New This Week

Here is the quilting update for the week:

Paisley Party arrived Monday. What a beautiful line! There is a great beginner level quilt kit, which I've scheduled a class for in November. See it here!

I added a few new classes. Be sure to check them out if you're in the area.

My sister was nice enough to update the Quilt Samples on the website.

My sister also did my dishes. Oh yeah, she even added some of the new kits:

Warm Hands, Warm Hearts
Christmas Crossing
Sweet Sunshine
And More!

Recipe for Friendship was shipped Thursday. It should be in-store by next Thursday!

I finally got to use my long-arm Wednesday! Quilts are once again going out the door. Hooray!

2 weeks and counting until Quilt Market. Can't wait!

Where's a Flu Shot When You Need One?

It's that time of year again. I'm stuck in a time warp, still wishing we were boating on the weekend, when suddenly I'm stuck in bed with the stomach flu. Just when things were starting to settle down slightly, the shop is moved, the longarm is moved, quilt shows are over until next Spring, and suddenly I'm bed ridden.

I spent all of Sunday in bed, unless you count trips to the bathroom to, well......you know the rest. In the mean time, my kids took full advantage and terrorized the house all day. Where was Monte? Why, lying right next to me with the same problem, of course! Which could have been funny, except that it wasn't.

It was all we could do to crawl to the bedroom door every few hours and yell something like "Settle down!" "Go outside and play, NOW!" or "Who left the fridge open?!"

And that big, empty room that used to be filled with a mountain of quilt tops and a certain longarm machine? My kids have mistaken it for a wrestling/tag/basketball/dance arena.

The light bulbs in the dining room/deck/family room area aren't all mysteriously burnt out at once, either. The breaker's just tripped. "Not me" decided to investigate the former longarm power outlet in the floor with a screw driver.

Now, I'm stuck home today with "Not Me," who has the stomach flu. Just when I thought I might get to make sure my longarm still runs. But hey, who doesn't love scrubbing the carpet at 6am? By the way, race car beds are all kinds of fun, except when the driver doesn't make it all the way to the bathroom. Then they're just a great big germ factory that requires lots of disinfecting.

I think I'll find some time to make 5 appointments for flu shots - ASAP.

Kid Kwip-Combed Your Hair Lately?

For some reason, most of my kid kwips come from Kylee. Perhaps it's her matter-of-fact way of observing the world that only a 6-year old has. Here's another one:

Yesterday afternoon I stopped at Walmart to pick up a few things. Just as we were walking away from the register, Kylee offered this observation -

"Hey Mom, it looks like that girl never combs her hair."

She was referring to the cashier who had helped us. The funniest thing was that Kylee was right. At least she waited until we were leaving to voice her opinion!

New Fabric for Preorder-Bistro

I've uploaded new fabric this morning! Bistro is due in some time in October.

I'm working on adding Recipe for Friendship also, which is another line from Moda due in October.

Happy looking!

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, 2 Days

It started yesterday morning. I woke up exhausted, and I'm not a morning person anyways. My car was still stuffed with everything we took to the quilt show, so the only free seats were the two up front. (I'm pretty sure I hold the world record for most stuff ever stuffed into a Durango)

I crowded all 3 kids into the front seat of my car, because I needed to unload it and didn't want to come back home after dropping the kids off to switch cars. The school is directly next to the quilt shop, and only 3 or 4 blocks from our house, which is why I figured I could get away with breaking about 15 driving safety laws.

We made it to the school ok, but somewhere in the process of 3 kids tumbling out of my front seat, one of them hit the automatic door locks. Now I'm locked out of my car with no phone and no keys. Thankfully, I'm wearing sweats, and not what my mom calls my "shortie-shorts." I proceed into the school to call her for a ride.

Amazingly, I actually locate the spare keys to my car pretty quickly and mom gives me a ride back to unlock it. I spend the better part of the morning inputting the weekend sales into the POS system and trying to make sense of my notebook scribbles while Will pulls Aiden around in the Tutto. My cash drawer is $600 out of balance, but at least I got all the sale in the system!

Somewhere around 11am, Will informs me that "one of those glass bottles" fell out of the fridge when he opened it. I proceed downstairs to find the "glass bottle" is actually a nearly new bottle of vanilla latte syrup, now in a puddle of sticky glass in front of the fridge. I do a terrible job wiping it up, leaving a sticky spot on the floor. Thank goodness I haven't painted the floor yet!

When I make it back upstairs, just as I'm trying to wrap things up, my computer locks up. After fighting it for another hour, I give up and head home. I decide to pin a quilt on the longarm while Aiden sleeps, but after pinning it on wrong twice I think maybe I should try again later.

Later, I run to Moscow for groceries. I stop at the bank to see about why my debit card has suddenly stopped working, and learn that it was tagged as showing fraudulent activity. I have to reorder a new card, and while I do that, Will manages to act like the brattiest child on planet Earth. I think I'll stick to the drive thru from now on.

His behavior continues through the grocery store. I think grocery stores need drive-thrus too.

Around 7pm, I head back to the shop to investigate my computer. After 1.5 hours on the phone with Dell, we decide my computer has a virus. I'm thankful that I'm able to make a backup of my POS files, but when the tech on the phone says he'll be happy to help me reinstall Windows as soon as I find the disc that came with the computer, I have a small coronary. "Just shoot me now," I think, at the thought of looking all over the new shop for that disc. Instead, I tell him I'll call back, and I head home to drink lots of wine.

This morning (Tuesday) I wake up to freezing temperatures outside. The battle of the computer lasts all day. I manage to find my Windows install disc, but still have to spend over 2 hours on the phone with Dell tech support to fix everything. The technician says he lives in Florida, which makes me jealous. I haven't had time to clean the furnace ducts in the church, and it was 32 degrees last night. I spend the day shivering and so cold my fingernails are blue. I think I'll add long-johns, an electric blanket, and a turbo-charged space heater to my shopping list.

Thanks to my mom and my friend Barb, the shop gets put back together today and actually looks pretty good. First on my to-do list for tomorrow is to cut 30 Moda U kits. That's after I get the stitches removed from my mouth and make another Home Depot run. I'm going to stock up on furnace vent filters and crank the heat!

Breaking and Entering

Labor Day weekend, my mom and I always hold a booth at the show. Sunday, after the show, we decided to go through Moscow on the way home. I needed price tag labels for my new printer system and was dying to try it out. Moscow adds another hour to the trip home, which put us back in Deary around 9 or 10pm. My mom and I never pass a Starbucks without stopping, so in addition to labels we picked up a drink on the way home. Therefore, I was quite ready for a bathroom break by the time we got back to Deary.

When it comes to keys, I am extremely scatter-brained. When I was growing up, we didn't lock anything. The house, the car, nothing, so there was never any need to keep track of keys. This means that as an adult, I am hopeless when it comes to key organization. Give me a key to anything, and I will lose it within an hour! Thanks to the extra copies of my quilt shop key made for me by my mom and a friend, I haven't locked myself out of the shop for quite awhile, but I used to lock myself out weekly. (Which my mom finds extra annoying)

So, back to Labor Day weekend. Saturday night, I had locked the laundry room door, which exits to the garage. This door has one of those doorknobs that can be locked on the outside but still turns on the inside without automatically unlocking. This has, on more than one occasion, proven not to be a good choice if you're not good with keys, like me.

Sunday morning, my mom, who has an annoying ability to be an hour early for everything, had already called and demanded to know why I wasn't at the shop yet, so I was in a rush. I even left without properly fixing my hair. That meant that I rushed out the door Sunday morning without realizing the door was locked. A bad idea, indeed, since my family was gone camping for the weekend.

It wasn't until I arrived home, doing a potty dance, that I realized I had locked myself out of the house. Any other day of the year, I would've had the house key on my car key ring. But not this day. This happened to be the one time that I had removed the key a couple days before so Bailey could borrow it. I could see it perfectly in my mind, laying there so neatly on the table by my bed, right where I left it when she gave it back. So, that left me, exhausted, doing the potty dance, locked out of my house, in the dark.

Yes, in the complete dark. Because even though I could get inside the garage, I still couldn't turn on the outside lights. In addition to being scatterbrained about keys, I'm scatter brained about almost everything else. That includes remembering to buy and replace the light bulbs that had burned out. So scatterbrained, that every single light (all 6 of them) outside our house have burned out before I can remember to replace even one of them.

Thankfully, I did manage to get inside. It involved the headlights of my car and making a staircase/ladder out of fire wood, but I did get in, and I did finally make it to the bathroom. The entire time I kept hoping that no one would see me, because thanks to my hurried morning, the a-line hair cut I'm currently growing out, and a lack of hair gel, I held an eerie resemblance to Charles Manson (minus the facial hair). And if my neighbors have reason to believe that Charles Manson is breaking and entering my house, I can only hope that they would call the cops.

Quilting Blossom

It's down to the final hours this week! I have 2 days to finish up projects to take to the St. Maries Quilt Show Sunday and Monday. With only one quilt left, it should be easy. But only a few blocks into that final quilt, I realized that my urge to customize was going to mean it would take a lot longer than I had hoped for. Finally, at 8pm last night, I was too tired to keep quilting, so I had to give up until this afternoon. Here is what is taking me so long:

And by the way, that late night party? Never happened. The computer shipped separately from everything else, so I'm still waiting. (not so patiently!)