Fun for the day

My fun for the day is getting this little baby computer up and running again.

Had to put in a new SSD (solid state drive), re-install Windows. That was interesting since these little things don't have CD-ROM drives, but where there's a will there's a way and you can find ANYTHING on the Internet.....downloaded & installed drivers for the various components. Installing Service Pack 2 right now, to be followed by Service Pack 3. Then I guess I'll have let it download and install all the updates since SP3 came out. Already have an anti-virus program on it and will need to put on some sort of Office program, maybe OpenOffice since it's free.

Yesterday I got a little sewing done.........20 of the neutral string blocks for Roll Roll Cotton Boll. It goes pretty fast even though I'm using up a bunch of narrower strips. Hoping to do another set tomorrow.

The grass is pulled out of the flower bed and maybe tomorrow I can get my petunias set out. If it doesn't rain tonight it should be dry enough tomorrow to set out the tomatoes & peppers too. The poor things will probably get beat senseless by the wind, it hits so bad here, but they have to go into the garden sometime.  And, I think it's time to drag out the grill and the Adirondack chairs since it seems like winter has FINALLY given up its grip.  It's so perfect out tonight that I should probably have been doing this stuff instead of messing with the baby computer. :)

Finished product

Got the binding on this one yesterday.

Bricks and Stepping Stones

This is a Bonnie Hunter design, quilted with the "Feather Me" pantograph by Meridith England. The bricks are made of hand dyed material I made several years ago and the piecing was a Quilt Club project I worked on at meetings when we didn't have a special project to work on. The pink for the borders & binding was from my stash and when I finished cutting the binding there was about 1/8th of an inch left. Cutting it a little close, I'd say. Now, on the to next one.

29 and holding

 

My birthday cupcakes. We don't ordinarily have food at our Book Club get togethers but since it falls on my b-day I thought I'd take treats. Just like kindergarten. hehehe

Have you ever made the cake recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa can? It's good, but if you try it don't believe the part about filling cupcake cups 2/3 full. Half way is plenty. Mine kind of ran over and I had to chisel them out of the pan.

The quilt on the frame in the last post is quilted and the three computers are working again. The last one goes home to its mommy tonight.  Please, please, please don't ever venture out onto the Internet without anti-virus software installed on your computer. Some really nasty stuff gets on your computer.  I really need to have less sympathy and charge more for cleaning them up. :)

No plans this week...................NOT!

This was the week with NOTHING on the calendar except going to work on Monday and Thursday. This is the week I was going to sew, sew, sew on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Yeah, right!!! By suppertime on Monday I had three computers setting in my living room that needed to be cleaned up and made to work again.

 

The first one ONLY took me two days to clean out. Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT download something called WhiteSmoke to your computer. It claims to be a legitimate program but it's full of malware and a real bitch to remove. On this particular machine it had imbedded itself in about 900 files, established numerous files and registry entries.

However, while I waited on several cleaning tools to do their thing on the computer  I got a quilt loaded on the machine and about 2/3 quilted.

 

This one has been in the works for a little better than two years and I'm really liking it.

The weather is still gray, rainy, chilly and windy and supposed to continue that way so I won't mind staying inside cleaning out computers and quilting.

At home sew-in

I didn't make it to the Heartstrings sew-in in Fremont so I had my own personal at-home sew-in. Of course, I didn't get to enjoy the company of other Heartstrings members but I didn't have to get up at 5am, or spend about six hours on the road round trip, or burn a tank of almost $4 a gallon gas. By the time I quit working I had 41 RWB blocks finished.

Maybe I'll make a few more in the morning, for a full set of 48.

Do you know what's odd?  My box of RWB strips doesn't look any emptier!! They seem to fluff up to fill the space. LOL

There's small....and then there's SMALL

I've been thinking about making Bonnie Hunter's Roll Roll Cotton Boll quilt so Wednesday afternoon found me digging around in my string drawers, picking out neutral/pale strings for the string blocks in RRCB. After three meetings in three days, two where I was hosting, it was amazingly soothing.  I just grabbed anything I thought would work & tossed it in a pile. I did have to wonder though about some of the really short, narrow pieces I found. Finally I remembered that several years ago I had it in my head to make 8-point star blocks, probably about 18" or so, and all the diamonds in each star were going to be string pieced. For that project short and narrow was good. Some were really small.  Today I went through the basketful,

sorting strings. Long ones on the left, shorties on the right. I hate grabbing strings while I'm sewing and finding two or three that are too short before I find the right length. A few of the shorties I even sewed together to make a more useful length.  Crazy??  Maybe. So now I have the basket full of longer strings, a small box of shorties, and a small tin full of wide shorties and triangles for the corners.

The string drawers aren't crammed quite as  full now, but I think I'll have to make "Fair & Square" from Bonnie's book Scraps & Shirttails II: Continuing the Art of Quilting Green  to use up a bunch of the colored ones. Gosh, I might even have to make some of those star blocks if that doesn't do the job.