'Twas the Week Before Christmas

...when all through the house

not a grandma was resting, not even (something that rhymes with house).

That's the mudroom.  I'd thrown the single cheapest piece of hardware store carpet on the roll I could purchase over this icky cracked concrete floor a few years ago when we re-did the kitchen roof.  Now, SUDDENLY, two weeks before christmas I just HAD to get the carpet up and put down the tile that matches the rest of the kitchen and laundry room.

Here's Decaf lining up with all the boxes of books that had to be taken off the shelves so the shelves could be taken down so the carpet could be pulled up (starting to sound like a children's book where the punchline is about a broken balloon, isn't it.).  He's a really funny dog.  He lined up there and just wagged at me for a while until I got the joke.

Here's the tile down!  Yay!  Oh my aching back!  This morning I cut all the fussy bits around the edges and mortared them in.  Tomorrow morning I'll grout it all.

While I took little breaks during the day I made the rest of the cookies I'll be sending out for christmas.  Below is the VERY EASY Eyeore's House cookie recipe I learned from a dear friend in 1992.

Melt 2 tablespoons of peanut butter and a package of butterscotch morsels in the microwave.

Throw in a short can of potato sticks.  (No, I'm not kidding)

Drop by spoonful onto waxed paper.  Let sit until set!  I also made peanut butter buttons.  The hardest part of these cookies is waiting until they cool to eat them!

Decaf really likes peanut butter.  He can smell it as soon as I open the jar, so of course, he helped me keep track of the cookies.  Especially checking to see if they were cool enough to eat!

Are they ready yet?? [wag wag]

I haven't done any sewing in several days, but that'll change as soon as the floor is finished tomorrow.

Work Plus Play

...equals jewelry boxes.  This is what happens when quilting meets construction.  Pattern and how to were featured in a recent edition of Scroll Saw Woodworking and Crafts magazine, and there were these scraps laying around the shop and well, it just kinda happened.

I know this isn't a woodworking blog, but sometimes it's hard for me to seperate woodwork from quilting.

Sawdust

What have I been making all week? Clearly I haven't been quilting - there aren't any pictures up of what I'm working on or what I've had to frogstitch.

I do all my quilting (not piecing) on a Singer 188K. This machine was made mostly in Great Britain and only during the mid/late seventies. It is an industrial machine (only does straight stitch, has a very well balanced mechanism). I've removed the feed dog so I can do free motion stitching, replaced the two horsepower motor with a standard singer 1.5 hp, and have given it a little light in the back. The only drawback to the machine that I've noticed is that it isn't a Gammill long arm.

Anyway, my general procedure is to drag whichever portion of a sandwich I'm working on up to the throat plate and slide it around and sew. This works well for small motifs or stippling, but for large graceful curves it gives me little hiccoughs in each spot where I have to stop and haul more of the sandwich up onto the throatplate. So for the past week I've been building a trestle table from scraps (the top is a left over piece of 1 1/8" subfloor plywood for example) of previous woodworking projects. I cut a hole so the machine could be fitted flush with the table.

Voila!

The ONLY reason I'm writing this blog entry is because that last coat of varnish on the top really should be allowed another three or four hours to harden before I start dragging a safety pin loaded quilt around on it.

What have I been making this week? Sawdust!