by Nancy
Here’s my second purple house for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I really like the fabrics I used in this one! And here it is next to my first purple house:
I didn’t really realize all the different shades of purple – more red or more blue – until I started sorting through my purple stash for fabrics for these blocks.
by Nancy
The Rainbow Scrap Challenge color for February is brown. I’ve been using my tans and light browns for another project, so I mostly have dark Browns to work with this month. Here are my first two houses. Check out what others are up to at soscrappy!
By Nancy
I don’t have any big quilting projects that I’m working on at the moment, so I’ve been having some fun with my scraps. The color this month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge hosted by Soscrappy is blue. I found a pattern for a house block in the May/June ’02 issue of Quiltmaker. It’s been fun to pick the fabrics for the windows, doors, and chimneys.
by Nancy
I’ve been making some good progress on the applique for my soccer-watching quilt. Thanks to a week off school for Thanksgiving and the use of Marty’s sewing machine, I have finished all of the letters! I also bought some red flannel for the backing at Field’s while we were in Holland. So, I laid out the letters to see how it would look and to consider how I want to arrange the other blocks. Randomly? Alternating red and tan squares? Outlining the letters with the soccer ball fabric and then alternating red and tan? Maybe…
by Nancy
The leaves are changing, and the fall soccer season finished up this weekend. Both boys had tournaments in different cities, so it was busy, but the weather was beautiful. We were even treated to 5 hot air balloons flying over Nicholas’ game this morning.
I came close to reaching my goal of finishing the letters of Nicholas’ name…
I just have the s left.
by Nancy
Now that I have some good soccer ball fabric, I’ve been able to put together the beginnings of what I hope will be a warm soccer-watching quilt. I cut some 5″ squares of the soccer ball fabric and laid them out with the first three appliqué letters to see how it might look:
I think I’m going to need to lay out all (or at least more) of the appliqués blocks in order to decide how I want to arrange the other blocks – in some kind of pattern or randomly? So, to that end, my goal for next week is to appliqué one letter a day so that by next weekend I will have all of Nicholas’ name finished.
In other news, we returned to school this past week after fall break. Everyone was a little tired the first few days, but we got back into the routine and things are going well. My 2nd year students are, for the most part, getting a handle on the dative case. We made a foldable in class Tuesday to practice for the speaking part of their Unit Test, which they took on Thursday.
This weekend is homecoming for IU. They play Michigan State in football, which isn’t likely to go well, but we did have beautiful weather on Friday afternoon, and I was able to go for a long run.
by Nancy
Last weekend, while I was watching a soccer game in chilly weather, I was struck with inspiration for my next quilting project: a warm quilt for soccer game watching. Since Nicholas’ and Andrew’s club soccer team colors are red and white, I decided to use red and tan. Here’s what I found in my stash:
My plan is to do some machine applique letters to spell the kids’ names, soccer, and their club name, Cutters.
I haven’t done any machine applique in a while, so my first practice letter wasn’t great, but after I looked up the directions for how to pivot on inside and outside corners, things went much better.
Since it was fall break, I had quite a bit of time to work on it, especially since the weather was bad and the kids were visiting grandparents for the first part of the week. I really wanted to find some good soccer print fabric, and I went to all 3 fabric stores in town but didn’t find anything I liked.
I did do a few other things besides sewing during fall break, such as cleanin
g out some closets and making cinnamon rolls. Yum!
On Saturday Andrew had a soccer tournament in Indianapolis, and there was enough time between games to visit one of the quilt stores. They had just what I was looking for:
So far, I have the letters of Nicholas cut out, ready for applique…
by Nancy
We’re on fall break next week, so I’m looking forward to having some sewing time. I’ve been thinking about making another reusable shopping bag. I started looking through my scraps and found some fabric left over from Mira and Audra’s quilts. That led me to the blue flower fabric, which is extra from Anna’s quilt, and I have quite a bit of it and some coordinating fabrics. We’ll see what I end up doing…
My week started out well – when I walked into my room Monday morning, this was waiting for me on my desk:
My laminating order was finished!!! My school just switched over from do-it-yourself laminating to “we’ll do it for you so people stop breaking the laminator.” I couldn’t be happier – I’ve always been intimidated by the laminator and afraid of being the one to break it, so I hadn’t tried to use it yet. Now I can just leave it up to the pros.
Later in the week we found out that our new photocopier was even better that we had first thought:
It punches holes!!! I’ve never heard of a copier doing that. Wow! For people like me who do guided notes and hole punch them to encourage students to keep them organized in a binder, this is fantastic! As you can see, we’re still plugging along with the dative case – the last part, dative prespositions!
Fall arrived almost overnight this weekend. On Thursday it was 80 degrees, and by Saturday morning it was in the low 40s for Nicholas’ soccer game. The leaves are starting to change, too.
by Nancy
Phew! Things have finally calmed down at school enough for me to write a blog post. Here are the highlights of the past week…
On Sunday Andrew had a soccer game in Batesville. I’d never been to Batesville before. As we drove into town, Andrew looked around and said, “In Batesville they make hospital beds and baskets.” Eric replied, “That’s caskets, not baskets.” Sure enough, Batesville is known for making caskets. In fact, they have a soccer tournament called the Batesville Casket Cup!
Monday morning got off to a great start when I walked in to the world languages office and found we had a brand new printer/copier. I was so excited that I took its picture and tweeted it right away. Of course, later that morning, the internet and the phones went down, making it impossible to send anything from your computer to the new printer/copier, but at least we could make copies!
On Tuesday one of my students gave the best reason I’ve heard so far in my teaching career (ok, so during my first 2 years of teaching in 1999-2001 students didn’t have cell phones) for possibly needing to use a cell phone in class: He was expecting a phone call about a cattle transaction. Disappointingly, the call did not come during my class.
In German 2, we’ve been plugging along with the dative case. We started talking about dative verbs and put our first four up on the Outlaw Verbs wall.
Due to school and soccer, I haven’t had a lot of time for quilting or other crafty activities. Since finishing Anna’s quilt, I haven’t started any big projects. I did spend some time this week working on pressing and cutting up scraps from my scrap basket.
Inspired by this quilt on Pinterest, I’ve been making some simple 6″ blocks using my 2.5″ scrap squares.
Both boys have had a lot of soccer games, and I’ve been doing some crocheting on my granny stripe afghan, both on the way to the games and at the games. It’s getting big enough that it keeps me warm while I’m working on it, which is a plus as the weather gets colder.
I’m making granny squares that follow the same color order as the stripes. My plan was to put the granny squares on the edges of the blanket, lining up the colors of the granny squares with their corresponding colors in the stripes, but the squares are a little bigger than the stripes, so it may not line up exactly as I’d planned. Still, I think it will look nice.
By Nancy
School starts Monday, so on Saturday afternoon Nicholas, Andrew, and I went in to school to hang up my quilt. Everyone agreed that it should go on the wall above my computer, and hanging it was quite easy. I used Command removable hooks, which seemed to work well. Hopefully it will still be on the wall when I go in Monday morning!
