Blogiversary Winner!

And the winner is:

Joyce!

Congratulations, Joyce! I had The Husband choose a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive) to choose the winner and his number was 4. Here's a photo of your winnings. It is 4 fat quarters of blue & sparkly winter fabric.

Other news:

Quilting - I finished The Girl's quilt!!!! Well, it doesn't have a label but it is bound and ready for use. It's funny but I am busily thinking of tons of things I could sew for people for Christmas. It doesn't seem to phase me at all that Christmas is less than 20 days away. Ha!

Speaking of Christmas, you may remember last year I mentioned that when The Husband went to take down our outdoor Christmas lights we were missing just one net of lights. They were very distinctive - it was a rainbow net. The Husband actually didn't like them because he didn't think it seemed very Christmas-y to have a rainbow bush. But to get back to the story, they were missing. We didn't think much of it, a neighborhood kid pulling them off for his/her own contentment, etc., whatever. Like I said, he didn't like them much so we weren't too broken up about it. Well the other day I was pulling in to our drive, and I noticed something curious: the neighbors that we don't talk to very much had their lights up. And they had 1 bush with a rainbow net. Hmm. None of their other lights are rainbows. Coincidence? Hard to say...of course we won't be mentioning it. Even if I wanted to mention it I couldn't since we don't really talk to them. Not out of dislike or anything, they just seem to not want to speak to us. Maybe because of their rainbow net guilt. Unlike the previous occupants of that house they are very quiet so I am content to leave things the way they are.

The Big Read - I had about 400 pages to go in Les Miserables when the book wouldn't renew anymore. So I took it to the library and started finishing up the read online. Let me just say that it is very tedious to read a book online. But you can do it too at the Gutenberg website. Hurray for free stuff!

Congratulations to Joyce and thanks everyone for playing! Maybe this year I'll post a little more regularly. And add some photos.

The Big Read!

Today is el Dia de los Muertos, a.k.a. Day of the Dead. I've always thought it was such a nice tradition - colorful remembrances of our ancestors who have passed to the great beyond. It would be so cool to experience this firsthand.

Anyways. On to the topic of the day. I'm so tired of reading political posts on blogs, I figured I'd make the move to something educational. I recently saw the list below on The Quilting Bookworm's blog. She saw it on someone else's blog. I looked up the National Endowment for the Arts and they do have a program called The Big Read, but it only has maybe a dozen or so books involved. I've seen different accounts online of where the list actually originated (the BBC, the Guardian, NEA, ???) and each list seems to be slightly different. But I like the list below, and I am (dorkily) setting out to read everything on it. I've read the books in bold and loved the red books. I am currently reading Les Miserables. And at my current reading rate (about 20 pages/day...I don't have a lot of time to read anymore) I have 50 days of reading to go. Hopefully the library will let me keep it that long!

Another note - apparently The Big Read has the purpose of attempting to get more adults interested in literature. Some survey somewhere said that the level of literacy in adults is taking a header (well duh, tv, cell phones, the internet...). And I don't think they mean fewer adults can read or that adults are forgetting how to read...they just mean we aren't reading books anymore. So the stated statistic is that the average adult has only read 6 of the books on the list. I am happy to see that I've read more. Though every time I see the list I come up with a different count, so below I only highlighted the ones that I most definitely positively was forced to read and/or read of my own free will and I actually remember doing so.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcot
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Checking in

Well of course I fell off the blogging wagon for awhile. It seems to happen to me periodically. I guess the main reason that happened is I made a big stink about wanting to lose weight at the beginning of the year. I lost one pound and then promptly gained it back. Now that I have lost a grand total of 3 (yes you read that right, 3!) pounds I am feeling like I can blog again. February was just stagnant but I've made progress in March. I've been weighing myself almost daily for a week to be sure that it wasn't just some weird dip where I spontaneously weighed less than usual. Some days I've only lost two pounds, some days 4, and some days 3. So we'll go for an average and say 3. I'm so glad to finally be making progress.

And here's the kicker. I didn't do it by dieting, really. Well, it is but it isn't. I decided that I was tired of eating so much processed foods & meats and I should be trying to eat closer to nature. I wouldn't call myself a vegetarian because I am still eating meat, just not very often. Ok, the last three days I ate it. But today is Friday and I'm Catholic so today I'll be meat free. I've also made a real effort to eat more salad and fresh fruits and vegetables. Take today...so far I've had oatmeal with raisins, a dried cranberry, sunflower seed and peanut snack mix (made it myself!), a whole wheat pita with roasted garlic hummus and avocado slices. (I am very proud of my little pita sandwich...it was tasty.) I'll be downing a little baggie of carrots, a banana, and an apple by the end of the day, too. Not sure what is on tap for dinner but I've been working a lot of hours and so that will probably be up to The Husband. That means it most likely will not be "nature" food. Oh well, you can't win them all. Also I am supposed to be training for a 10k run in May but work has put a damper on that this week. I'll have to take it up again next week. Oh, and I'm not training to win the 10k. I'm training to be able to finish the 10k.

On to quilt things. I stopped work on all other projects to work on a little blankie for a friend's baby. The baby was born in September and I really have to get my butt in gear. I kept postponing because I wanted to make her something but I finally realized the poor kid would be in college before I could make her what I really wanted to make. I saw in a quilting magazine not too long ago (sorry, I can't remember which one) that a fun way to make a quilt without doing patchwork is to get a nice large-patterned fabric and just quilt the lines on the fabric. That's what I'm doing for little Liesl. I wanted it to be a yard square to keep with the tradition of giving babies a yard of cloth for luck. I read about that in a Fons & Porter book...the Quilter's Complete Guide. (It was my first quilting book and I love it dearly! So dearly it is falling apart.) I'm about halfway done with the quilting on it, which I am doing by hand. This week work has been stomping on all of my quilting time so I didn't progress too much this week. I hope to have it done by the end of the month.

In other news...The Girl got glasses. She apparently is "extremely far-sighted" as the doc put it. Really? How on earth was she able to function? I can't figure it out. But she is happily wearing her new specs without any argument, in spite of being three and having very definite ideas about what she does (dresses) and doesn't (pants) wear.

Oh and t-ball is about to start for The Boy. I can't believe it is already time for that again. This year he seems much more eager. Some friends of ours got their son on the team too so now he'll have a team buddy.

I'm so glad Spring is on it's way. This is Ohio so I know the cold weather could drag into May. I sure hope it doesn't, though.

And the winners are...

Joyce & Freeblady! You are the quiltie gift winners. I asked The Boy to name a number under 10, and after much prompting (you know, a number that is less than 10? But more than 0? Don't you have a favorite number? Just say a number?!) he finally said 2. Then I said, ok, I need one more number less than 10. Well, I wouldn't have accepted 8 since that was my own comment, but anyway he definitely just wanted out of the line of questioning and said, "oonnnnne?" in that tone that says, mommy, I just don't get it--can I go now?

Congratulations to the winners!

In other news, I completed the top of The Boy's quilt. And I am working on the binding of The Girl's quilt. I doubt I will finish that, it generally takes me forever to sew down a binding. But that is at least one goal finished for the year. Shwew!

I neglected to mention last time I posted that I got some cute Christmas exchange gifts at both of my guild meetings. At one I got a yard of varying fabrics in homespun-like colors. I was thinking I might make an applique block to frame. I generally think it is dorky to decorate with quilt patterned things that aren't quilts but I think I can make an exception for something that is appliqued.

At guild two I got three awesome things...a really cute hand-made pin-cushion--which I am already using--a set of triangle rulers, and (my favorite!) a needle threader. I've wanted to get one for awhile but I kept shying away, thinking I'd rather spend my quiltie dollars on fabric or thread rather than a gadget I might not use too much. So I was really excited about it.

Also at guild two we got a packet of fat quarters for a challenge quilt. I really love the colors in it. So far there is no theme to the challenge. It just has to be at least 30x30 and less than 60x60. I am patiently waiting for inspiration to strike.

I am about half-way down with my first hand-pieced block from the rosy fabrics. I neglected to mention that the pattern I am using is from Quilter's Newsletter #394 and is called Sunburst with Holly Leaves. The link has a little picture of it; since I don't want to step on copyright laws I'm not going to repeat the picture here until I have my own blocks to show. Anyway, I am not crazy about the holly leaf blocks so I'll probably do something else there. I do love hand quilting so maybe I will just leave them open as showcase areas for a quilting motif.

And since I mentioned hand-quilting, I joined a hand-quilting blog ring. It is my preferred part of the process, so when I stumbled across it I could barely contain myself.

And just to stick in a photo...Cottage Living is my favorite magazine. Yes, folks, it somehow manages to barely slip by even the quilting magazines I receive. I even have this goofball rule about it. For some reason, decorating the house has been a difficult task for me. It is just so darn overwhelming, and I don't want to waste money on something that turns out looking like the anti-home & garden. So, when I get a Cottage Living in the mail, I am not allowed to read it until I do some decorating tidbit around the house. Since December is already so crazy I allowed the Christmas decorations to service the rule. I still haven't read it, though. I was reading Spindle's End by Robin McKinley. Someone at work recommended it and I liked it, though be warned it is a retelling of sleeping beauty and is considered juvenile fiction (though it read very well, in my opinion.)

I hope everyone is having a terrific holiday season!