One Piece at a Time

Shameless Self Promotion

I hope you all can forgive me for this little bit of shameless self promotion. I recently entered the McCall’s Quilting “Quilt Design Star” competition and was accepted. If you want to see the quilts entered go here. Click on the VOTE tab to see the quilts and vote for your favorite. They have this nice widget that says vote for me that I put on the right of the blog but don’t feel like you have to. I just want to promote the contest.

Now, back to unplugging, family and trying to keep my kids from blowing each other up with fire-crackers…and eating…lots of eating.

Unplugging

What happens when you have teenage children and visiting relatives on top of two separate dog sitting obligations? Not much as far as sewing and blog writing go I can tell you. My daughter did convince me to have my first ever pedicure though...a lovely experience once I got past the ticklish bit. I think those flowers were definitely worth it don't you?

Since the family onslaught starts tomorrow and I haven’t cleaned the house I’m going to be unplugged for a little while.

Here’s a preview of a free project coming sometime next week (hopefully). I want to show you how you can use your Florabunda blocks to do other projects such as this table runner. Will there be applique in the border? YEP!

Happy Fourth of July to my US readers. I hope everyone is enjoying summer.

Saving Our Necks

OK friends I have made such a wonderful discovery that I am even willing to share a picture of myself to show you this. I don’t know about any of you but when I see an actual picture of myself I tend to cringe. I always think I don’t look like that, I look like Julia Roberts, or Jill from Home Improvement at the very least. Then I begin to wonder where I acquired that extra chin etc etc etc. Just so you know, I did a little “chin surgery in PS” before posting this.

OK enough already. Lately I have been having some neck stiffness and I realized it’s because I spend much of my time sewing like this.

Awful isn’t it…makes my neck hurt just to look at this picture. So I decided to prop my very well used travel ironing surface on a plastic box to see if that helped. Well, it did, as long as I didn’t push on it and knock it over…which was every 10 minutes.

Yesterday I was wandering the isles of our local Michaels ( that’s a giant craft store for our international friend) when I saw this.

For 50% off. It turns out this is perfect. You can adjust the angle and height for your perfect sewing position and it doesn’t fall over. It even has a handy drawer for stashing stuff in and packs away neat as a suitcase.

See the improvement.