though and was turtle crazy for the next 10 years or so.



my chicken shears!
will cut through a whole chicken like butter, including the breast bone.


don't fillet without them!






now the bachelor scissors!
does every unattached male have a pair of these in their cabinet?
they barely cut nails let alone hair and every bachelor seems to have a pair they use for everything.











 the other pair of scissors I bought while at Hoffritz were a pair of hair scissors so I could (finally) cut my bangs straight.

 I use them to trim my Fiancée now.
none of them have let me down (except the bachelor scissors)


whats your scissor tale?

Guelder rose Faerie

I'm on a roll!

I have finished another Faerie

this one is the Guelder rose Faeries

I surrounded them with birds and other critters and a magic keyhole for their part of the secret garden

 I have used a little more SRE on this piece I am challenging myself to use it.

like with the pre-made sew on motifs and roses it almost feels like cheating because it takes up so much real-estate and is relatively easy to accomplish

  as those of you who follow me regularly I LOVE seam treatments but they do take up a lot of time to do

and this series of blocks is to challenge myself to use techniques and motifs I would not normally use

and balance it all in context of the rather delicate drawings of  Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower faeries and the magic of a secret garden

A new faerie and a RR

here is my Lime tree faerie all finished, oh whoopse!

maybe not ALL finished.

 I just noticed I need to add leaves and something to the green branchy thing at the bottom, ergh!

oh well not all is as it should be all the time!  :)

and here is my nekkid bock for the Pearls and Lace traditional RR over at CQI

we're keeping this one "in the family" so to speak and doing it amongst our group of CQers at crossroads CQ

any one can join us BTW if you are in the neighborhood on Wednesdays from 3-6pm Crossroads mall in Bellview, Washington
right in front of the Jo-Annes fabric in the food court.

see you there!

heritage CQ - an explanation - sort of

A good friend suggested I put together a post explaining my Heritage CQ.
I think shes right I've got some 'splaining to do!
Not just for you all either.....
I have spent much of my life without much in the way of family history.
mom was a single mother raising little old me, in the middle of the wilds of Wrigleyville in Chicago. Dad had gone back to Lacrosse WI. where he had family and mom wasn't into looking back.

There are family stories here and there but history, there's not much.
I am a mix of Bohemian, Austro-Hungarian, French, German, Scots-Irish, Norwegian and Blackfoot Indian. So, in short, I'm a mutt. I give my kids a generation or two to bring the rest of the world into the mix!

Going through and researching each of the countries, my parents brought into me, was interesting and insightful.

Not so much because it told me anything about myself I didn't already know, but it gave me a base to understand where all these ancestors came from and gave me a new appreciation of how this, could only happen in America or more specifically in Chicago.

I started with the countries and cultures I knew the most about, Blackfoot, French, German, Norwegian and Scots-Irish I split into two, so there would be an even  number of blocks.

 I love the history of Chicago, it's messy and loud and doesn't try to take itself too seriously. where as New York was where everyone landed, Chicago was the terminus, for those going into the west and so everyone eventually came here, in order to go somewhere else.

There are still neighborhoods, where you don't have to speak any English, to get along. There are enclaves of Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, German, Polish, Russian, Jewish, you name it, theres a neighborhood for that. If you were brought up on Foster and Kedzie you are probably Korean. If you were brought up on the west side of Naragansett, you are probably Italian as the east side is Irish. Belmont-Craigan neighborhood was Polish and Hermosa is Puerto Rican.
Growing up there was wonderfully diverse, full of good food, interesting music shops, and people to watch.

The upper left-hand corner is Blackfoot Indian and holding up the other corner is Germany.
My grandmother's father was Indian, her mother was from Germany. we don't know much here, I think it was too painful for grammy to talk about them.
They died when she was 6 or 7 and she and her older brother and sister wer sent to live with her mother's sister.  She had almost no education and ran away to Chicago in 1927(?) where she met Grandfather.
He came to America in 1906 when he was 14, with two, of his brothers, Otto and Adolph(he changed it to Arthur in 1939) . They were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their father was a Bohemian farmer and their mother was French.
Don't know much of grandfathers family either.

Dad on the other hand, has LOTS of family, all gathered in LaCrosse Wisconsin. "Gods Country" always said in a sonorous voice.There my Norwegian grandfather fell for my Scots- Irish /German grandmother and had lots of babies, who had lots of babies and they had lots of babies.
Honestly if you want to know where over population is coming from the LaCrosse side of the family would be a good start!
Here things get, well strange, for me at least. This is the side of the family who are so entrenched in themselves, that they had a history of themselves, made into a book.
You would think I would have read this, being a history buff and wanting to know about my family history but no. I have not. You're right, I should but I just can't bring myself to do it.
This is the side of the family that has shunned my mother and I for so long, I feel the need to respond in kind.

The last time I saw any of them was at my fathers funeral 13 years ago.  It was strange being surrounded by people who knew exactly who I was, who all looked like me,  who are complete strangers to me.
I am not this petty, normally and this attitude towards that side of the family, bothers me a little, not enough to do much about it but there it is, a flaw in my character.


I used to be envious of those who had such strong family identities or identified with a place until I realized how unique I was. In that crowd of people who's families were only this or that, it seamed to be their only identity.
Whilst I knew who I was, they only seemed to know where they came from and were still searching.

This CQ was more to define that which I didn't understand of my heritage, more than to understand my family. I have made for myself a loving family of my own with it's own quirks and oddities, not dependent on or restrained by the past.

yard work

As you all know, those of you who read this blog regularly, I love my willow.                                                                                         I love her wavy fronds, her lumpy bark, the curly corkscrew way her limbs grow

and under her  boughs is my favorite sewing spot

this weekend we decided to give her a trim as her boughs were overtaking the garage and her fronds were whapping my darling fiancée in the face when he mowed the lawn.

nothing like getting a face full of spiderwebs to male a grown man loose his perspective!
(of course I would have run around screaming like a sissy girl!)




So Mother willow got a haircut and that pile you see is whats left to be chipped and mulched into the garden, so far we covered the verge garden the deck and rose gardens, lots of work done and more to come!
till thats over, I'll sit and sew in one of my other spots on the deck.
tootles!