Amaryllis Blooming

My Amaryllis plant is blooming. This is the second stalk of flowers that it has put out in the last month. I thought I'd cut it back to late and it would not bloom, but here it is....

Tic Tac Toe Quilt

I finished the Tic Tac Toe quilt. Sorry the picture is not very good. I have got to figure out a better way to take pictures of quilts. The center four blocks came out of the March 2006 Quilter's Newsletter. The border was taken from a quilt I found in Quick Quilts, except I decided to do random size colored blocks.

The quilt is for a baby shower at work on Wednesday. I hope they like it. It isn't a very traditional looking baby quilt. I was using fabric from my stash so I could get started quickly. I looked for primary colors but I just did not have them. So I used brights.

I always get asked how long it takes to make a quilt and usually I have no idea. This time because I did it in a week and a half I have a pretty good idea.

• 8 hours to piece the top
  
• 6 hours to machine quilt
• 10 minutes of swearing once I found out that I had large tucks in the backing on two corners
  
• 1.5 hours to rip out the quilting on those corners
  
• 30 minutes to quilt those portions again.
  
• 6 hours to do the binding
  

My husband liked it enough that he said I should keep it and give them something else. I think that means I'll be making a king size Tic Tac Toe quilt soon. I definitely need to add to my stash for that one.

Finally quilting again...

I've been doing all kinds of other stuff rather than quilting for the last few weeks. I have a friend at work who is having a baby. We are having a baby shower for him and a his wife in a week and a half. I decided I wanted to make a quick baby quilt as a gift. Unfortunately two weeks have passed since I decided to do this. This weekend was the first time I felt like I had some spare time.

I went through a bunch of magazines to find a fairly quick quilt that looked cute. Last night I narrowed it down to four possibilities. One was a rail fence pattern, another was pinwheels and the last was a square on point made using four patches and half square triangles. I pulled out some brights from my stash (they are having a little boy) so I could make my final choice and start this morning.

Then I ran into my latest issue of Quilter's Newsletter and found the Tic Tac Toe pattern. For some reason I was sold on doing that quilt. It has 18 inch blocks and is larger than I really want. So I decided to do a 2 X 2 layout with a cool border from the split rail fence pattern. That will end up with a 42" square. I think that is a pretty good baby quilt size and one that I can hopefully finish quilting in a week and a half.

New Blog Look

Well, I did change the look of my blog. It didn't take a whole lot of work either. I found this cute template from Blogger Templates.
Anyway hopefully this will inspire me to blog more.

Beth Mitchell Photography

I have been helping a friend with her web site. Its been fun and a good way to practice html and javascript. I have spent almost every night this week working on it though. I'm not doing anything amazingly cool or anything, but I think it looks pretty good.

It gives me ideas for ways to change the look of this blog. So stay tuned you may see some changes coming in the near future.

I haven't been doing much quilting lately because I've been either working on Beth's site, working on stuff for my quilt guild, going to agility class with the dog, or working. Hopefully I'll get some time this weekend to quilt.

What is up with Amazon?

Our quilt guild is doing a quilt from Judy Martin's Knockout Blocks and Sampler Quilts for our Block of the Month quilt this year. I bought the book from a quilt shop a couple years ago for $21. It is listed on Amazon through different sellers for $57, $65 and even $131.05!!! I have no idea why it would be so much on Amazon. I found it online at a quilt shop for $20 and I may contact them. We are also contacting some local quilt shops to find out if they can get the book and what their price would be.

If anyone happens to know of a place we can find multiple copies of the book for a reasonable price ($20 or $21 is doable...$57, $65 and $131.05 are not) please let me know.

Human Calendar and Daylight Savings Time

This post is just to let you know how messed up my mind is.
You see the cool calendar at the right of the blog? If you click on it you go to the Human Calendar. It is a calendar made of pictures of people. One person for each day of the month. Every person in the calendar looks at the person holding the current date.

I spent 2 hours awake figuring out the algorithm they might have used to figure out which direction each person should be looking on any given day.

Of course since my brain does not have any real form of persistent memory (printer, memory card, hard drive) I lost the algorithm as soon as I actually got to sleep. Actually I dosed off a couple times and had to start over too.

Because writing code in my head for something that has already been done and I have no intention of tying to do myself is the best use of my time at 2 AM on a Sunday morning when I am already going to lose an hour of sleep due to daylight savings time.

**My apologies to any English teacher I've ever had for that last run on sentence, not to mention my punctuation and grammar.

Great Run Thru

We went to run-thrus at the Georgia Dog Gym. It was a really good day. The weather was in the 70's and sunny. We kept ASCII crated under shade when he wasn't running. ASCII isn't thrilled with heat...that black fur soaks up the sun. There were two courses mapped out. One was an easier "victory lap" kind of course. We did that first and ASCII did great until the last two jumps. It wasn't his fault of course. I was out of breath and couldn't say "Over!". That little pause while I tried to get one breath was all it took for ASCII to decide I didn't know where we were going and decide to go his own way. I should have at least pointed or something.

The second time I tried the long course. It had a few tricky turns. I had ASCII out for a little while before the run and was worried that since it was warm, my big black dog wouldn't want to run. So I tried to pump him up before the run. I ran out to the start line with him and played with him as we went.

It worked! I'm not always good at keeping him pumped up. I get wrapped up in the course and forget to make it fun for him. When I don't do that he'll shut down and go sniff clover or decide to make a bee line for the teeter. This time he was happy when we got out there. He was happier about doing agility than he'd been in months. He did everything I told him to do perfectly. I was so happy about his performance that I forgot where I was going and cut out the whole middle of the course. That was OK though. We still ended the day on a high note.

Agility Run Thru

Tomorrow I'm taking ASCII to the Georgia Dog Gym for agility run thrus. ASCII really wants to go. You can see it in his eyes. Take me to agility pleeaaase!

Underground Railroad Block of the Month

I have finished two more blocks from my quilt guild's block of the month. I have 3 more left. Forgive the bad pictures. I've got to get better at this stuff.