Coming Home

DH will be coming home tomorrow morning. I will pick him up at the rehab center at 8:00 A.M. and have him home before 9:00. Once his he settled in and comfortable about being home with only Max & Roxie to keep him company I will be going into work for the remainder of the day.

I already have supper planned for tomorrow. Pork roast, potatoes, carrots and corn. Since the weather is supposed to be cooling I will be making home made dinner rolls as well. This will be a celebration dinner to pass all others.

This weekend we need to visit MIL and get her on the path to a nursing home. DH has been very worried about her the last four weeks and so have I. There is a nice nursing home within one mile of our house and we can visit daily or more often if needed. She has been fighting this for years, but now is the time to do it before she has another bad fall. Then I will have both of my patients to care for and watch over. With the help of the nursing center staff I am sure that MIL will be fine as long as we visit regularly and at different times during the day.

Tomorrow evening after supper I am getting out the fabric for MIL Christmas present quilt. I have a lot of fabric cutting and piecing ahead of me. If I can get all the pieces cut out before we leave for Gatlinburg then all I will have is the piecing to do while on vacation. Navajo Tears needs additional piecing but DH has become so observant that I don't think I can work on it when he is present. This presents a bit of a dilemma. This will take some thinking about. Maybe I can get DH to promise to look the other way so I can work on it. LOL It's worth a try, don't you think?

So many UFO's and so little time between now and Christmas. I have my work cut out for me. Fortunately I have a 4 1/2 day weekend the week of Thanksgiving. I hope to get DD quilt under the sewing machine for the next phase of quilting. I am fairly sure that Navajo Tears and MIL quilt will have to be tied rather than standard quilting. The time frame is too tight otherwise.

If you cannot tell I am in a better mood than I have been in a very long time. DH is showing signs that almost indicate that the dementia was mis-diagnosed. Only time will tell on that. The neurologist said not to come back for 3 months. We will see what happens in the meantime.

Have responsibilities to get back to. Have a great day.

Alaska Baby Quilt #2

The Alaska Baby Quilt Trip Around the World #2 has been layered and pin basted. This morning I am wearing Neosporin on my left thumb and middle finger. Only two actual cuts, but lots of mini scratches in the upper layers of the skin. Luckily the left thumb is not used for touch typing, but the right thumb is used for the space bar.

Enough of my injuries.

DH had a good day yesterday. He mowed the lawn in the front and back of the house. It looks really nice since it is about 8 inches shorter than it was. I am amazed that my neighbors hadn't complained. During the winter one of them actually shoveled the drive and walk way for us. We have wonderful neighbors and I thank them for all the help!

I have another quilt I want to layer and baste tonight. It is a NICU quilt that started my walk down the road of Trip Around the World. I have the perfect backing fabric for it and I am thinking about reverse quilting by using the backing fabric as the pattern for the quilting. The bobbin thread will quilt the top and be totally different from the pattern of the fabric. I will have to mull over this idea and look at the top and fabric before trying this. I do not want to practice a new machine quilting skill on as important a quilt as this is. At the same time it would be a wasted opportunity.

The house cleaning continues to be one item at a time and it is starting to show. How nice.

Hurricane Gustav was declared a catastrophic loss, but our company was not hard hit so we did not set up cat loss reporting for it. Now we may have to deal with Hurricane Ike. Time to watch and see what it brings to the company. It is hard to see large losses both for the insured that we help and for the company itself in these hard economic times. We are fortunate to have good investment gurus here at the company and that makes for a tighter bottom line (no pun intended) on the balance sheet. Our stock has been taking a roller coaster ride lately, but seems to be on the road to recovery. That is good because my pension and my personal stock in the company is the basis for retirement.

Have a great day, Karen

Thursday Machine Quilting

Last evening I spent time trying to figure out machine quilting. I haven't done much beyond stitch-in-the-ditch and I was trying to do a long curve starting at the corner of four patches and swinging out into the patch on the right and then coming back to the seam line where the next two patches meet the previous two. Basically it grew into circles running through the intersection of the four patches.

It looks exactly like what it is; a beginner machine quilter trying out something new. Anyone looking at it up close will know it, but a novice will only see the circles. I am using a variegated 50/3 King Tut thread and it looks really great on both the top and bottom of the quilt. This will be one of the Kid's Komfort quilts I will be turning in at Guild at the October meeting.

DH had another bad day. I wish I could use different words for the good days and the bad days. He is so depressed right now that it is effecting his dementia and every day is not a good day. He finally figured out why his back is hurting worse the usual. He had put the lifts for his shoe into the wrong shoe. Since he is wearing a brace on his left leg that runs from inside the shoe all the way up his thigh, it makes his left leg longer and therefore he needs lifts in the right shoe. He hasn't been able to find the lifts for several days. He looked in both of his everyday shoes (right only) and did not realize that he had transposed the lifts into the left shoe. Once that was corrected he felt a lot better and the pain decreased measurably.

Tonight I am going to go through my stash and find a bolt of fabric I purchased on clearance that should work for the binding on all my Alaska quilt tops. I will need to get out the ironing board to iron the fabric and clear off my cutting table to make strips of fabric for the binding. This is a relatively new process for me. I usually cut my binding on the bias, but because these are quilts that have no curves, I am going to go with the straight of grain. Fun!

This weekend will be a continuation of changing the family room into my sewing room/quilt studio. My family room is L shaped and I have made some progress in the smaller area. If I can clear out what remains and take down the card table that I have been using for my grandson's coin collection I should have sufficient room to move my computer system and office furniture into this section. Once this is done I can start progress on the other section and have a place for R & R when my 60 year old body starts to complain. I really want to get everything totally out of the other area so that I can measure the remaining walls and mark exactly where the windows on the south wall are positioned. Then I can start drawing floor plans with more accuracy than I currently have.

BHG has a fabulous website for planning room layouts and I am using it currently to show a before layout and also working on a final layout. Having the before will allow me to know the dimensions of all my furniture and how they interact at this time.

This Studio Makeover will take about four months from start to completion and I need to have parts of it available for working at the same time. What fun ;).

Have a great day, Karen