Kathy Nida

I’m up too early today. I’ve been up for an hour because of the puppy. She is a sweet thing, but she is a baby. I have choices. I can force the teenaged girl up to deal with her puppy, but then I deal with a tired teenaged girl all day (actually, I’m sending her to a birthday party this afternoon and evening, so it might not matter). I only have so much patience saved up for each day. Puppy plus girl means cranky mommy.

The good thing is that I think my brain has finally had enough rest (despite early morning risings) to get to the artmaking side of my time off. The studio is mostly clean. The quilts that needed to be shipped out are gone as of today. We still have three doctor’s appointments, a piano guild assessment, and a variety of other obligations this week, but it’s starting to feel more like summer. Maybe. It could just be the heat (which is still a good 20 degrees below what it will probably be in August).

We spent all weekend in soccer mode. The girlchild chose to play in a tournament with another team that she’s played with before…unfortunately, their new players…um…kind of…um…suck. Yeah. So they didn’t do well, but the girlchild had a solid weekend of practicing running around and playing with the ball. And even heading it, which she’s been practicing more now that they let them attempt brain damage during the game.

The ball IS in the picture…look at the top above the two guys in the red hats.

The weather was actually quite reasonable and nice and breezy where she played, and I did some applique (show you in a minute), so the heinously bad scores were sort of easy to forget.

Leg crossing while kicking the ball. Impressive. Anyway, four games makes up for missing soccer practice today for a birthday party (her daddy doesn’t think so, but he’s a little obsessed with the game anyway…she needs some time with her friends or she will drive her brother and I bonkers).

I’m still trying to finish All around the Town…I got both borders on, but it was too big to take to soccer games.

I like it even though I didn’t pick out the fabrics…I saw one online here on Susan Garman’s site that was done all in bright colors, and I really liked it (but I’m NOT doing it again!). Pat Dicker did the quilt in dots, but I’m not finding a website just for her…Anyway, I’m trying to finish up the stars and there are cars as well.

Plus there is a big sun in the middle that has all these rays coming out of it. The pattern recommended using one of those bias tape makers, so I bought one and it was incredibly easy to use…imagine me at 11 at night ironing these teensy-weensy quarter-inch pieces and being so excited, but everyone is asleep and they would think I was crazy to be so excited anyway.

The cats were excited for me. Of course, where am I going to put this little piece of metal so that I can find it the next time I need it? Knowing me, it’ll be somewhere in this room and I’ll still have to go buy another one because I won’t remember what I did with it. I should label all the drawers in here…yeah. Now THERE’S a summer project for you. Seventy-eight things in one drawer will make one huge label. Maybe I’ll stick with sewing.

So I needed something small enough to take to the soccer game, because this quilt is now like 56″ square, so I started another square in a quilt I’ve been working on since 2002 or maybe earlier, Simply Delicious by Piece o’ Cake Designs.

That is the official picture off their website, and they are now offering the patterns as an epattern, which is cool (and incredibly cheaper than buying the patterns like I did way back when).

My quilt is moving very slowly. It looks like this…

and I’ve done one more block without its little squares (if I don’t do the tiny squares right after I finish the block, I might never do them. I hate piecing. Plus I suck at it. More on that later this week).

What’s funny is I thought I had done this block last summer, but no. I did it in July 2007. Yikes!

And you wonder why nothing ever gets finished. I have Quilt ADD. So that is 7 blocks and now I’m doing the grapes block, which currently looks like this…

AKA nothing. Forty more grapes to go! Here I am picking out the greens for leaves (harder than you might think).

And then the purples, which I really didn’t think about at all…just tried not to put any of the same colors next to each other.

Purple is difficult because there are so many shades of it…red-purple, blue-purple, gray-purple. Maroon is borderline. Burgundy is too. There’s a brown fabric that lives half of its life in the brown drawer and the other half in the purple drawer, depending on how I’m feeling when I put it away. I have the same problems with grays. Let’s not even talk about the multi-colored fabrics.

Speaking of putting it away, I’m trying to find space for all the fabric in here and it’s an issue. Not sure what to do next. I bagged up a huge pile of stuff people had given me that aren’t really quilting fabrics (Hawaiian shirt remnants, some upholstery and curtain remnants) and it’s sitting in the hallway with the stuff I bagged up last summer and still haven’t dealt with properly. Sigh. I think I will calendar that.

OK. So it’s time to wake the dead (11-year-old and 13-year-old) and get ready for the day. This afternoon will hopefully include fabric-choosing for art quilts (as well as shopping for pajamas for the giant boychild, who needs to clean out his closet and stop looking down on his sweet mama when she asks why he’s wearing flannel pjs to bed when it’s 90 degrees out…maybe he should verbalize his needs…a girl can dream). It will probably also involve puppies and kittens and sweltering heat, but I can handle that now.