One More Finish and Lots of Changes

Here is the girly frog D9P all finished. I packed up the donation quilts for this year, my goal was 12 and I have 14, so yeah me! Ten quilts are going to Project Linus, 4 to the Veterans Hospital. Last year I made more for the veterans, so maybe it evens out? Next year I have no idea how many donation quilts I'll be able to get done, if I get any done that would be a win.

The past few days have been crazy. I cut backings for the next four quilts, but I've only pieced two of those. I do have those two layered and pinbasted. I have tendinitis in my wrists again, so I decided to take a break from pinbasting, I've done a lot of that in the past couple of weeks. None of these four are donation quilts, two are gifts and two I will actually keep! I got 5 scrub tops cut out for DH, but nothing else sewing related done. Well, with the exception of staying up until 2 in the morning last night rearranging my sewing room yet again!

I turned my sewing cabinet 90 degrees, and now I can have the Brother set up in the sewing room too. I also fit this old microwave stand in there, which gives me a bit more storage. I don't know if you can tell, but there is an Asian print on top of the microwave stand, and that will be a maternity top for DD#3. She is making it herself. Since DD's #2 & 3 are both learning to sew, I really needed the Brother set back up. It's pretty crowded in the sewing room now, but it is still functional, all the stations are accessible, and there is just (barely) enough room to move around.

I think the Brother cs6000i is a great beginner machine. It has some idiot proof features that other machines don't have. It will not sew if you have the presser foot up, it won't sew if you have the wrong foot for the stitch you selected (how it knows which foot you have on, I have no idea, I can't see any computerized components on the foot or where you attach it.) It is easy to thread, and has multiple error messages that tells you exactly what is wrong. Most importantly for a beginner, the markings on the faceplate are easy to read, the 5/8 inch seam mark is very well marked. I think it is the better machine for the girls to learn on, so now that it's set up they can sew whenever they have a chance.

The bathroom downstairs is now gutted. Evidently the drain from the bathtub has been broken for years, and the drain underground had completely filled with dirt. Whenever a bath or shower was taken in there, it was draining all the water under our house instead of down the drain. Not a good thing, but now since everything is torn up, it will be fixed and all will be well. There was no way for us to know that was happening, as the problem was under our basement, and the water did not back up into the tub. In fact, the damage may be from before we even bought the house. I have to go to Home Depot again tomorrow and buy more paint and get the medicine cabinet we forgot the other day. The new bathtub is in my backyard, the new vanity in the family room, a toilet in the nursery. Boy, will I be glad to have the bathroom done and things put back in their place!

DS the Younger decided to paint his new bedroom after all, and thankfully, he wanted to do it by himself ;-) He picked a dark brown, which I like better than I thought I would. It is very masculine and warm looking. Most of my kids pick pretty dark colors when given free rein. The plus to the brown is the new burgundy curtains I had purchased for that room when it was the guest room will still match pretty well, so at least that works.

You know, I didn't think I had that much stuff stored in the guest room, but since I had to find new places to store everything, I realized there was actually quite a bit in there. I had the mailing supplies and gift wrap in the guest room closet, and now they are in my bedroom closet. I had to rearrange most of my closet to get those things to fit. I had been storing the donation quilts in the guest closet until I got ready to turn them in, which is why they are now packed and being dropped off this week. The closet was by no means full, which is why I didn't think there was much in there, but I had to do a lot of fiddling to store the stuff elsewhere. Since I will now have no bed for guests set up, I had to rearrange the linen closet to fit the extra linens that were on that bed. We are looking for a shed to store the bed itself in, as well as DD#3's kitchen stuff. We don't have a garage or any large storage areas, so it's either buy a shed, rent a storage area, or get rid of everything we want stored. We are getting rid of quite a bit, I have a pile to go to the thrift store, but to get rid of everything would be foolish, as we will need some of this when DD#3 and DSIL move on. Their kitchen stuff certainly should be stored as it would be very expensive to replace.

Home remodeling and people moving in or out always has the domino factor involved. To do this, you must first do these few things, and then since you did that, you must also do x, y, and z. It never seems to be simple or straightforward. Ah well, at least life is interesting!