Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

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

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.