Tuesday, July 8, 2008

New Club, New Friends, Work, and Quilting

So, I don't think I've really belonged to a "club" really. But tonight I joined one. It was really fun. Most of the ladies knew each other, and I knew some of them through Angel. It was fun to meet new people though. The 11 of us went to dinner and laughed and talked and ate...and ATE....and ATE!

Then we got down to business. We will meet every month, and we are going to be doing humanitarian work some of the time. It sounds like it will be very fun, and very fulfilling. We discussed several different projects we would like to work on: from tieing quilts and donating them to a local hospital to helping feed orphans in Liberia, Africa. All ideas were good, and the only thing we felt bad about was that we couldn't do all of them this year. Fortunately it looks like this club will be going on for a while, and we'll have plenty of time to do all of the projects we would like to do.

We have decided to meet once a month, and it will be fun to get together next month, and hopefully start working on one of the projects. We would like to start on the quilts for the local hospital. First, we need to find out what exactly they need. Then we need to figure out fabrics and stuff. I've decided to donate a roll of Hobbs heirloom batting, should the quilts be needed, and we proceed with that project.

Mike babysat Marshy while I was at the meeting, and when I got home baby was NOT happy! Apparently he had been crying for quite a while, and was very happy to see me....although he kept saying "Daddy! Daddy!" I think he really just wanted to not be in bed. Little stinker....it was almost 10 PM! I got him out and let him watch some Baby Einstein's on TV to calm him down. Surprisingly, it worked IMMEDIATELY! Mike was so tired and a little stressed, because he has to get up at 4 AM tomorrow to be on the road by 5. He is driving this week, and is trying to get as much done as he can. He has a new boss based out of Colorado, who he has never met, and his boss will be in town Thursday and Friday and wants to meet with him, so that means he loses two days of work. We go on vacation on the 19th, so Mike is really stressed about finishing his drives by then so he just has to process data at the resort.

I put on the 2nd of one of my clients' quilts today. It is pretty scrappy, which makes it kind of cute. She used an interesting mix of brights and not-brights. It will look cute when it is done, though. I'm doing flowers in the scrappy squares, with fun vines and leaves and flowers in the borders. I hope she likes it! I finished her first one on the 4th. It was scrappy too, but mostly all brights (with a few random Christmas prints and non-brights thrown in). On that one she had done little rectangles, and then an almost solid blue fabric for the sashing and borders, and backing. As soon as I saw it I thought that it looked like a bunch of brightly wrapped presents. I've never quilted ribbons and bows, but I attempted it (totally prepared to unpick it all and start over with something else) but it turned out so dang cute! She told me that if using different thread colors looked good, to do that, so I did. I made the boxes face all different directions, and used 7 different thread colors. It turned out so cute! Again, I really hope she likes it! It was such a fun, scrappy quilt, and now it is a fun scrappy quilt with brightly wrapped boxes all over it! :)

I still have a few other quilts to finish before I go on vacation. One of them, Mike's cousin brought over for me to do. Her ward was tieing quilts, and she found a quilt that someone had pieced together, and she told them they couldn't tie it because that would ruin it. She asked me to quilt it for them, and I said I would. She brought it over yesterday. I'm hoping to get to it by the middle of next week. One of our close family friends brought me a quilt last week that I have to do before I can do that one. AND THEN! I get to quilt my 5!! YAY!! I'm really hoping to have them done by the end of the month, but if I can't, I'll settle for the end of August. I also have one more of Mike's aunt's to do, but she won't be back in the area until September, so there isn't too much pressure to hurry and get that one done yet.

Tomorrow I am going to see if I can talk to the lady who owns the new local quilt store about maybe helping her out if she needs quilting done, and ask her if she will let me put some business cards in her shop. I would love to expand my client base. That would just be awesome!

So, I just realized that this post was a lot to read....and I will try not to do another post like this without any pictures for a while. In the meantime, I'm off to try to get the baby to bed, and then I'm going to do some work on ebay. G'night!

2 comments:

Kathi D said...

I was never a club joiner, but about 20 years ago I joined a group and made the friends that are closest to me today. I am so thankful my friend nagged me into joining, even though I resisted.

Nanette Merrill said...

Its fun to have friends with similar interests. I'm sure you are getting really good at machine quilting.