Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Cat blocks for Heartstrings finished

This is where I have been this afternoon.

Started out with this pile of pieces

and ended up with this set of blocks for the Heartstrings virtual block party for New Years Eve & New Years Day. They are very bright & cheerful & the quilt made from these will keep some child nice and warm.

These blocks are really quick & fun to sew. It's no wonder they're called Happy Blocks. The cutting is what takes the time. I have another two sets of 48 cut out and ready to sew so will work on that this evening and tomorrow.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Strips Cut!

Last night about 10:30 I went to my sewing room and cut the strips for the framing pieces for my Happy Blocks. I should have gone ahead and done the sub-cutting because once I got into bed I just laid there and listened to the wind howl. I always have a hard time getting to sleep when the wind blows so hard. I can sleep like a baby through the worst thunder & lightning storm, but a little wind keeps me awake. Strange, I know. But then I think mice are cute too. Don't want 'em in my house, but they're cute. :-)

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Heartstrings Happy Blocks

These two piles are fabrics I dug out of my stash this morning to make Happy Blocks for the Heartstrings New Year's Happy Block party. The request is for bright, cheery fabrics for quilts for children, with novelty prints in the center and solids or tone-on-tones for the outsides of the blocks. The pile on the left is novelty fabrics left over from the alphabet quilts I made for my grandchildren, with coordinating TOTs. The pile on the right is bright cat prints with my hand-dyes for the outside strips. I'll make a complete set out of the cat prints and as many as I can out of the other novelties. This project starts out on New Year's Eve day and continues through February so there's plenty of time for making blocks. The blocks collected by Heartstrings for this project will make quilts for children who need something to brighten their days.

What I've Been Doing

Here's the quilt on my "design floor" that I put together on Friday. The blocks and pieced border pieces had been done for a couple months. I showed parts & pieces of it in an earlier post. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to put borders on it out of the fabric I bought for that purpose or just quit with the pieced borders and bind it in either black or strips of the hand-dyes pieced together scrappy fashion. Here's a couple pictures with the border fabric laid beside the quilt. What do you think?


I'd like to give credit where credit is due for this quilt design. I THINK it may be one of Judy L.'s QFAH projects. I made it from a picture I had saved from the Internet and didn't make a note of where it came from. I thought I would remember, can you believe that? :-)

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Another Merry Christmas Past

We all had such a nice day today. The turkey was moist, the pies yummy, nice presents and some Wii action. Now I'm sitting here watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation starring Chevy Chase. It's kind of a Christmas tradition. I usually watch it on Christmas Eve, but I was just too pooped last night.
The "camper quilt" was a hit. And until it goes in the camper next summer they thought it would look pretty good in the living room too. Here's a few other pictures of our Christmas.






If Ashley saw this she would wish she'd given Grandma a nicer smile.

And last,but not least, some Wii video action:

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Done!!



Here's the "camper" quilt all quilted & bound. These pictures aren't the greatest. The colors are a little off & the focus might not be the best, but the lighting just wasn't very good. The quilting pattern is "Bubbles." I really like it. It's pretty easy to do once you figure out how to properly line it up for the next row when advancing.

Today was the day to start some cleaning. I didn't get as much done as I intended. I'm always overly optimistic about how much I can get done. I still need to get some presents wrapped tonight, put some pictures on the digital picture frame I got my daughter, print out some gift tags. Maybe if I hadn't quilted and bound 4 quilts in the last two weeks I'd be further ahead. Three of those helped finance our Christmas so I shouldn't complain. Will just have to call it quits on the cleaning before I exhaust myself. Some things NEED to be done and others I just think need to be done. As long as I make pumpkin pie for my one granddaughter & get the presents ready, that's all that REALLY counts.

I'm wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas. Enjoy your families, enjoy the food, enjoy the gifts. And, take a few days next week and just do something YOU will enjoy after all the work of getting ready for the holidays. And have a QUILTY New Year.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

What have I been doing?

Today I finished quilting the brown/cream/black "camper" quilt. I showed a picture of it before, as a top, so don't have one here. It turned out pretty good, though there was a tension issue on one row. If the back wasn't such a busy print I would have had to rip out the whole row & do it over, but as it is, I just left it. It feels a bit rough on the back but I think it will be OK. The thread came out of the intermittent tension and caused the problem.

Yesterday was the special assessor's recall election. A loooooooooong day. Worked 13 1/2 hrs at the polls, then made a 50 mi. round trip to the courthouse to deliver the ballots and that blasted, heavy, awkward voting machine that no one uses. The heater on my car doesn't work very well anymore and by the time I got home I was so cold I thought I'd never get warm. To illustrate---even though I started it 15 min. before I left the polls I had to stop at the 2-mile corner to scrape frost off the INSIDE of the windshield because I couldn't see out any more. Might as well borrow a horse & buggy from the Amish.

It was pretty cold here again today but the sun was shining and all the snow we got yesterday looked really pretty. Pretty cold. It's getting late, I have to work at the library tomorrow, so nighty-night.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Done!!


The customer quilts are done. The tree is up. Santas are set out. Rest of the decorations are up. Cookies for the exchange are made. Still have to make Christmas cards & get them in the mail. Still need to get a quilt of my own quilted for a gift. It'll all get done in time.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Look What I Got!!

Last night we went to my husband's work Christmas party. It was nice--meal, games, door prizes--I even won two $5.00 Hot Stuff gift certificates. I had heard that the Blarney Stone had gone downhill over the past year, but I thought the food was fine. Actually any food I don't have to cook and clean up after is usually fine as long as it isn't something like sauerkraut or cooked spinach. After the party it was still early so we stopped at Pamida to pick up a couple Christmas gifts and some stuff on sale. Best of all I got this new microwave--on sale for $80. My old one is at least 25 yr. old and is very slow to come on, plus the start button doesn't always work right. I think it was time for a new one, don't you? And I don't THINK it's even my Christmas present.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Library Giving Tree


Most years the Town & Country FCE Club sets up a Christmas tree in the library and decorates it with items that are donated to charity. Things on this year's effort will be donated to Bright Horizons, an area woman's shelter.

Wow, four posts in one day, that's setting a new record for me.

Thing #16 -- Week 11

Just to make sure I got ALL the information I read all the recommended articles on Library 2.0 & Web 2.0. A LOT to absorb, so my thoughts expressed here will be rather random.
[1.] Libraries ARE changing & computers and easier access to information are a big part of that change.
[2.] All this 2.0 stuff seems to mean librarians will spend an awful lot of time on the computer. What about acquisitions, cataloging, processing books for the shelf, circulation, reference, in other words, everything we've always done & much of which we will continue to do for the foreseeable future. Where will all the time come from? Not to mention all the new skills. I don't think we can get time from a government bailout.
[3.] What about our patrons & their skills? For any number of years yet, we'll have two groups of them -- Generation Y, the young people who have never known a world without computer technology, cell phones, IM, texting, social websites, downloadable music, etc., and the older group, some of whom are still struggling to learn basic computer skills & e-mail. That group is used to a library geared to books. It's what they know & it's what they want.
[4.] I think we need to pick and choose what 2.0 things we can make use of in our libraries. Introducing them slowly will make the younger people think we're not completely hopeless and will allow the older patrons to learn a little at a time and not feel totally overwhelmed, which is how I'm feeling a little bit right now.

Thing #15 -- Week 10

SlideShare. This is something that I don't think I will be using since I never have reason to use PowerPoint for anything. I did set up an account{http://www.slideshare.net/quiltinlibrarylady}, looked at presentations, picked out a couple favorites, commented, and added Nebraskacess as a contact. So I'm no longer totally ignorant about it. I WOULD rather read the slides from a presentation on SlideShare than on a hand-out where they are usually so small I can't make out the text. Or so dark nothing shows up. Maybe I could make a slideshow of my quilts & embed it in my blog?

Thing #14 -- Week 9

Delicious. I would associate this word more with food than computers. However, after watching the short video and going through the various exercises, I think I'll find this very useful. Maybe the most useful thing we've learned in this journey so far. I'm one of those people who works on at least three computers and have bookmarks on all of them. Of course, whichever computer I'm on doesn't always have the bookmark I'm looking for. This would certainly solve that problem. I've signed up for an account and will start moving my bookmarks over as I have time.

I checked out the Holdrege Public Library's tagroll and they have certainly done a lot with Delicious. I'm not sure I'll go as far as doing something like that with our lists of sites on our web page, but then again, never say never.

If I were to tag the NebraskAccess site I would use nebraskaccess & databases, as several others did. Then I would add magazines, biography and genealogy.

For me, the best part of Delicious is the ability to share bookmarks from any computer with Internet access.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Do you ever have days???????????

Librarians, do you ever have days when you just want to let go like this? A day when some patron just makes you want to tear them apart?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbDdgWiaS0

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

One done!!


I just finished quilting my first customer quilt. The lady who pieced it is legally blind. She has help with the cutting but she does the sewing herself. She did a pretty darned good job. I have another one just like it to do for her too. Then I'll make and attach the bindings and a lady who helps her out will do the handwork.

Last night we had our FCE/Extension Club Christmas Party. One of our members invited us to her house and she & her husband cooked us a variety of Italian foods. It was all yummy but the tiramisu for dessert was wonderful. We all decided that her husband should give lessons to ours. He enjoys cooking, doesn't mind shopping, and while we were sitting around visiting he was in the kitchen cleaning up. What's not to like? I just wish I had taken my camera along to take a picture of the table. Jana has a knack for setting a pretty table.

Great food, nice gifts, grab bag fun and time spent visiting with friends. What more could we ask for? Well, maybe for our husbands to be more like Steve, but that isn't likely to happen.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Happy Monday

Well, at least the sun is trying to shine. We had a little dusting of snow overnight that is already starting to melt.

We had a nice quiet weekend, I had to work at the library on Saturday and my husband went to a late Thanksgiving potluck at his brother's. First thing that morning we went to Plainview to get my car, it needed to have the water pump replaced. I got the backing seamed and squared up for the "camper" quilt. It's all laying on the quilt machine table waiting to be loaded. I should have gotten that done yesterday but I was just too darned lazy!!

Last night I watched four episodes of Eureka on the computer. I always liked that show, but I don't think it's on any more. I like being able to watch shows online when I miss them on TV. The original CSI has always been a favorite & it's on on Thursday nights when I have to work at the library. Too bad CBS only keeps two weeks worth online, which I discovered when it was too late to see the first few shows of the new season. I totally missed Warrick getting killed and there was such a hullaballoo about that. But, hey, ABC keeps whole seasons online and I can watch all the Lost I want.

Saturday at the library turned out to be kind of busy so I'm hoping today will be quieter. I need to prepare for the Library Board meeting later this afternoon and I have a bunch of new books setting here that are cataloged but need to be processed for the shelves---spine labels, AR labels, stamped, plastic jacket cover put on. This time of year the patrons read more and it can be hard to keep something new and fresh ready for them.