It is hard to believe this is September 1st already. The summer flew by and I haven’t a clue why? I think I spent the majority of the summer in the house due to the extremely hot weather we had. When it is 100+ degrees for days on end it tends to be too hot to even sit on the porch and enjoy the weather.
One would think because of that inactivity that the summer would have dragged by instead here it is September and we all know that fall is actually just around the corner. I think as we get a little older times goes by faster!
Last night I worked on two boxes of scraps – I filled up this small plastic zipper bag that I got a set of sheets (folded up so tight and small I am amazed). This little bag is about 7x7x7 inches and I have it packed with scraps that I will take along on the trip and go through as I feel like it and cut into useable scraps. Some of the shapes will be diamonds and some will be squares and rectangles depending on the size.
As I cut them I will store them in this box. I took some of the overflow from the photo shown in yesterdays post and also took two boxes down from the shelf and went through them. I repacked one box and put it back on the shelf and will bring this one with me to use for storage. If I decide I have enough room I might dump one of the boxes of scraps in a plastic bag and stuff them in the cabinet to take along – I don’t want to take too much along with me though as I hardly ever work on as much as I think I will.
I’m still trying to decide if I should bring a bag of yarn along to crochet while we drive. I tend to like to have something to do while Mike drives but I have found that I no longer sew very well when in motion. Last year I started an afghan but here I am part way done with it and haven’t touched it since the last trip and no longer really like the color! and I ran out of yarn anyhow and would need to match it up. Maybe I will bring the crochet hook with me and if I feel like it stop somewhere and pick up some yarn – a crochet hook sure doesn’t take up room – I can stick it in the silverware drawer 
On to the living area – it is small but keep in mind we also have the bed to stretch out on and recline and read if we don’t want to use our chairs. We do have a tv – someone asked that 
it is a small tv and it is in the kitchen area – you pull it out from the wall and it turns to the living area or to the bed.
Here is the tv pulled out from the wall facing the living area – there is a stereo in the cabinet above the tv area.
Facing the bed – yes that is my reflection in the tv – there are two layers of blinds on all the windows in the bedroom area so the reflection is not on the screen if we wish to watch tv from here. Truthfully though we rarely watch tv while we travel. Sometimes it is just because we are busy doing other things and also because we do spend the majority of the time outside not inside watching tv. When we are inside we tend to read a lot and work on our computers – or in my case get some sewing done. We always seem to have music playing.
The living area as it is when we are driving – all the seats forward, tables put away nothing laying around where it can fly out and hit you in sudden stops.
The living area when the chairs are turned inside when we are set up. There is a curtain that shuts off the windshield area for privacy. Tables I pulled out so you can see them. Plenty of room to eat at and to use the computers or for my sewing. The chairs recline all the way back just like “lazy boy chairs” do at home – no foot rest though. The chairs can be pulled forward more or go back more so there is plenty of leg room.
The closet and dresser
Mike remodeled the closet and we have the top half for hanging and the bottom half with plastic bins to hold t-shirts and other articles of clothing – a strap hooks to the floor in front of the boxes to keep them in place when traveling.
A skylight over head with a blind pull down, we also have a windshield reflector placed up there for the very sunny days to keep the heat out. There are a couple storage areas up here as you can see and we keep soft things up there – the bath towels so if they would happen to fall it doesn’t do us any damage
More storage:
And all the way around the bed on the upper area is more storage area
This wraps around the ceiling by the bed in a U shape, the corner areas go back a good distance.
So that is it – this is what we live in when we travel. This is a 2008 Navion IQ – diesel engine and this model floor plan was only sold for one or two years and they do not sell this model any more! They are selling a different floor plan which we really did not like so we are glad we go this one when we did. It is just under 25 feet in length and we pull our car behind us. We love going to small campgrounds in the woods or on the prairies and desert area. We do not like the “resort” type of campgrounds nor the “parking lot” type of campgrounds. They tend to pack you in really close and you barely have any privacy at all in those type of places. We like a more of a rustic type of atmosphere and a lot less people!!
Back to quilting tomorrow!
Seeing as I had to go to Little Rock today for my bi-annual check up for my auto immune disease I thought it would be a good time to look for the rest of my dishes! I had went back to the local Wal-Mart several times and all I found were broken dishes!! What a way to run a store – putting crumpled up boxes on the shelves with dishes rattling around doesn’t make good business sense to me.
The first and only Wal-Mart we went in today had 3 or 4 boxes on the shelf and they all looked to be in good shape and no rattling noise when you lift the boxes ( the tell tale noise letting you know not to buy). These all look blue but they are actually more of a hint of green in them – they also sell individual pieces on the shelf but they are all very much blue. I will get these all in the dish washer tomorrow after I get back from my quilting morning and then get the old dishes packed away for goodwill. I will keep a few pieces here and there for extra – like little dessert plates are still in very good shape.
Yesterday – mainly last night while watching tv I finished quilting the first pillow for the camper. I still need to make a backing for it – but that is just one layer of cloth and will not be quilted as the front of it is. I should be able to finish that tomorrow.
One down, one to go. I think I will bring it with me to quilting in the morning – maybe I can make a good start on it.
We didn’t stop to visit with our daughter as she was working but also because she is spending the weekend and Monday here. She and I are driving to NW Arkansas on Monday for a surprise visit with my mom – Mel hasn’t seen her grandma in almost a year.
Sometimes I hate shopping!! Talk about a run around. I told you all last week or two that I wanted to find some new dishes – I don’t want expensive dishes – I know me I will get a chip or a crack quickly.
All I wanted was something new and pretty. I found some new plates etc.. at Wal-Mart, I bought two boxes to give me 8 settings so that when the girls and family are here I have enough plates without going to paper. Aren’t these pretty – well of course I am unboxing when I get home and find one plate in one of the boxes is broken into about 5 pieces. I go back to Wal-Mart with the box to make an exchange – no problem there. I go back to get another box leaving the box with the broken dish at the Customer Service area with a very helpful young man (really he was the best). I get back to the dishes – and all I find is one box of my set ( I really thought there were more from the way the box was on the shelf when I was there the first time) and the bottom of the box is crushed and when I pick it up I can hear broken dishes!
I go back to the service area and tell the young man – only one box and broken dishes in it. He says well go back and get the box and maybe one plate is ok in that box that we can change out to my box – ok that would work – not! I bring the box back and he checks – all the plates are broke! Ok they are selling the same dishes individually also – he checks with his manager yes we can take one plate and change out – I go back once again to the dish area and grab a plate – bring it back up to the service area and we are ready to do the exchange – get the plate box out of the big box, open it up to get the broken plate out and low and behold they are different colors! Mine has a hint of green in them which I don’t think shows up in this photo – the individual plates are more of a turquoise – an obvious difference when they are next to each other. By this point I’m ready to scream!
The young man sends someone to the back of the store to check and see if there are any in the stock room as his computer tells him there are – he gets on the phone to check with the stores in the next towns over both east and west (I forgot the one to the south which is much closer and so did he) to see if they have a set (how helpful he was being. They have him on hold forever! The person comes back from the stockroom to tell him they have 4 more boxes of those dishes coming in on the next truck which was coming in last night but there were none in the stock room at that moment (sounds like they were missing some boxes that mysterious disappeared from the shelf). They assure me they will be on the shelf today – not!! I went back over to the store today to see if they had them stocked on the shelf – not a box! I will go back tomorrow when I am done at the fitness center and see if they have them then.
I can order them on Wal-Mart.com but I would rather be able to pick up the box and shake it gently and listen to hear if I think there are any broken dishes in it until I get the right box – I just have a feeling that if I order on line that by time it gets to me it will contain some broken dishes. But if they do not have the boxes on the shelf by the end of the weekend I guess I will order a box or at least drive over to the next towns and see if they have the box that matches my color.
Now I guess I will get back to quilting!
EDITED: at 8:55 pm – outlook e mail is now working again – it had been out all day! glad it seems to be fixed now.
I am having trouble with my e mail program so I have not been able to answer anyone today! Hopefully it will be fixed tomorrow. Thanks all for the compliments on how the yellow to orange colors are looking. This is just a small portion of the quilt. It will be finished size around 110 x 110 inches – yes all hand pieced. I intend to try to use as many colors of the rainbow as I can 
I was able to order more reds and purples and I hope they are not out of stock – without having my e mail today I don’t know if they sent me a message! ugh I hate it when I have problems like that – the mail won’t even forward to my cell phone like it usually does. I know I could go to my old yahoo address or g mail but then I have to cut and paste addresses to send to individuals that are not on my normal mailing list and I’m too lazy Hopefully it will be up and running tomorrow -
It has been so nice the last three days that I have been back sitting on my porch a lot. The air is a little more humid today but it is still in the low 80’s 
so nice! I wish it had been like this all summer.
One of the nice things about having a lap top is that I can take it outside and do my post from the deck listening to the bugs making all their noises and the birds pecking at seed, the wind chimes tinkling in the breeze – so nice – now if I would have just thought to grab a cold glass of something to drink it would be perfect. Guess I will have to set this down and run back in the house for moment –
Last night and this morning I was busy getting some more colors printed out for Joseph’s Coat and between cutting and printing I was pretty busy. I still need to cut out more of the background pieces and I will do that this evening.
I had said I wasn’t going to use the fabric that is orangey/yellow (shown yesterday) but after looking at it some more I decided it would be just fine in it. Now quite a few of these are just stuck up on the design wall not sewed in place. (you can see yesterdays post to see what is sewed together) I just wanted to get ahead on the color placement for a bit – everything from the yellow/orange is not sewed. This will keep me busy throughout the weekend I’m sure and on into next week most likely Hand piecing and cutting out with scissors means you accomplish things at a slower pace – but it is so relaxing!! Really you pour so much of yourself into making a quilt that you never want to give it away!! The girls are going to have to wait a long time before they get their hands on some of these quilts LOL
I have the next 15 fabrics or so lined up to use, although I didn’t count them – some are fat quarters, some are smaller –
I need to get on line and place an order at Hancocks of Paducah for more reds and purples. I got to looking at the next bundle of fabric that I have stacked up for this quilt and I have very few in those colors. I am mainly using Bali Water Color Batiks, they normally have a good selection of those. This quilt is going to be a big quilt – about 110 x 110 I want it to fit the queen size really well with it’s deep mattress and have plenty hanging over the edge of the mattress.
The hard part of making a quilt this large and needing a design wall to make sure the color placement is right is that I don’t have the space to hang a big sheet of flannel or whatever up to do it!! I’m not sure what I will do when I outgrow the design wall I have right now – as you can see after all this is sewed together I will be running out of height and I will need to tack a piece of flannel or something up above it so I can see my color selection.
Of course it will have to wait awhile with all those other quilts waiting in line to be quilted!! I keep telling myself – one day I will be caught up – and if you believe that you are sillier than I am!
Now I am going to get back to reading my book and enjoying this day. I will grab a cold drink when I bring the computer back in the house to get it out of my way. I am reading a book by Lisa Scottoline “Killer Smile” I love her books – this morning on Amazon I was going through the list of kindle books to find more to add to my selection. I found this one and then about 6 more that were $2.99 and under. I have tried a lot of the free books but find that I don’t care for a lot of them and really $2.99 and under is a good price for books. I do pay more for them also but try to stick to the low prices but I don’t make myself stick to low prices if you know what I mean.
What a wonderful day we are having. It is in the mid 80’s and it is 2 in the afternoon. A nice breeze on the porch is keeping me from bringing my sewing outside. But I have my kindle and a glass of Iced Raspberry Green Tea. What more do I need? Well I realized I hadn’t done a blog post today so I thought I would do a short one. I brought my laptop out to the porch to keep on enjoying the day and took a few photos and had Mike take one of me doing what I am doing out here on the porch most of the day – reading. I have done a few chores like cut the grass while Mike was taking care of some brush. I picked up some fallen branches from some of the storms we had last week – small ones that had been dead mainly = just hadn’t fallen out of the trees yet.
Me enjoying my porch and the deep shade that I have on it.
Mike enjoying some down time with his kindle as well. Looks like I need to clean up that storage box that holds the chair cushions when they are not in use. I tend to stick cleaning products and bug products on there and forget to put them away.
The deep shade of the front yard – the trees are still green despite the drought we had this summer and the hot temperatures – we didn’t loose any grass for the lawn – we just have very little of it!
The shade plants survived mainly I suppose because I watered them every couple of days through the heat wave. I don’t know what they would look like otherwise. My ferns can barely be seen in this photo though. They started out really well this spring but then by the heat wave and lack of rain they started to die back. I ended up cutting them back last month and hoped they would come back on their own and they are now. Mainly what is around the tree and running alongside of the railroad tie bed is “monkey grass” I don’t know what the actual name is but that is what we call it. It gets purple spikes of flowers on it at this time of year and then it turns to purple berries in the fall.
And now I am going to get back to reading and maybe later today if the breeze dies down I will get some work on Joseph’s Coat done – otherwise it will wait until evening.
Hope you all are having a good lazy Sunday.
Today was a quilting break. Other than a few stitches taken at the quilting frame this morning there is no progress on anything! Instead seeing as we were well into another 100+ day (high of 108) we decided to go see a movie this afternoon and grab a meal out.
We drove to the next large town over – Conway – where there is a nice clean movie theater and we saw a very fun movie – (we thought) “Cowboys and Aliens”. It wasn’t supposed to be a comedy (I don’t think) but parts were funny – it was too weird to take seriously if you know what I mean. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford were great and a nice touch was adding Keith Carradine to the cast – I didn’t know he was going to be in it, he is a favorite of mine.
After the movie Mike wanted to stop at Best Buy to look at computer and electronic stuff – not a favorite store for me – boring! So he dropped me off across the street at the strip mall area that has Kohl’s, Belks, Target, Pier 1 ect. In Kohl’s I found a perfect little set of mugs and saucers to put in a wire rack that holds Christmas mugs and saucers. I had been on the look out for something so I could use the wire rack the rest of the year but had not found anything – my new little set on the rack.
I just got 2 of the large mugs and 4 saucers. This is mainly just for morning coffee and will be mainly just used by me and sometimes Mike – he tends to take his coffee in a travel thermal mug where as I prefer to wrap my hands around a mug especially in cold weather time.
I need to buy new dishes one day. I have had the same set for going on 10 years – it is a mixed set of white dishes, plates are from one outlet, salad plates another – ect. all white and all go well together – but age has put scratches and chips on the dishes and new ones are in order. I need to start looking and then all of the old ones will be put in a box and given to good will. I need to do that with all of the mix sets of glasses that we have too.
Now it is going on 7 PM and it is still 102 outside, I do not think it will be enjoyable to sit outside at 9 this evening on the porch like I normally do – I have not been able to do that much the last two weeks. I do hope it starts to cool off more but I think we are in for another month of abnormally high temperatures and little to no rain, we are now officially in a severe drought.
Today I took time away from other projects to get a couple blocks done on the Farmer’s Wife. I hadn’t worked on it in a week and thought I better get busy on it. The next two blocks were very simple ones and I got them both prepped this morning. Then I got busy with some other things but sat down this evening and got them sewed while I watched a couple old NCIS shows – and is there anyone besides me that thinks Jimmy Palmer the Medical Examiner assistant shouldn’t have a larger part on the show and his named shown in the beginning credits 
he is kind of a cutie I think. Anyhow I digress – the blocks I did today–
Block #15
Block #16
I am taking tomorrow off from sewing. Our son-in-law’s brother had a business meeting up in Madison, WI last week and got in a visit with Jessica, Shane and the kids and he talked them into letting him bring their son home with him for a short visit – this is our grandson Utah I am talking about. We arranged to have the whole day with him tomorrow! I saw him back in May but Mike hasn’t seen him since last September. It will be a busy full day – which includes a run up to north west Arkansas to pick him up. Our son-in-laws family doesn’t get up to Madison often and most of that family doesn’t travel much so this is their time to visit but they graciously gave tomorrow to us we have a full day planned including going to Cosmic Caverns in North central Arkansas close to the Missouri border. We will most likely stop at Eureka Springs on the way back to the Bentonville area to drop him off in the evening at his uncles house. Eureka Springs is such a beautiful small historic town it is always nice to wander around a little bit – if I remember right there are several places to get ice cream
I am sure I will have photos to post on Saturday. I am scheduling this to post tomorrow while I am running around.
WIP Wednesday has me continuing work on the “Pave The Way” quilt. I had brought this quilt along with me to work on but I must admit I sat and watched the scenery go by the whole way to the coast and didn’t pick up any of the pieces to work until the drive home.
Go on over to Lee’s Freshly Pieced and see what everyone else is working on this Wednesday. These rows are hand pieced but I still need to sew the rows together. As you can see I have two more rows to do. If I do it like I am doing now it will be 40 x 50 I believe. I am thinking of making one more row in width and using that last row to make the quilt a little more square instead – if I continue as I am it will be 40 x 52 I could make it so it is 47 1/2 x 45 1/2 instead – hmm guess I need to decide today as I can certainly finish up the rows today.
How do I piece while in a car I have been asked – I normally do not ever get car sick although I do have trouble with motion sickness on amusements rides and never get on them – learned my lesson on that years ago! I do at times get motion sickness on boats – but not ferries – the only time I had trouble with sea sickness was on large ships when we went on two different cruises but it was in very rough water.
If I have my quilt top all prepared I can sew in a car but most times I am so busy looking at the scenery that I forget about working on the quilt. Mike normally does most of the driving and always has. I do some of the driving but if someone else wants to do it I let them 
driving is not something that I love so much that I want to be the one doing it all the time.
I had some comments about the quilt on my bed yesterday – thanks for the compliments – the quilt is called “Twisted Stars” it is a Judy Niemeyer pattern. It is for most people to be paper pieced. This is one that I did hand pieced though as I always believe that anything that can be machine sewed can be hand sewed as well and I just plain enjoy hand piecing. I made the quilt in 2003 it is hand pieced and hand quilted. I used batik fabrics and I loved them – some think batiks are too hard to hand piece or hand quilt but I think those people are not hand workers though as I know a lot of hand sewers who love working with batiks. The quilt took me almost 500 hours of work and I will never sell it, I love it too much.
Here is a photo without the laundry on the bed!
A close up
The side borders had flowers and wreaths in the pattern but I had just finished a double wedding ring quilt pattern of Judy’s that had a flower applique border that was very similar and I didn’t want to do another one so I changed it just a bit and did this instead – each side has 3 stars applique in the center of it. I used a little fabric from all the “ribbons” to do a 2 inch border and then used the same batik background for about 6 inches I believe.
