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.

Happy Easter

Guess what??  I get to get up in the morning and make another cake for the strawberry shortcake I'm taking along to my daughter's for Easter dinner.  Made my pound cake recipe that has never failed me before and it was a total flop.  It fell, was greasy and very dark and didn't taste at all like pound cake.  Guess I should have used the tube pan like always instead of putting it in two loaf pans. It got tossed even though I felt guilty about it considering all the butter, sugar & eggs that went into it. I'll just make a nice yellow cake from scratch...it'll probably still be warm when we get there.

Tuesday....Mother Nature's Tricks.....Orange Crush

This is what I woke up to this morning:

Al Gore notwithstanding, global warming doesn't seem to have reached the Cornhusker state yet.

So, I decided to brighten a dreary, gloomy day by getting my Orange Crush top laid out:

And yes, I did notice that the star block in the middle of the second row has a piece turned wrong.  This is why I take pictures of my layouts.....it's easier to see errors in a photo. It will be corrected before I start sewing rows together.

One.....Two.....Three

#1

 

#2

#3

That's three UFOs out of the pile. The first one will be going to Alycia for QOV. The other two will be going to Quilter's Newsletter for the Quilts for Japan appeal. The second one was started over a year ago at the Fremont Heartstrings sew-in and just recently got finished.  The third was pieced about three years ago from leftover strips from a Scrappy Bargello quilt (I think there might still be some lurking somewhere.) that was made 10 or more years ago.  Sometimes things just have to mellow for a while.....at least that's my story.

Dreary day

When I woke up to fog this morning I was so hoping it would lift and we would see sunshine. That was not to be. Checked the forecast in the paper and it looks like the chances of rain get better as the week wears on.  Spring in Nebraska sucks. It's almost a sure thing we'll go from cold and wet to hot and steamy. If we get real lucky there might be a few nice days in there somewhere.

Tuesday night was Quilt Club, held at the library.  Our hostess had been under the weather so we didn't have a special project to work on. I took my machine with me so put together a top from string blocks.  It was my lucky night since I won the door prize.

A very pretty bracelet made by Jennie.  The purple key fob was a gift from Flischa.

 

 

 I scrambled to get a challenge done. Here's what we started out with..........

A pre-print for a sweatshirt jacket.

 And not feeling very creative, this is what I did with mine............

String blocks!!!

As it turned out, no one else brought theirs so I'll take it again next month.

Looks like Spring is here

It's been a beautiful day today.....clear skies, sunshine and a little wind but not 90mph like usual. Today was the first time I hung laundry out in months.

 

So, what have I been doing, besides laundry, on such a nice day?  Why, I've been in the basement quilting. Crazy, huh??  Have club tonight so I suppose I should be thinking about what's for supper. It's grilling weather, but the grill is stashed away in the garage and I don't feel like dragging it out.

OK, enough of a break. Back to quilting, but first a kitty picture:

In her nest of quilts.  She looked friendlier in the other picture I took but it was out of focus.

And a grand-daughter picture showing her all ready for the Prom Sweetheart Dance. She's only a sophmore but got asked to Prom by a Junior. She did get to go to Prom too, but with a different date.

And one of the younger grand-daughter too.

 

She's #8....the one in mid-air. She always gives it all she's got.

 No pictures of grandson to share right now, but we celebrate his 8th birthday this coming Sunday even thought it's not officially till the 14th.  They're growing up so fast.

Goals met

Last night before I went to sleep I had a list in mind of things to get done today:

       1. Make Crock Pot Ham & 16 Bean soup for supper
       2. Make binding for the QOV quilt I quilted yesterday
       3. Make backing for the next quilt on the quilting list

I'm happy to say I got all that done plus cutting batting to size and making the binding for that next quilt. I'm thinking maybe I can at least get it loaded on the machine on Friday.

The soup turned out pretty good...DH had two helpings.  One thing though....the beans were cooked within 4-5 hrs on high, not the 6-8 like the recipe says.  So it was ready much sooner than I thought it would be. We ate early tonight.

.....Mmmmmmmmmmmm.......

......Should a librarian be in possession of an eBook reader? It might seem like going against the grain, but I was curious, did some a lot of research and am now the owner of a Sony PRS 650 touchscreen eReader.

It's compact, easy to operate and fairly lightweight. So much easier on hands than holding a large hard-cover book. Text can be adjusted to six different sizes....good for aging eyes. The screen is what's called e-ink rather than back lit like a computer screen. I've read two or three hours at a time and my eyes don't get tired like they do reading for extended periods of time on the computer. Over all I like it, but if there was one thing I could change it would be to have the screen background more of a cream color instead of the very pale gray it is.  This model doesn't have either Wifi or 3G connections so books need to be downloaded to the computer first then put on the reader.  I use a free program called Calibre to manage my books and load them to the reader. The program can also convert from one eBook format to another as long as there's no Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the eBook. For instance, from Kindle's MOBI format to the more standard EPUB format, or vice versa, but only if there's no DRM involved.  Just so you know, I still like real books too. Something about the feel and smell of the paper and ink along with the ability to see your progress as you read. I'll never abandon them entirely.

My new gadget is laying on the 10-Minute table runner that only took an hour to make at our Quilt Club meeting last week. My Halloween one turned out real cute and it would be fun to make some for all the holidays and seasons.  A set of them would make nice gifts too.

Isn't it interesting?

The library got it's new copy of Consumer Reports today.....the 2011 new car edition. In looking through it I realized that the car industry seems to be going backward when it comes to gas mileage.  The majority of the vehicles featured, and there were lots of them, don't get as good gas mileage as my 20-yr. old Buick. That includes the teeny-weeny sub-compact models. There were just a handful that are rated at 30mpg or better. This is progress?? Who are they trying to kid?? We won't even go into prices of the new "efficient" cars.

So Close.....

The two-year-old UFO if sooooo close to being a finished top. Just need to miter the corners. Maybe it'll get done yet tonight.

For tonight's entertainment, here's a video of my kitty after I fed him some cheese. I guess it must have stuck to his teeth or something. When he kept licking and licking I just had to grab the camera and video him.

Lick, lick, lick, lick.

Lime Green

I've got two sets of bright w/lime green center blocks done for the Feb./Mar. Heartstrings quilt group project. I get carried away cutting strips and the sewing is addictive. Anyway, those are done now & just need to be mailed off.

Love that lime green!!

Some quilting done

Hard to believe it's been over two weeks since my last post. There just hasn't been much going on to write about except to complain about the cold...why bother???  I have gotten a couple tops quilted....too bad they're not mine.

Progress is being made on a 2 yr. old UFO. The borders are ready to sew on. I hate putting on borders and it will have three of them so I've sewed the strips together and will miter the corners. I decided that should be less of a PITA than sewing each strip on individually. We shall see.  My grandson actually asked about this quilt when he stayed the weekend. I had been working on blocks when I stayed with the kids at their house.

I have really been enjoying the much warmer weather. Yesterday I made a trip to Norfolk to do some returns, spend a gift card & run a few other errands. I noticed how many Senior Citizens were out and about.....scads of 'em, oxygen bottles, walkers and all.  With the ice mostly thawed they probably felt safe going out for the first time in weeks. Today I'm off to O'Neill to try to spend a couple gift cards at the quilt shop & run another DH errand. Friends report that the quilt shop is looking kind of empty so we'll see what I find. I always worry they'll close their doors before I get my gift cards spent.

Helper

Found this on another blog and decided to share it.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

 If only I could train my kitties to be so productive.

Ahhhh, Spring!!

Not really. After all, this is Nebraska in January, but the sky is blue, the sun is shining and my thermometer says it's 42 degrees out today and it was almost as warm yesterday. It gives one hope that Spring is getting closer.

Still nothing quilty to show, but soon. They aren't mine but I had a part in them. Stay tuned.

Had an email this morning from a second cousin in Germany sending me some old family pictures & telling me a little bit more about her family. So exciting.  Makes me want to get working on genealogy again. It's always hard to decide....genealogy?? read?? sew/quilt?? play on the computer?? Notice, nothing active mentioned here. That's why I don't like pictures of me....to chubby from all the sit-down hobbies.

We had a program/book signing at the library last night by local author Dick Haskin for his latest book, "Beyond the Hills of Mars."  Ten people were there for the program and another couple showed up just as it was ending. A pretty good turnout for our little library. I'm hoping to get a couple more area authors to do programs in the next couple of months.

Grandson, Tyler, will be coming later today to spend the weekend. Will have to move my junk from his bed and lay in some of his favorite foods. I have to work at the library tomorrow but he will have a good time hanging out with Grandpa. Maybe it will be warm enough to go ice fishing.

So long till next time.

Cold again

glitter-graphics.com
 

We're back to freezing cold today. I was so hoping for another nice day like yesterday.....upper 30's, even saw the sun a little bit, but no go. Freakin' cold again, with some light snow......and I hope it stays light. Yesterday melted a bunch of what we had and we don't need any more.

Got the sewer system problems straightened out yesterday. A person just doesn't appreciate being able to run any amount of water down the drains until you can't. After the freezer's demise that was the second stumbling block we've had lately. They say things come in 3s so I'm scared to even think of what #3 might be.

Today I'm hoping to get myself down into the basement, get the machine oiled up and load a quilt. It's high time there was something quilty on this blog.

Keep warm, everyone.