It is starting to explode. It is a challenge to stop and keep things under control when I am trying to make progress on these projects. So here is the stuff I am working on. I am so excited. This space will soon explode in pastel tulle! Tulle is something I usually avoid like the plague, but now I have nieces. One of the things I enjoy about Christmas is having to stop and think about what all the kids might enjoy. It is very different from the things I normally spend my time creating. So if your kid is on my gift list, don’t let them see these pictures.

I am starting to work on Christmas gifts. I realized that unless I decided not to post for the next month, there will be a chance that somebody will see what they are getting before they get to unwrap it. Since a lot of the fun is in the making of things I will post anyway. I thought of a fun gift for all my nieces and nephews. I am so excited. I think they will have fun playing with them. Here is a little sneak preview. I think the colors are fun. I won’t be getting very far on these tonight since I need to run out for more supplies. But it is a start. I have to start thinking about what to give to the grown ups.

Great weekend! We had such a great time with family. My sister-in-law said she always laughs more when she gets together with family and I could definitely say the same. It was fun to connect in ways that others might not understand. As we complained about the food we had to eat as children, we had a good laugh about the fact that we were not complaining about our mother’s cooking, but the cooking of the hired help. How snobby does that sound? It isn’t what it seems. It comes from growing up in a foreign country and going to boarding school which gives you a lot of experiences that don’t make sense to most of the people around us today. But I should say that those cooks also made some fantastic food. But not as good as what’s cooking at Nathan & Carol’s. The food is always fantastic… and the chocolate! Throw in a great thrift store and it is a perfect weekend!
I am a little bummed that even though I walked through the kitchen of the world famous Moveable Feast, I have still not tasted these fabulous brownies featured this year on Oprah’s Favorite Things. I might just have to order a box.

Okay, I was feeling inspired. I thought maybe my sister-in-law would like this better. We shall see. We are heading to Chicago for the weekend to see them. They are visiting another brother and sister-in-law and it will be very fun to spend the weekend with both couples! Also can’t wait to see how much our kid’s cousins have grown in 6 months since we saw them last. I can’t believe it has been that long. Here is the new baby blanket. It was so fun to make, I might have to make more!

More than anything else, I love combining fabrics. Of course, just putting them together isn’t enough. It is fun to see those fabric combinations come together into a tangible item. I am discovering the joy of more instant gratification projects. Those are projects small enough to see results in a few hours. This is an apron I am working on. I usually push to get things done so that the finishing doesn’t feel like a chore, but this one is so much fun I thought I would save the last 15 minutes of work for sometime today when I need to do something rewarding. I should give credit to Carol and to Susi for the cute ideas using circles and embroidery. Theirs are so much better executed than mine, but I just had to try it.

I have been experimenting. I realized my sewing machine has this feature that disengages the feed mechanism and just lets you move your fabric around freely. I have only had super basic machines until this one so I didn’t even know it was possible. So it has been fun to experiment. I need to come up with some good designs. I really like the way the tree looks and need to come up with some designs that can really take advantage of the jagged edge look. But the sun is gone and I have such low light that I can’t get my little camera to focus on the fabric. So I have probably spent as much time trying to get photos of it as I have actually doing the sewing. Oh, well. Here is what I got so far. Maybe if the sun comes out again I can get some better pictures. Note: that is a flower in the middle that is upside down. It is probably hard to tell what it it. I couldn’t really get any good individual shots.

It was rainy and gray all day. It really makes it hard for me to find motivation to do the things I should be doing. I decided that it would be fun to make a mini quilt. A project small enough to enjoy doing it and actually feel productive. So at about 2 o’clock I scrapped my “to do” list and started a baby quilt. It is now 8pm, but it didn’t take six hours to make. I actually had to drive and pick the kids up from school, supervise homework, make dinner and sit down and have dinner with my family (although it was really hard to sit there until everyone was done eating and I actually skipped out while the youngest was still slowly plugging away at giving his squirrelly body some sustenance.) I have a new niece or nephew due this summer. I wanted to give this to my sister-in-law, but I think that maybe she has pretty specific tastes and I don’t really know what she would like. I have a few other fabric combinations that I think would be fun so maybe I will put together a few more instant gratification quilts and choose which one she would like best. Any ideas from you ladies who know her?

I am a little nervous about the coming winter. I haven’t lived through the seasons long enough to get used to the cycle. It is hard not to grieve over the conclusion of summer and even the end of autumn. I keep looking at pictures to remind myself that it really doesn’t last forever and winter can be really beautiful. I am hoping after a few years I will get used to the cycle and that I will just get excited about each new season. But today while I was raking up leaves again, I had a couple visitors. They have been hanging out on our lake for a week trying to escape all the noise on the nearby lakes from the gunshots of duck hunters. I have been wanting to get some pictures, but we don’t have a zoom lens that is strong enough. I was so excited when they swam right up as if they were looking for company. OK, I am sure they were actually looking for home baked bread, which I gladly supplied. I never realized how big these birds are. I actually felt compelled to make sure there was enough bread in the water so they wouldn’t decide they wanted to come after the bread I still had in my hand. I got some lovely shots of these beauties, and am so grateful they were willing to oblige. And I am also reminded why I love living here, even with winter on the way.

When I was a kid I used to clean my room before I did my homework. I am not sure why I felt compelled to do that. I just couldn’t really concentrate until I was free of the clutter and chaos. I sometimes think it was a way to procrastinate without feeling guilty since, hey, I was still being productive right? Later, I think I started prioritizing that way in order to have a little motivation to get the tasks done that were no fun. So my long list of fall chores is coming to an end. I am so excited. Fortunately, some of them have been enjoyable. While the wallpapering was difficult, it was also so fun to see the kitchen transformed. And when I felt like all the work was just no fun, I supplemented by working on Ethan’s quilt. Since we have moved around so much I feel desperate to make this house feel like my home. With an “exaggerated sense of design” it takes a lot of work for me to transform a place into my own (thanks to Dave French, friend and former art teacher who brought his family to spend the day with us yesterday, for putting that dilemma into words) . And just like when I was a child, I feel like I need the space to be my own in order to concentrate on anything creative besides transforming my space. So as I get closer to reaching that point I am starting to get very excited about other projects. I loaded up on buttons at the big Joann’s clearance. They were selling them for 25 cents a card. I bought as many cool ones as I could find. It was such an amazing steal that I had to total up the cost if I hadn’t gotten them on clearance. Sixty-five bucks worth of buttons for 4 dollars. Woohoo! I can’t wait to start adding these babies to my projects.

I also found this cool old bedspread at the Goodwill. I think it would make really fun tote bags. I just love the colors and “old style” print (trying to avoid the exhausted words retro or vintage, but I am too lazy to look in a thesaurus.)

One of my goals has been to have some color in the kitchen before snowfall. I guess it does have color, but I want vibrant color. And I am not so crazy about the country style wallpaper that was up in here. It is more my mom’s style, and I am so thankful my parents are letting us rent this house, but it doesn’t feel like my style and sometimes it gives me the feeling that I am house sitting instead of living in my own place (which we have done enough times to know). I do feel a little bad that the things I am doing to the house might not really suit my parents if they want to move back in, but since their future plans will probably take them out of state, and I am desperate for a place to nest after feeling like a nomad for too long, then I am just going for it. I have been so anxious to get this done that I haven’t stopped to blog about it. But here it is. First the old wallpaper:

And here is what I am replacing it with. Woohoo! Do you think it is vibrant enough?



So here I am hanging it. I have never done this before! And I don’t think I ever want to have to do it again.



I finished hanging the paper this afternoon and was so desperate to get it done that I went straight to the hardware store to get some paint. I am tired of my kitchen being torn up. So here I am finally covering up the aqua. One of my least favorite colors, although I am thinking it can be kind of cute on some of the mod stuff I am seeing (just not in a country style kitchen.)



So here is the before and after shots!



And my kitchen full of new color!