Karate, Teeth and Freecycle

A strange title I know but that is what my past few days have been composed of. I am a member of a yahoo group called freecycle, it is a national movement when people who have stuff to give away post to their local group and give it to others. Go to http://www.freecycle.org/ for a better explanation, but on Tuesday a woman posted that she had seven bags of fabric to give away and a small cabinet. I responded that I was interested and she chose me so after the kids got up from their naps on Tuesday afternoon I loaded them up and went and collected the fabric and cabinet. When I got home I gleefully went through the bags and kept and overflowing laundry basket full of fabric, most of which is older quality quilting fabric (a lot of Hoffman prints). The rest I took to my quilt guild meeting that night to offer to the ladies and what they didn't want my friend offered back to other people on freecycle today. It's a great concept of passing things along to people who can use them as well as keeping things out of landfills. This is actually the second time that I have been blessed with someone else's stash. Several years ago I was in Costco when a lady noticed my bag said something about quilting and struck up a conversation and offered me many large tubs full of fabric. I gratefully accepted and went to pick the stuff up (which barely fit into the 2 door neon that I was driving at the time). I kept two large rubber maid tubs full of fabric and passed the rest on. I have made so many useful things from that fabric and am actually now getting down to just the last bits so it will be nice to go through this fabric and start using it, although my room is such a mess at this point that I am going to have to do some serious Flylady flinging in order to make room. I did get a start on flinging tonight when I boxed up some craft supplies that I am not using to donate to the childcare at the Y.

Tuesday night I went to my first Karate class at the Y. I have done martial arts before and greatly enjoyed it, but had to stop when I was 6 months pregnant with my son and then couldn't afford to go back afterwards. One of the benefits of joining the Y has been that they offer Karate classes for a VERY reasonable price. The classes are two nights a week for an hour which works out well since I really can't commit much more time than that anyway. In the three years since I stopped doing Tae Kwon Do I had forgotten how much fun I had and how empowered martial arts made me feel. I am glad to be able to go back and am grateful to my husband for being willing watch the kids two nights a week so I can do this.

On the teeth front Abbie got another tooth today. This brings the total up to 5! She was much less cranky with this tooth, I didn't even notice it until this afternoon but it looked like it had been in for many hours.

More Pictures

Blogger wouldn't let me post all of my pictures in one post so here are the rest.

A Third (and a Fourth!) Tooth

I has been pretty hectic around here lately. Little miss Abigail got her third (and fourth!) tooth on Monday. She got her third tooth in the morning and the fourth one later that afternoon. No wonder she has been cranky lately. Actually she has another tooth that looks like it will be popping out sometime soon. She has been particularly fussy this evening and this is the first time since I got home at 4:30 that she has let me put her down, let alone have my breast back :)

On Tuesday night I went to Nimble Thimbles and the program was a super show and tell where we were asked to bring in our first and most recent quilts. My first quilt was a rail fence made out of 30's reproduction prints. I was one of those kids that was hand sewing doll clothes for her Barbie in elementary school and then took a sewing class in junior high. I was lucky enough to have an aunt that sewed that lived right down the street (love you Aunt Martha), but the class and the aunt focused mainly on garment sewing and I always had an interest in quilting. I tried once to make a quilt when I was in high school, but since I knew nothing about cutting things accurately and 1/4" seams I soon gave up. Finally as an adult I got a job where a couple people were quilters and they pointed me in the direction of a quilt shop that had a beginning quilting class. In the class we made three quilts one was a rail fence the next was a nine patch and the third was a friendship star. I still have two of these three quilts.

My most recent finish is a wall hanging for Valentines day. It is the same pattern as the Joy wall hangings that I made for Christmas but with Love down the center instead of Joy. I have been working on this with my friends when we get together once a month to work on projects and hand out. I continue to work on the blocks for my guild's mystery quilt and have almost finished making 1/2 square triangles. Since I am making the quilt scrappy I wanted to make a bunch of triangles at one time so I could have more variety in each block. Once the triangles are done the rest of the blocks should go quickly. They are revealing the setting for the quilt next Tuesday so it would be nice to have it done by then.

Zoo pictures

Every year in the spring me mother, sister and I go to the zoo with the kids. This year we went on March 23rd. Here are some pictures from the last three years. The first are from when my son was three months old, the second are from when he was 17 months old and I am pregnant with my daughter and the last set are from this year.

BTW look how much my daughter looks like her brother!

Getting my act together

I just checked my blog and I notice that it has been a month since I have posted with any real regularity. A lot of personal things have been going on this past month and luckily they are mostly working themselves out. I haven't been doing much sewing, or housework, or knitting, etc this last month, but hopefully as things settle down I hope that will change. I have started to teach myself to knit in the round. It is really easy, perhaps easier than knitting on straight needles, because to do stockinette stitch you just knit, no purling.

Here are some pictures of what we have been up to in the last month. The first are pictures of the quilts that I entered into the Arizona Quilter's guild show. One is the Oklahoma Backroads quilt that I have shown here before and the other is the stars over time challenge quilt that I have talked about before. I did not win any ribbons but I feel that I have accomplished something just to be brave enough to enter. The second set of pictures are from Easter Sunday which was spent with my family at my parents house.

Please forgive my absence.

Sorry it has been so long since I posted but a lot of changes have been going on in my life lately. I'll write more about those changes later, but I will say that sometimes you have to take a step back, look at your life and decide that you are not living life the way you know in your heart that you should. Then you have to decide if you have the courage to change those things or are you going to ignore what you know is the right path and stay on the easy path. After much soul searching I have decided that I must take the path that I know is right. It will not be easy, but in the end I truly believe that it will be better off for all involved. Please send your positive thoughts my way, I can certainly use them.

A tooth Finally!

Well my sweet baby girl finally got her first tooth on Sunday. Hallelujah! She has been working on that tooth for over a month.

Recently a friend gave me a stack of her old shirts that she was going to give to Goodwill. She knew that I like to recycle old clothes into clothes for my kids. Last Friday I was able to make a t-shirt and a pair of shorts for my son and an a-line tank top for my daughter. I was going to take a picture of them together in their new outfits, but my son got sick on Saturday and threw up on his new outfit before I could get a picture. You can see the top on my daughter though. I embellished it with a pooh patch and ribbon that I got in a set at the cheap fabric store for 65 cents. It turned out darling. I have several more t-shirts that I am going to probably recycle into similar tops, I even ordered some cute ribbon online yesterday from Les Bon Ribbon to embellish them.

Tonight I was reminded once again how important it is to have the right tool for a job and how important it is to do the prep work correctly even if it is tedious. A week ago last Saturday I decided to paint my small entryway powder room. Piece of cake I thought, I already had the paint left over from painting my daughter's bedroom. So I go into the bathroom and get started. I was out of plastic for the floor but I figured I'd just put down some towels and go at it. My painter's masking tape was also a bit old and not sticking well but I decided to just forge ahead anyway. Within minutes my son had gotten paint on the tile and i had to stop and clean it up. I also dripped paint a lot and kept having to clean up paint. Then I got the walls mostly done and started to work cutting in the ceilings and such with a paint brush. this was not going well with the brush I had but I kept at it. Finally tonight I gave up and went to the Home Dept and bought a special corner paint tool and a tool for painting edges. It took me minutes to redo the painting that was taking hours and it looks sooooo much better. I think that I might actually be done painting, I'll have to look at it in the morning when its dry. I wish I had just taken the time to go get the right tools in the beginning, I would have been done days ago! I guess that life just needs to give us these kind of lessons every once in a while. So the moral of my story is, don't struggle with something, find the right tool for the job and use it!