Saturday Nights are different now!

And I am thrilled!  Instead of rattling around the house with nothing on tv, I've been spending the last few babysitting.  Last night was 2-month-old Zoey's first sleepover at Gramma's and the little sweetheart slept through the night and even slept in until 8:15 a.m., much to her mother's chagrin.  Isn't it wonderful to wake up to this smile!

Last weekend, Alex had a turn.  He made a fort with quilts and then pretended it was a train.  I had to sit behind him and be the whistle for a while, but was able to talk him in to letting me get off.

The next morning, I pulled out the old rocking horse that was my brother's and he had a ball pretending he was a cowboy.

Such concentration!

This horse has quite a story.  It was made by prisoners at Oakalla Prison in New Westminster, BC in the early 1960's and shipped to the military base on northern Vancouver Island, where a sister of one of the guards (and we) lived.  She would help sell them so the prisoners could make a little cash.  My brother got it for his first birthday and our children all used it too. Now the next generation is here and using it!  It still has its original paint job and leather ears. I plan on passing it to my brother's daughter when she has her first child, but in the meantime my grandbabies can use it.

Not much has been happening on the quilty front.  I hit a by-the-pound sale at a LQS, and spent way too much money on scraps (they sell off manufacturers samples), but scored about 5 lbs of wonderful batiks, and about 4 lbs of mostly new and unreleased fabrics, including selections of Parisville by Tula Pink, Amy Butler and more.  Here they are piled up in my new wicker laundry basket I got for $5 at a garage sale.  This basket stands about 14" high, and it was almost full!

Here's another perspective, with my foot adding a sense of scale.  Most of the fabrics hide a stack of coordinating fabrics underneath.  This pile extends almost 6 feet.  In case you are wondering, 9 lbs of fabric equals about 22.5 metres or 25 yards of wonderful, glorious scraps!  Now I can create scrappy quilts a la Bonnie Hunter to my heart's content.

While the babies visit and sleep, I do work on my hexagons.  Here is my little kit that I like to travel with, including my punch for more cardboards in case I run out.

I'm still thinking about doing a Red & White challenge, and I'm floating the idea around that I might make blocks from the Midget Blocks, Barbara Brackman's Civil War blocks, and the 100 Block magazines (I have Vol. 2 & 3).  I'll end up with a buch of different size blocks, but I can visualize a pretty fun quilt with sashings of flying geese and other designs.

Bad blogger update - Garage Sales, the Beach and Free Block Patterns

I am such a bad, bad blogger.  I scan blogs everyday and consider adding a post to mine, then either don't have pictures to upload, or get sidetracked or just plain lazy and I don't post.  Since I do this blog mainly to keep myself accountable and motivated, that means there hasn't been a lot of sewing or crafts or scrapbooking going on!

But I have been doing some fun things.  Yesterday morning I saw this ad in the local paper:

Can you imagine your friends advertising you are a hoarder (that's what one of them actually called her)?! I called my sister and off we went, where the friends were hosting the garage - and they weren't kidding, the driveway was lined with tables on both sides from the front to the back yard, and they weren't shy about talking about their friend's hoard.  It turns out she used to own a shop, and a lot of the stuff was leftover from those days.  And so were the prices - only about 50% of the original retail price, which in my opinion is not a garage sale price. Needless to say, I left without getting a thing - I can buy a lot of the same or new stuff cheaper on the 'net.  I overheard one friend tell someone they were trying to help her recover her costs.  Unless she was dire straits, I consider a garage sale a way to save the environment by passing on usable stuff at ridiculously low prices.  In fact, I don't even hold garage sales anymore, I just give my stuff to charity.

Here in BC the first Monday of August is a statutory holiday called BC Day.  Since summer seems to have only started around here on the weekend before (July 23rd), we couldn't wait to spend the day at the beach.  My kids and grandkids and I all headed for White Rock, a beautiful beach on the ocean just south of Vancouver and only about an hour from home.  Can you imagine having this view from your home?

Across the bay is Washington State.

These homes run upwards of $1,000,000 and more!

The rock is how White Rock got its name.  Apparently, it is a erratic boulder left by glaciation and was white from guano by seagulls over the millenia. It is even featured in the local natives' legends. Now, it gets painted regularly by the city to hide graffiti. (This is one of my infamous UBIs, as my friends and kids would say! UBIs = useless bits of information)

Sarah dipped Zoey's toes in the ocean for the very first time. She is such a water baby - she just splashed around. She is now seven weeks old in this picture.  Her little friend Logan, who is 3 weeks younger just curled his toes up almost behind his ears !  No way was he putting his toes in.  I can't post that picture cuz I don't have permission yet from his mommy.

Alex took his time to warm up to the beach and the ocean - it's been a year since he last got on the beach because of our poor weather this year.  He loved taking pictures with his camera, though.  A future scrapbooker maybe?

I haven't done much on the quilty front.  I have made more hexagon flowers - I love a portable project!  I also found a block I had done 3 years ago, which was the beginning of  another project that I wanted to do eventually. It's called Midget Blocks and the patterns come from Gay at Sentimental Stitches.  I had forgotten about it because I had saved the .pdfs on my old computer, which was stolen when my home was broken in to almost 2 years ago.

Here is the one and only block I had completed.  Just like Gay's original find, I wanted to name each block in the sashing, but knew I would never stick to hand-embroidering each one, so I used my sewing machine's embroidery feature to put the name in the sashing.  I'm not crazy about the look, but that was before I knew about stabilizers.

I learned a lot doing this block. This is the first foundation-pieced block I've ever attempted.  I liked the process, and felt confident enough to take a class from Judy Niemeyer, the queen of foundation piecing!  I also made this block before I knew enough to trim the seam allowances on this very small block (finished size 4 1/2") to 1/8".  Check out this back - very ugly!

I pride myself in having neat backs on all my craft work, so I wasn't very happy with this result.  That's probably why I put it aside.  Thank goodness for the internet and my LSS, I feel my skills have improved so much in the last couple of years that I'm ready to tackle this again. Gay is redoing her blocks in Red & White, inspired by the Infinite Variety Quilt Show in New York, and I think I'm going to do the same!  Is any one up to a challenge starting in September?  Here's a link to Gay's free Midget Blocks patterns if you are interested in joining me.