My Beauty!!!

Sherry and I have a friend named Rebecca. Rebecca is from Australia and is a beautiful quilter, she has purchased a long arm machine and is practicing before she heads off to a Long Arm Summer School. I gave her my "Simplicity" quilt to practice on and look at the pictures. I can't wait to put the binding on!!!

Rebecca did a gorgeous job. Thank you Rebecca!!!

On the homefront there is nothing much going on. The sheep are fairly self sufficient right now, although they will be sheered soon and I will certainly be there to take pictures! The children are all involved in their activities and are anxiously awaiting their summer holidays.

Summer is a far cry away, it is still very cold here and we have had gale force winds since Saturday. The weather is wet and miserable, it feels like October. This did not stop us from having a party here at our house this past weekend and all the usual suspects were there. The comments I have received from everyone is how pleasant and friendly everyone is. The circle grows bigger and bigger and all are welcome. I think the reason we all get on so well is that we are all expats and have a shared experience of being on the outside looking in.
So that is all folks, enjoy these pictures and hopefully I will have more to show soon!

Bye and keep smiling!

Stars and Plumbers!

This is what I have been doing on the quilting scene lately!!! I have made three sets of each of the color combinations you see here. The quilt that I am working on requires 44 stars. I have enough fabric cut to make close to 180 stars, I am not going to be doing this on my own so don't fret. This is going to be one purdy quilt, I am using the Allspice Fat Quarter bundle and yardage that has been sitting in my stash for not quite a year but getting close to it!!

I have also added a playlist over there on my sidebar with a beautiful song that I fell in love with when I first heard it over on Liberty Star Farm . Hauntingly gorgeous!!

Now, let me tell you what my day has been like. I need to share and I hate to whine but FarmerBoy isn't here so this is my only outlet today. This morning I had a house full of guests and while they were all eating breakfast I was cleaning the kitchen. To properly clean a greasy kitchen you need hot water, really hot water! Guess what? There was no hot water, nada - none to speak of. Could all those guests have used up all that hot water, no way!!!

The boiler isn't working, on a saturday and FarmerBoy is unreachable doing his FarmerBoy thing! I called my ever so faithful plumber and put on my sweetest voice, "Please, Please Please come and fix my boiler...."! Guess where he is??? In the southern most part of our county, playing 18 holes of golf...... Crap!!! What am I going to do?????

I have a house full of people tonight, no hot water and a massive headache from the stress of it all!!!! So what do I do? I ignore all the problems and I play with my blog and catch up on all my favorite blogs!!!! Thank you for listening, I feel so much better now!

There are a couple more close up pictures of my stars, I think when I am finished here I am going to start working on more stars. Why worry about something that I can do nothing about and when the going gets tough the tough get sewing!!!! LOL


I love these two as well as the brown floral above with the small print background.

Thankfully all of my guests are Irish and I will simply offer them a discount and use of my electric hot shower (which by the way I have to go clean). They are here for the motorcross races, all men and we all know that men can be very easy peasy about stuff!!!! Heck, if I look pathetic enough maybe one of them will look at my boiler. That sounds kinda of, wait I hear a truck....could it be, YES its the plumber!!!!!!!

What a great guy, he fixed the boiler. Yippee, we have hot water!!!!! He is my hero!!!!!

So long!!!!

Finally - A quilt!

I bet you all thought I had forgotten what this blog is all about!!! I really want to focus more on the quilting than the family but sometimes they don't let me quilt. So my revenge is to talk about them and they don't always appreciate that. (Evil laughter ringing through my empty house)


This first picture does not do this fabric justice. The fabric is "Simplicity" by 3 Sisters From Moda. I can't get enough of it, I want more and more and more. It is the sweetest fabric and so delicate and cheerful, it brings a smile to my face just working with it.

I also think I have mastered the whole charm square dilemma, a charm square is a 5" precut square and you usually get one square for each of the fabrics in the designers line. So in this fabric line I received 48 or 50 charm squares. The charm square are cut with a pinking scissor or whatever they use in the factory. I sewed the four squares together and then trimmed them down and it worked a "charm"!!!!


The border will hopefully get down tonight and will be ready to be quilted. The pattern is Legacy "Butter Charm and Jelly" (I have to double check that). I have another quilt all cut up and ready to piece. Another cute fabric from Moda, Swell by Urban Chicks. Hopefully I will have that ready to show you soon or maybe not, it all depends on how demanding the guests are!!!!

Bye for now and hoping to be back soon!!!

The Sound of Silence!!!

I know that I have been a very bad blogger, life just somehow keeps getting in the way. Silence has decended on my home, no guests for the past several days. I have one more free night and then I start all over and go straight through until the end of the month. This time of year is very difficult, working 18 hours a day and caring for the family takes first priority and then everything falls where it falls!! The other night we all went for a walk in the woods behind where we live, the kiddos wanted to show me two things. First the Blue Bells!!!!! The entire wood is carpeted with blue bells, the scent is incredible. The second item on their list was a swimming hole, actually it's a stream. I look at my children sometimes and realize that they are real country kids, they can't wait until it's hot enough to go swimming in the stream!!! Even FarmerBoy is looking forward to it.

Here is the gang rambling along the path, the local gun club keeps these trails cleared. We all benefit from their hard work, a woman and her horse were out treking and stopped to talk with us. This of course led to a long conversation with our little princess!!! She is desperate for a pony, "everyone has a pony, why can't I"!! FarmerBoy argues with her but she manages to come up with a solution to every obstacle. We have land for grazing, we have barns (just need to build a stall in the barn) and of course she promises to take care of it day and night. Yeah right. Mommy and Daddy will be out their shoveling you know what everyday. Little miss muffit can't feed the dogs and cat without an emotional breakdown!!!!!!! I pacified her by making a promise to take her riding and the two of us will take some lessons together, then and only then will I make a decision. FarmerBoy and I would love to get a pony and horse, I really want a donkey but that is another discussion for another day! We don't think she is ready for the responsibility, time will tell.


If there is anyone out there who is preparing to travel to Ireland within the next couple of weeks, please do me a favor!!! Bring warm weather with you, it is really cold here -- I mean really cold!!

I have quilt pictures to show you but I just noticed that they are missing, I will do another post.

Bye!