Recent Adventures in Sewing

Made these for my Goddaughter (Addisyn) and psuedo-niece (Riley).




I played around a little with the backs; my envelope technique needs work....



So cute!



This was last year at her 1 year birthday party.



Her 2nd birthday is in July; thinking of doing a matching baby quilt.....

Woohoo for sewing!

Happy Mother's Day...

to all the special ladies in my life:


My beautiful momma



My Grandma Mary-Ellen



My Grandma Irma



My Cindy

Making Progress

As far as my quilt goes, I'm liking it more and more. I decided on Kona white for the sashing and borders, but still haven't decided on the backing. I've been kinda busy so I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it. Hopefully this weekend will be calm and I can get alot done with it. I've already decided that my next project will be a baby quilt for my Goddaughter, Addisyn. She's precious :-)


got the sashing done


"Summer Splash"


My Goddaughter, Addisyn.



Also, I've finished another graduate class...thank God. This was the worst class I've ever taken and the professor was terrible. I could not wait for it to be over. The class was Human Resources Management, in which I know absolutely nothing about. The class met 3 days for 3 hours. Of those 9 hours, our professor "taught" for about 30 minutes. We spent 2.5 HOURS the first day on introductions. Seriously? Do I really need to know THAT much about these other people? I'm thinking no. And THEN, she had us post our resumes online and required that we review and comment on every single one. So I spent practically 4 days reviewing my classmates' resumes and making comments and suggestions on each one. "Won't it be nice to have 40 suggestions on how to improve your resume?" NO. Because my resume effing rocks. Thankyouverymuch. The bulk of the class work consisted of us reading the entire textbook and working online exercises to check our understanding. But she didn't grade the assignments; she didn't even give feedback. So I have no idea if I'm understanding the material correctly. To top it off, we had a group paper and presentation. We didn't get to pick our groups, so naturally I'm in a group with the one guy noone wants to be in a group with. You know that guy: MD, MBA, knows everything, owns his own business, talks over the professor, takes over the paper and presentation....OH, and English is his second language (if you can call what comes from his mouth "language").

So now I've read and commented on 40 resumes, read 600 pages of textbook gibberish, attempted 8 multiple-part fairly difficult analysis examples (with no feedback), used my "knowledge" of human resources to write a few paragraphs of a 10 page analysis paper over "that guy's" company, and spent 3 hours editing said paper for spelling and grammar. After all of that, I've gained about a 1% improvement in my understanding of HR management.

But at least I know the life and work history of all 40 of my classmates.

It's a start....

After months of procrastination and indecision, I have FINALLY begun my first quilt!!!! I am really excited about it! There is so much inspiration out there for modern quilting and I become obsessed with these fabulous quilts that are being made. I really really want to make some fabulous quilts of my own, but I'm so scared of messing up or not having it turn out perfect, that I've had "stage fright" for a while now. But I came to the conclusion that A quilt (perfect or not) is better than NO quilt! Right?!?! So I've decided to keep this first one very simple. It's going to be a "stacked coin" baby (or lap) quilt and instead of using my best fabric, I'm using fabric from a charm pack I bought a long time ago at a quilting store with my mom. I'm not familiar with the designer, but the fabric is decent enough and is in bright, summery colors. (Califon by Mark Lipinski). My main concern is to not completely destroy it. So far, so good. I've cut the square charms into rectangles and sewed 4 rows of 15 blocks so far. Now all thats left is the (really) hard part of figuring what sashing and borders and (God help me) binding to use, and then sewing all that together. The binding is what scares me the most....I've read books and tutoriasl about it, and had my mom explain it to me over the phone, but when I actually tried to do it on a pillow, it was a disaster and I ended up not using binding at all. So. I'm really just trying to focus on getting through the process of it all and not worrying about how good everything turns out; I just need the learning experience. It is SO HARD for me though! I've never considered myself a perfectionist.........okay well maybe I have. It's just so frustrating when you're learning a craft like this and you KNOW perfection is not expected the first few go 'rounds........ohhhh but I want it so bad!!!! Patience is NOT one of my virtues. :-( But anywho, without further adeu, here is the beginning of my first quilt!!! I plan to call it "summer splash". I think its fitting enough. Any ideas or thoughts about colors for sashing, border, etc are appreciated!!


These are the fabrics I'm using. They were 5'' squares that I just cut in half. I wanted to do a rainbow sort of thing with having all the same coordinating colors grouped together, but the fabric didn't allow for that, so I ended up decided to have one strip be a rainbow progression and the rest of the strips be random, sort of like creating order from chaos.....so philiosphical, I know :-p



Here's my calming, rainbow strip.




And now here's all the stips sewed together. I decided for the sake of randomness and moderness to put the rainbow strip in the middle....but I dont know if it would look better on one of the ends.....still trying to decide. Miss indecsion here. Anyone have an opinion? :-p

Can't wait to see how it turns out!!

What's For Dinner?

A miracle happened in my kitchen yesterday. I followed a recipe I found in a magazine...it wasn't even the magazine's recipe, it was an advertisement for tomato sauce. Well anyways, I decided to make it, even though I was skeptical, because it seemed strange to me. But I thought, "what the hell, I'll give it a try." And I am so glad I did because it was so good, and relatively simple to make. Luis loved it and dubbed it my "best ever". And that's saying something. Now I have a decent thing to make the next time (first time) we invite someone over for dinner!


Chicken Rollatini

3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (I used the thinly-sliced breasts)
1 pkg Genoa salami slices
1 pkg provolone cheese slices
18 asparagus spears, trimmed
1 jar tomato sauce (I used Classico Spicy Tomato and Basil)
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat oven to 350. Halve each chicken breast and pound to 1/4 inch thick. Season with salt and pepper.

2. Place 1 salami slice, 1 cheese slice and 3 asparagus spears in the center of each chicken breast. Roll up and secure with a wooden toothpick.



3. Spread some tomato sauce in a baking dish (11x7 or so). Place chicken rolls in the dish, and cover with the remaining sauce and sprinkle with shredded cheese.





4. Bake, uncovered for 30 to 40 minutes or until cooked through.

5. Enjoy! It looks so pretty when you cut into it! And tastes great!

Tony Romo!

This past Saturday, Luis and I went to the Ginger Man in Dallas to watch The After 5 Band. A buddy from my bowling team is their drummer. They covered some really good classic rock and we had a great time sipping on our Sam Adams and Shiner Bock. My friend, Danielle, from college met us there with some of her friends. A few minutes after she got there, she ran over to me and exclaimed, "Tony Romo is HERE!". As you can imagine, I just about fell off my bar stool. "OMG! REALLY?!?! WHERE?!?!?!?!?!?!" Oh, geez, like 2 whole feet in front of us! He was sitting at a table a few feet away from us with what looked like some friends and, of course, his blonde-haired-barbie-faced gilfriend, who, I must say, was entirely way to overdressed for the Gman. C'mon. At least he was perfect. White tennis shoes, blue jeans, baseball tshirt and ball cap. Mmmmmm. :-) So while the band was really good, the remainder of the evening I spent drooling and trying to take inconspicuous photographs, of which I will post later. For now though, I'll leave you with this picture, which Tony requested; it's of him and the band. The guy in front with the cig and beer is my buddy, Mike. The tall drink of water in the back with the hat on is Tony :-) .....I should have run up there and photo-hijacked that.

Currently...

I just spent 3 hours trying to figure out how to use paint.net to create my blog header.... Is this how our parents felt when we tried to teach them to do "simple" things like using Facebook and sending a text? You'd think using a photo-editing application wouldn't be that hard....I'm scared for myself in 10 years.

As excruciating as it was, I am very pleased with the outcome, and after fiddling with colors, fonts, etc, I can now sit back and enjoy my blog. Except...I haven't updated in a while, and I'm sure people have stopped checking.

SOOOO I have created this new post just so my creative endeavors can be appreciated by others :-p.

No really, I do have something substantial to say:

Currently, I find myself extremely drawn to music. I have always liked music, but literally, in the past 4 days I've downloaded about $50 worth of songs and albums off iTunes. My music is constantly on and I find myself playing the same songs over, and over, and over. Surprisingly, most of the stuff I've been getting is by bands that I've never even heard of. But OMG I am obsessed with all of them now.

Two particularly have a very mellow, "indie" kind of sound, which I really really like. One group is called the XX. They did the awesome instrumental for the Apollo Ohno AT&T commercial during the Olympics. They are from South London and their sound is really unique. I bought their whole album. I especially like "Infinity". For some reason, it reminds me a little of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game". And I LOVE that song :-p

The other group, Civil Twilight, is from South Africa. They are freaking amazing. I bought their whole album also. They currently have a song on the radio called "Letters From the Sky" which I immediately fell in love with. The rest of their stuff is just as good or better. "Human" and "On the Surface" are my favorites. The thing I like most about this band is that they are very "real". I don't really know how to explain that other than by saying that it "speaks" to me in ways the rest of the crap on the radio doesn't. And Steven McKellar's voice is intriguing.

Other (maybe more known) bands I've been downloading include: Alphanaut, Silversun Pickups, Metric, Phoenix, and LOTS of 30 Seconds to Mars.

Check them out and let me know what you think! What are you listening to these days? Any good suggestions?