Almost There

This week I concentrated on getting the bedrooms back in order. The closets are all cleaned out and the furniture is all in place. We moved 2 pieces of furniture from our bedroom into the new guest room along with the bed from the smallest bedroom, and it all fits nicely. That room now just needs items on the wall and a new rug. I would love to make a quilt for the wall, but with the graduation quilt I'm working on I would not be able to get to a wall quilt until June. Maybe that's okay - we'll see. Our bedroom needs a new rug as well since we "re-purposed" the old one in the entry foyer as it would not go with the green walls I wanted in our room. We also need items for the walls in our bedroom, but there is no rush there.

Jim's office is all set up in the smallest bedroom, and it looks pretty good. We are debating on a rug in there, or just leaving the hardwood floors bare. He also doesn't want the framed antique paper dolls left on the walls. What's up with that? We will probably move 2 or 3 of those to the new guest room. Then I think we will simply take some of our landscape photos and have them enlarged to 8"x10" or maybe 11"x17" and put under glass for the walls in the office. We have some nice shots so we might as well use them.

In between all that I have managed to work a few hours on the graduation quilt. It has been very time consuming! I definitely need to carve out a couple of hours each day to work on it. Slowly but surely...

Measure Twice, Cut Once

That was an old adage my mom used to throw out when I was learning to sew. I've gotten a lot of mileage (or should I say yardage?) out of it over the years. Over the weekend I came up with a modification of mom's words of wisdom. Measure twice, buy once. I have been working on the graduation quilt I am making for my friend's son. She helped me pick out 26 of the fabrics initially, though I need 73 different fabrics all together. I finished shopping on my own. I have all 70 squares cut and sewn with their borders attached. The next step is a purple fabric for the sashings, which is what joins the squares together. Diane had helped me select this particular fabric, and it quickly became clear to me on Sunday that I was not going to have enough to do all the squares. Crap!

Knowing that Jackman's was having a Super Bowl sale, I rushed up there hoping to be able to buy 3 more yards of the fabric. They only had 2 yards left. Double crap! I made an executive decision to change to a different purple, one that has a suggestion of tie-dye effect to it. I think it will mesh nicely with the 70 different novelty prints in the quilt, and it blends with the purple border already around each square. (Purple is the graduate's favorite color, in case you couldn't tell.) Now I get to cut 280 strips 9" x 2". Yippee! My least favorite part of quilting is all the cutting. My wrist hurts thinking about it. Maybe if I had a decent layout table it would help. Instead I am either hunched over on the floor cutting, or bending over a table that is too short.

Maybe my retirement home will have the perfect craft room???

Once the Dust Settles

So I got our bedroom all put back in order, and found a pretty quilt at Macy's that looks great with the wall color. Then over the weekend, Jim and I had to take everything out of my "office" for the painter who was coming on Monday. Now our bedroom as well as the small guest room is packed with stuff from the office. I just don't know where to go with stuff. I have recycled as much as I can (or will, when the weather clears - all THAT stuff is in the entry foyer!), and the trash cans are full this week. But since some of the stuff will go into the small guest room when it becomes Jim's office, it has to remain elsewhere until we can take the bed down and move it into the old "office". Honestly, it is like a Chinese fire drill around here.

But the old "office" was painted a cheery yellow Monday, and yesterday I began to clean out the closet in there. That is where I stored all my office supplies. I'm boxing them up for now and those boxes, too, are cluttering up our bedroom. Who would have thought that some wall paint would cause all this mess? Me and my big ideas! I can't wait until it is all done...