Jun
28
Mug Rug Bug
Filed Under Quilting | Leave a Comment
I have to admit that for the longest time I was thinking “WTF is the point of a <insert snicker here> mug rug?” It just seemed so trite. So… um, quilting for the sake of just finishing something. With no respect for the real process and the ungodly amount of time the process — is supposed to — take.
Not to mention the way the name makes me giggle. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what I was thinking the first time I heard the term… and if you don’t see it, well, then your mind isn’t as dirty as mine… good for you! I admit to being as immature about the whole thing as QuiltDad… (Who, BTW, is totally freaking awesome. How did I not know about him either? I am so old and out of touch.)
But then…. I noticed the completely disgusting old paper towel that I had my coffee sitting on at work. OMG. I swear, you wouldn’t want to touch that thing even if you were wearing an entire hazmat suit and wrapped in saran wrap to boot. I think it actually got up and walked over to the trash can by itself this weekend. It probably heard that I was going to cave and make this:
Yep. A mug rug. But seriously, could we come up with another name? ‘Cuz the snickering every time I hear (or say) “mug rug” is starting to annoy the people around me.
So, now I get it. I really do. I have all these tutorials stuck in my head, and the mug rug (gag) is the perfect vessel for getting them photographed so I can share them. This little tiny itty bitty quilt (I think I need to make a yellow polka dot one… don’t you?) has been photographed more than anything else I have ever made. I think my camera is going to throw up if it sees red, brown, yellow and green ever again. But I’m so glad to be using up some of this jelly roll of some Moda line that I bought a zillion years ago.
No kidding… never. buying. a. jellyroll. again. I know, right? Now I’m doomed to fall in love with at least 52 more.
As luck would have it, Alexis made her yummy Personal Peachberry pies… So there is even an action shot. Well, half way. I had already had dessert, and that mug is empty… so it’s really more like a posed “action” shot. Sort of like that picture of me doing a round house kick at Chris’ head. Totally not real. And, yes, I can hold my foot up that high for that long… or at least, I used to be able to.
Anyway… stay tuned for tutorials (bunches of them… because the only post I get daily traffic on from Google is my ribbon box…) and recipes. And other stuff… Probably more mug rugs… I don’t have time for anything else. But I need to find a swap, because, really, how many crumb covered, coffee stained tiny quilts does one person need?
Jun
22
Jun
16
Cut and Paste
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
I’m actually working on a project! This is one I’ve had in mind for a while, and assuming it ever gets finished will hang in Sean’s room.
If you haven’t guessed already, I’m making it in the same way as my other collages. There’s not a whole lot to it, yet, but I’m so proud of myself for actually getting the ball rolling.
You wouldn’t think a collage would take so much effort, but I guess my process is a little more involved. I have to first come up with the idea, spend inordinate amounts of time using google images to find the right pictures, convert them all to grayscale, print them out, cut them out and then decide that most of them are all wrong and go back to the beginning.
This idea centers on a ferris wheel. I think this is the one but it could change. I really hope not as it took me about 2 hours to cut out all those teeny triangles.
I can’t wait to share the whole thing with you… but don’t hold your breath, I probably won’t finish it before he goes off to Kindergarten.
Jun
15
Wordless Wednesday
Filed Under Parenting, Relaxing, Remembering | 2 Comments
Jun
8
Summer Love
Filed Under Remembering | 1 Comment
School’s been out for a week and a half, we’ve already been on vacation and Alexis is away at summer camp this week. So even though summer doesn’t officially start for almost two more weeks, I want to talk about my summer loves. (And I want to hear about yours, too!)
Someone posed a question on a message board I frequent. They wanted to know what your favorite part of summer vacation was as a kid, and what it is as an adult. It took me a while, but I finally remembered that in the summers before my parents separated, my brother and I used to have to clean the house everyday. And by “house” I mean the (teeny tiny) living room and (even smaller) kitchen. No, that wasn’t my favorite summertime activity, my favorite part was the reward we got for doing it.
My dad worked nights at that time, and so every afternoon after we had completed our assignments (and called Mom at work about 50 times just to inform her that we were starving –There’s nothing to eeeeat! – or bored – There’s nothing to dooooo — or just on each other’s last nerve – He won’t stop bugging me!) our Dad would get up and stumble into the living room (usually in just his drawers — oh yes, I am scarred for life) and we would get out the Monopoly game that had been going on all summer. For a couple of hours every weekday afternoon, we would roll the dice and my dad and I would struggle to stay afloat on a game board where my brother owned not only Boardwalk and Park Place, but about 5 of the other 7 monopolies and all four railroads. Come to think of it, I’m not really sure how the game lasted all summer under those conditions… I wonder if dad was doing a little pilfering into the individual envelopes we kept our game pieces in.
In later summers after we were living in a different part of town from our dad, I remember those same obnoxious phone calls to mom — except now she was threatening us with our very existence if we called her even one more time.
Seriously though, it seems like in those later summers during my middle school years my bicycle seat must have left permanent imprints on my butt I was on it so much. Riding to the pool, to our friends’ around the block house, up to the Sheriff’s station where there was a Coke machine that sold Cokes for $.40.
Man, I remember scrounging through the house for stealing out of my brother’s room (yes the same one who kicked my ass at Monopoly for an entire summer) the last nickel to make up that 40 cents. The best part was, that the Sheriff’s station was at the top of a hill at the end of our street, so after riding all the way up there, plugging 8 nickels into the machine and getting the last Coke Sprite Dr Pepper out of the machine, you got to coast down the steep hill and into the driveway. More often than not we were stupid and opened the can before getting home, and so ended up sloshing 1/2 of the soda on the driveway as we zipped up it and into the garage door. (Yes, I actually hit the door a few times…)
Those same summers were spent scouring the neighborhood with big black lawn and leaf bags on the front of our bikes looking for aluminum cans to collect. Sticky, nasty, ancient, flattened by cars and pulled out of gutters aluminum cans. Some were so disgusting that we weren’t even sure what delectable HFCS beverage they originally contained. All so we could turn them in for the big bucks. So we could buy more Cokes — or if we were feeling especially rich, the extra long ride to the 7-11 for candy and slurpees. That involved not only riding up the hill to the Sheriff station, but then up the hill of the cross street for another mile or so. A few years later this evolved into crossing the busy street and going to the Food For Less (my friend calls them “Fight for Food”) across the street from the 7-11 to buy ingredients for “cookies”.
Which brings me to the concoctions we made in the kitchen under the guise of “baking”. I am pretty sure — ok, I know that — my mother hated it when we made these. However, I pretty sure we didn’t get more than a few screamed words about the mess we made if for no other reason than during the hour or two we were occupied riding across busy highways and throwing varied ingredients (baking powder and baking soda are interchangeable right?) together and putting them in the oven we weren’t calling her at work and getting her secretary to drag her out of a meeting so that we could ask who should get the rights to the last frozen waffle.
Ahhh… summer. We did so much outside. Biking, swimming, biking with scrap lumber strapped to our handle bars because we were sure we could build a clubhouse out of 3 2x4s and a 2×3 ft piece of 1/4 inch plywood in a tree in a ditch in front of the park or under the blue bridge (which is now brown BTW). Diving classes at the local pool. Biking. Swim team. Biking to the dollar theater with a Ziploc bag full of pennies to pay for tickets. Did I mention biking?
As we I got older, summer’s became first more laid back with more reading and library visits (on my bike, of course) and then more busy when I started high school. Summer band usually filled the hottest days of August with me and 150 of my closest frenemies tooling around the high school parking lot being shouted at by elder students and deranged crazed men to “roll your feet!”
And then there was the time my littlest brother set the garage on fire… but that’s a story for another day.