Submitted by Sandie Griego on Fri, 08/30/2013 - 22:40
It seems like yesterday that we were beginning August and now it's gone.
I lived through another birthday and have been promised a trip to the new Perot museum in Dallas. I had to renew my drivers license in person this time. My old picture was 10 years old and my appearance has changed a little bit.
This was the month that I had planned to pay off our house. We moved into our new home 10 years ago in August. We moved one weekend and I left a few days later for two week at Philmont Scout Ranch. It was wonderful. Hubby worked hard while I was gone and had the place very livable when I returned exhausted. We had planned to sell some stock to help make up the lump sum to pay off our mortgage. The stock market has taken a dive and hubby would like for it to come back up some before we sell. I know it will come back up - and our house will get paid off. I just had this mental deadline in my head and it is disappointing not to achieve the goal the way I wanted. Anyway, we have saved some ungodly amount of interest money by paying it off 20 years early.
I finally got the last block for our Bernina dealership's Quilt Sitters Block of the Month. I begged, but they would not give it to me early. I had the top put together except for this one block and borders. Once that was done, I took it over to my friends house, who owns a Bernina quilt frame. We decided on a quilting strategy and started stitching. It book up the better part of two days to complete the quilting. I bound it tonight and wove in all the quilting thread tails.
This is not the best picture of the quilt. I normally lay out quilts in the game room floor but it was too dark in there tonight to take a picture. This is a close up of our beginning to quilt one of the corner triangles.
I also started working on my next project. I will probably finish this one at the quilt retreat I plan to attend in September. I made the first block and loved it. Then I made the next four blocks and only loved one of them. I don't love the three on the right. It is just too scrappy for me so, change of plans.
I had more solids with the jelly rolls I purchased. I plan to replace the fabric like I have pinned the fabric in the next picture. We will see.
One of ladies that lives in my neighborhood brought over some T-shirts for me to work on. This is the results. She works at a pre-school.
The bottom shirt is a take off on the AC/DC band logo. Notice that the edges of the letters show stray threads. As an applique artist, this is really hard for me to leave it this way - but it is what the customer wanted.
My Sewing Guild Doll group decided to start working on a new doll. I have three doll heads to make in the next week. Should be fun. We will paint the faces while we are together and choose the one we like best to use on our finished doll.
On a different note, my new cat, Jade, was starting to cause damage to our home. She spent Tuesday at the Vet's office getting her front paws taken care of. She is home and recovering well.
During this month, I had to make an unscheduled trip to my eye doctor. Somehow I got an ulcer on my right eye and it became infected. She took me out of my contacts for a week and put me on eye drops. I absolutely hate to wear glasses. They make me hot, they slide down my nose, I don't see as well. You get the idea. Well, this being Texas and August, my exercise schedule suffered greatly during this time. I think I finally got back on my routine today. It actually felt good to exercise again (who said that?). I also used my Weight Watcher meeting day to quilt at my friends house so it has been a couple of weeks since I have attended a meeting. Next week will be a "see how much damage I have done" meeting.
I decided that the heat had done too much damage to my garden. I still have peppers and okra producing but everything else has been pulled up and placed in the compost bin. We actually got so many cantaloupes that I got tired of them. I ate the last of them with my dinner tonight. Hubby wants to expand the garden for next year. I told him we would need to look into a drip irrigation system before we expanded and he agreed.