My new blog

The server my  new blog lives on was to undergo an upgrade last night.  Unfortunately, the server is still down, and my new site is inaccessible at the moment.

(As is http://www.mqresource.com, my site for machine quilters)

I hope it will be back up SOONER than SOON, but I don’t really know.

Because of the downtime this week, I’ll be extending the QUILT giveaway that I was running on my new blog.

I hpoe you’ll be patient and come back again later to see me:

http://www.suzanneearley.net

Itchy Feet

I like change.  (Well, some change).  I like to try new things until I figure out that I’ve finally found the right thing that feels best for me.

For example, Mark and I have been married for almost 13 years and have lived in 6 houses.  Three of those have been right here in Traer, which is quite a feat.  We kept looking for the best thing for us, and we seem to have found it.  For now.  Because I’m not moving again for a million years.  Or maybe we’ll move tomorrow.  Who knows.

How about cars:  in 9 years I went through 6 cars.  Ridiculous, I know.  But then we got my Accord, and I’ve been driving it for almost 5 years and I haven’t once thought that I really needed to change.  With previous cars it happened within about a year.

And now:  website/blog locations.

http://www.suzanneearley.net

I know. It’s the ultimate in vanity to have my own name as my domain, but it’s part of a larger plan for world domination.  I hope you’ll come join me.  All of my old posts are already over there.  In time the look and style will be changing, but for now, I think you’ll find it’s remarkably familiar.  For now.

I’ll maintain this blog for archival purposes, but will be closing comments.  When you get there, you can pretty easily (I hope!) subscribe to the feed of the new blog so you can keep track of me in your favorite Feed Reader (like Google Reader!).  I hope you’ll also take a few minutes to update your Blogrolls or link lists on your own websites to point to my new location.  And if you link to me in your posts, please use the new website address.

And if you do follow me, and you post a comment, I’ll enter you in a drawing for a small present.

Thank you.

Suzanne aka Easily Distracted Girl

Quiltin’ up a storm

I’ve had 4 quilts on (and back off!) the quilting machine this week — it sure feels good to FINISH things.  Well, “finish” as in “finish this particular step and then put them in the pile for the next step.”

I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures to my Flickr Photostream, and because I’ve run out of steam for tonight, I’m just going to point you there if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to.  A scrappy nine patch plus those Strip Twist QOVs from last week are the 3 that are photographed, the braid quilt was quilted today, but not photographed yet:

Quilt Photos

Did you know that tomorrow is the last day of January? How did that happen? Here are the photos I’ve picked for the last few days of my daily photo project:

The sky was such an odd foggy shade of grey and the trees were all covered with snowy ice:

You’ve seen this one:

And this one:

I waited until too late in the day to try to take Mark’s picture. None of the pictures I took were very great, and this one only looked decent after I went with the black and white. My goal was to get some pictures that show HIS eyes, but he wasn’t in the mood, and it was really too dark.

I’ve always thought that my eyes were my best feature, but my boys hit the beautiful-eye-gene-jackpot in that their DAD has really beautiful eyes, too.

Look at that dog’s tongue.  Don’t you wish you could do that?

TTFN-

Suzanne

Talking with Will

Will wanted to tell me about something that happened at school. I asked him if I could take some pictures of him while he talked. He said no, but I did it anyway.

How old are you?

According to my husband’s driver’s license, he is 38 years old.

The 4 wheeler tracks in my front yard lead me to suspect he’s really only about 16.

Looking for

This:

It’s by Robyn Pandolph, from a collection called Aubrey Rose.  It’s from approximately 2004, when she was designing for South Seas Imports.  It’s a tone-on-tone green and I need about 1/4 to 1/2 yard.

I have Googled, and tried Quiltshops.com, but all I can even find pictures of online are the focal florals, none of this tone-on-tone.  I’ll give Missingfabrics.com a whirl next, but I thought I’d give this a try — maybe you have a bit of this hiding in your stash that you’d be willing to trade with me?  (I’ll pay postage and trade you for comparable yardage of something from the shop or my stash…).

And of course, you probably want to know WHY I need this.  Well, instead of cleaning (or writing patterns, or writing/drawing my book), I fell prey to temptation again.

Only look!

Another finished quilt top!

Pattern is Peppermint Swirls by Fig Tree Quilts.  Pattern calls for some words (jingle all the way) appliqued on it, but I don’t like what she did, don’t think it “goes”.  Pattern picture shows it bound in red and I really don’t like that, but I only have about half of what I need in order to bind it in the green (it was a kit).

The blocks were together, I needed to add one more corner triangle, trim it, and add the white and green borders.

Having finished 2 quilt tops, I now I feel justified in starting something new!

Ha!

TTFN-

Suzanne aka EDG

p.s.  i was going to write it as EDGirl.  But then I worried that it looked like I was calling myself Erectile Dysfunction Girl.

Feeling like Goldilocks

Just once, I’d like for things to go according to plan.

Like today, for instance.  I needed to arrive at the shop early enough to finish up some packages and take them to the Post Office, before I open the doors at 10.

That included printing a couple copies of my books.  I didn’t get them printed last night because the toner cartridge I had just installed was leaving spots on the edge of the page, and I wasn’t able to fuss around with at the time.

Mind you, the toner cartridge I was replacing was leaving faint black lines on the pages, so it wasn’t like I could just throw that one back in.

My recent toner shipment had included 3 black toner cartridges, so I thought I’d just stick another new one in, get the stuff printed, and then deal with replacing the 2 bad cartridges later.

Ahem.

You see where this is going?

The replacement replacement had a big ole strip of NOTHING down the right side of the page.

This one leaves spots.

This one leaves stripes.

This one leaves blanks.

Thankfully (for my sanity) the FINAL new one I installed is Just Right.

I’m actually quite surprised, I’ve been using toner from this particular company for some time now, and this is only the 2nd?  3rd? (ok, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) times I’ve gotten a defective cartridge from them.  As you can imagine, I’ll be calling in a bit to see about getting replacements.  But that means I’ll have to package up the bad ones and take THOSE to the post office, and all I really want to do right now is QUILT.

Overworked and underpaid

Poor guy.  That darned dishwasher always needs to be unloaded.

I’ve told that them that if they want to stop eating, the dishes won’t get so dirty all the time.

Temptation

You are not going to be surprised to learn that I did not clean, I gave into temptation and sewed.

Only, look!  I resisted the temptation to start something new and I actually finished something.

And by finished, I mean that I finished the quilt top.

I really like the look of a braid, but this quilt was not fun to make — I’m actually surprised that I persevered.  Those braided strips were so poky.  Ugh.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I enjoy sitting and being one with my sewing machine as I sew and sew and sew and sew.  But this was tediously poky.  I’d sew and sew and sew and…not be able to tell that I’d actually DONE anything.  I like to at least see a little bit of progress.

I managed to make myself keep going until it was going to be approximately square and then I quit.  The tiny triangles (finished at 1 inch square…) and are waste triangles from another project.  There’s something like 200 of them on this quilt.  I have hundreds left.

Last night, I needed to finish piecing one half square border, attach it, plus attach the one that was already sewn to the other side — after that it was reliatively quick work to add the blue border and get the binding ready to go.  Not sure how I’ll quilt it.  I’m not sure if I’m keeping this one, or if it will be a QOV.

The beauty of the new location for the sewing room is that I don’t have to quit sewing when Mark wants to go to bed.  Yea!  Sewing into the wee hours, here I come!

Oh — now I’d better get going before I’m late to open the shop.

Later gators -

Suzanne

Saturday & Sunday

I set the camera on top of our TV armoire, and snapped this one.  I thought it would be interesting to take pictures throughout the year of our home and see how it changes.  We rearrange fairly often, plus there is always something going on — the table to the right of center is Lego Mindstorm Central at the moment.  And I’m noticing that the Poinsettia wallhanging never got taken back down after the holiday season.

The wall color is pretty accurate in this photo.  When we first looked at this house I thought “OMG that is YELLOW” and was sure we’d have to change it.

It has grown on me, though, and I’m glad I never could talk Mark into repainting.

The boys received a copy of the movie Wall-E for Christmas.  With the movie was a voucher for a free tree.  Mark went online, signed up, and here, finely, is our Tree.  We had to buy some potting soil and a pot last night.  Hopefully it survived it’s trip to our house, and can survive until such time that it can be transplanted to the great outdoors.

For reference, the portion fo the tree that is actually above the soil is only about 7 inches…

I think I’m all caught up now.  Well, caught up in sharing pictures, that is.

The boys should be home from basketball any moment now, and after we have our Traditional Sunday supper (popcorn, apples and cheese, that’s a well-rounded meal, right?), I might go sew for a bit.  I mean…clean up some more.

Yeah.  That’s it.  I’ll go clean some more.

TTFN-

Suzanne aka EDG