Any Ideas?

I've been working on machine quilting for the past several days and I have photos but I will probably show all of those in one post after some of these are delivered and such.  They are really pretty quilts.  I'm having to quilt early of the mornings and late of the evenings because it is hot upstairs and I don't have A/C up there yet.  I can't go up there and quilt right now because my sister is upstairs sleeping.  She is spending the night with me and she has work tomorrow morning.  Also, the quilting machine wakes Richard up since it is directly over the master bedroom.  As I was taking my breaks from standing at the frame I sat down and sorted through some totes that I had not unpacked in my quilting room yet.  I found lots of stuff but one thing that I'm not sure what to do with are these...

I found 1000+  2" (finished size) half square triangles in assorted blues and white.  I'm not even sure what I was making them for, it has been so long.  They are all paper pieced on triangle paper and most of them still need to be trimmed and cut apart.  

So now I need some ideas on what to make with them.  Whatever I do, I would like to be able to use them all in it.  Also in the basket I found a bunch more that had not been sewn yet, so I may finish those up too.  Any ideas????

 Now to recap on the past week....It is 1am right now and I just can't sleep.  I know this may be silly but Hunter rode home from Church with a friend, he is spending the night with him.  This is his first night staying anywhere except for my mom's which is right down the road.  I'm sure he will be fine but I sure am missing him.

Earlier in the week, we had to deal with this mess....  A dead oak fell across our driveway and crushed one of the gates where some of the horses are and took the fence out.   I'm just glad the horses were not standing there at the time.  This took us a while to get it cleaned up.  Richard cut it up and then we all worked on moving it.  Part of it was cut up for firewood for this winter and Richard cut 2 logs out of the rest of it to saw up on the sawmill.  We'll end up using the lumber around here somewhere.

 On the way back down to the house, I snapped this photo.  The house looks so small in this photo but I thought the sky and trees behind it looks so pretty and relaxing.

 Here is Andrew's horse, Rev.  He turned a year old in May and he is a spunky little thing!  I had him out of the stall letting him stretch his legs and getting him used to the lead rope.  He really does fine with the lead but he is still a little jumpy.  I think Andrew said he will be headed to the trainer sometime in November, I'm sure going to miss him, but he is his horse, not mine and he is paying for it.  This little guy has some great potential in the show ring.

 As most of you all know we've only been in the house for about 5 months now and we have some big plans to rework some of the property.  We have a big front yard right now but we want to extend the backyard a lot.  It still looks rather unkept but we moved the fence line back to extend it.  If you look real close you can see the white flags tied on the fence way back there, those are to help the horses remember that the fence has moved so they don't run through it.  There are a ton of rocks back there too, it will take forever to remove them.  Richard said as he gets time, he will take the tractor and blade to loosen the put so we can move them.  I will probably either use them on flowerbeds or make a rock fence back there.

 Also if you look close in the same photo (above) you can see a few dark red dots, they are these....  Hunter bought them for me for Mother's Day and I planted them back there for now.  I just needed to get them in the ground but I may move them later as I redo all of my flowerbeds too.  I didn't even put mulch around them because this is only temporary.

 Here is a closeup of one of them.  I love them.  I have the taller lilies up closer to the house.  I think I posted a photo of one of the pink ones the other day.  This morning, I noticed I had a bright orange one that had bloomed.

 And last but not least, Richard's grandmother had her 92nd birthday party on Saturday!  We spent the day with her and the family.  It was a nice time for all.

 This will be another busy week.  I have more quilting to do and a couple of doctor appointments later in the week.
Kristie

Catching up...and some new sewing....

This is a photo heavy post, believe it or not.....I have been sewing!!!  :)  I'll get to all of that in a few minutes but first I'm sorry that I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, but I do thank you for all of the emails of concern.  I have just been feeling a little down, just aggravated with life I suppose.

First my quilting machine was down for what felt like forever, then once I did get that fixed and back I had to rush and stress over getting the quilts quilted before my surgery.  If you remember I even had one lady to pick her quilt up at the hospital that morning.  Then I had my surgery and first she said I would be down for 2-3 days but it was more like a couple of weeks!  I wasn't expecting that at all!  Once I felt better and could get upstairs I planned on getting back to my quilting and then realized that I had forgot to place my thread order!  I had planned on ordering the day after my surgery but I guess I was just too out of it to remember.  So I ordered my thread, got it in and NONE of it was what I ordered!!!  They mixed my order up with someone else.  They were really nice about it and gave me a gift certificate for my troubles and I am now waiting on my correct order to arrive.

Then as I mentioned in my last post, Richard's truck was broken into and we lost about $800 worth of tools and such!  That really got me down.....  So I guess that is enough complaining about life, but I have still been busy!

We decided to clean out one of our outbuildings!  :(  Man, I don't know how everything was in there.  Some of the stuff belonged to Richard's grandmother so all of that had to be sorted.  I had tons of stuff in there too.    I had put things back in storage for a few years to save for when we got moved in the house.  I had lots of new stuff in there and lots of antiques too.  It was almost like Christmas getting to sort through it all.  That took us a couple of days.

I'll go ahead and show some quilting stuff before I get on the the family stuff.  :)

Do you remember me talking a few posts back about a quilt that I designed and was making for my granddaughter, Raelynn?  Well, here is what I have so far, I'll try to get a better photo of it once I get all the blocks sewn together.  I've decided to call it, Shades of Lilac.  As I was working on it all of those different shades of purples reminded me of the Lilac tree in my mom's yard and how pretty it is when it blooms.  This was a great use of all my purple scraps.  I didn't have to buy anything for it, just used what I had.  Anyway, I need to get the blocks sewn together and the borders on so that I can get it quilted.

The past few nights I have been watching the Hatfield and McCoy movie on the History Channel.  From what I have read a bunch of you watched it too.  I can remember in college I had to do a research paper on the Hatfield's and McCoy's which all happened right here where I live.  So while I watched it, I decided that I would work on something simple and mindless.....  So here is the story of how that all came about.

I am so sick of my older stash that it just makes me sick when I have to dig through it.  I did have a fairly large stash before Richard lost his job and I am very thankful for that because I would have gone crazy if I hadn't.  I read on someones blog the other day that she felt the same way and she jumped in a cut it all up and used it!!!  I don't even remember which blog it was, sorry.  I thought that was a great idea because no matter how much I hate it, it's not going anywhere unless I use it, right?

So I grabbed a stack of greens and started cutting...

I ended up with 350+ of these 3.5 x 6.5 rectangles before I stopped.

 Then I sewed them end to end in sets of two...

 Giggle, I'm still working on it so you will have to wait to see what it looks like!  I will tell you this though, I did end up adding one more color in it to give it a little "pop" and it will be pretty big once it is done.  The measurements that I figured up will be 94 x 103.  Even though I hate my old fabric stash, I really like how this quilt is turning out so far!  :)

As I mentioned we cleaned out the outbuilding and I found my old antique table and a couple of chairs that my great grandfather made.  They look a little old and rough but, hey they are antiques!  I placed them on my front porch and put this little quilt over the table top. This is something that I made a few years ago and it is about the size of a baby quilt.  My porch is 40ft long so I have plenty of room out there but I thought it might be nice to sit out there and have my coffee early in the morning or to even do some handwork too.

 Here is the quilting on it.  I used a panto called "on the forest floor"  it is one of my favorites!  I just love it, even though there is a ton of quilting in it.

 Now on to other things in my life the past few days....  My day lilies are starting to bloom!!!  Don't look at the mess in the flower bed.  This is just a temporary one until we get our dozer work done and the yard all fixed the way that we want it.  I am in the process of putting thick newspaper down around the flowers and then I will add some OLD sawdust over it all.  I've done it this way for years and it has always worked good for me.  I put a think layer of newspaper down to keep the weeds out and then put a layer of old sawdust over that.  It has to be old sawdust because the fresh stuff has too much acid in it.  The old sawdust just turns back into soil once it decays anyway.  This works great for me since we own a sawmill, it doesn't cost me anything.

I baked 5 loaves of Banana Nut Bread!  I put four in the freezer and cut this one to eat!

Here is a photo of Andrew and his yearling, REV.  Rev is the Tennessee Walking horse that he bought a while back.  He is doing great and will be sent off to the trainer in November.  Just in case you don't fool with horses much, in this photo he is "parking out"  He is doing great so far and Andrew just loves him so much.  BTW....see the background....I told you that I lived in the woods!  :)

Here is Hunter taking a break from playing.  As you can see he has his little toolbox and his toy gun beside him....that's my boy!

I've been babysitting Zoey, my sister's poodle for the past few days while she it at work.  Zoey likes to watch me sew!  She has seizures and Chantal doesn't want her to be alone during the day just in case she has one while she is at work.  So most days she is at my house unless mom is home.  She is a sweetie and my little dogs love to play with her.

This morning while I was making my bed, I kept hearing something and when I went out to see what it was, I found this.....Cocoa!  She had got out of her lot and was on my porch!  Maybe a little redneck but it's just farm life.  :)  I love it.  As you can see, we haven't stained the side of the house yet.  We'll get to it as soon as we can, just so much to do.  Anyway, the long windows on the front porch are my master bedroom windows and the french door on the side, you can see a little of it, that also goes to my master bedroom.  Eventually we will have a big wrap around porch all the way around the house.  I can't wait to the the porch done on this end, I think it would be nice to get up out of bed and go out and watch the sun rise...

I guess that is all for now, I need to finish up our late supper.  Richard has been working in hay all day and probably will not be home until dark.  I know he will be starved....
Kristie

What is your opinion?

It has been a long couple of days, my quilting machine is down. :( It has drove me crazy and near tears. I have a customer quilt on the frame that I need to get finished and delivered and I don't like much having it done. My machine just locked up and will not move at all. Anyway, I should have a loaner/demo machine delivered today as mine is being fixed. They assured me that it was fixable. Anyway......other than that this is what has been going on here...

Here is my much needed basket of chocolate! Let's just say that after trying to mess with my machine and being stressed over it, the basket is not this full now. LOL!
As I was upstairs waiting for the repair guy to call 50 times, I wondered around in my sewing room. I did sew a couple of strips together to try out my Hugs & Kisses pattern. Of course, the fabrics will be mixed up a little better, I was just trying to see how it would look. I can't find my white fabric so I will pick that up as I go out in a few days. I really can't do more of this quilt.

I also dug through a few of my UFO's and I have so many that really don't need that much done to them. This one is a spiderweb pieced with scraps. I read the post that I did last year where I had dug it out and worked on it a little bit that I mostly used the ugliest scraps that I had for this quilt. I actually saw a few pieces in there that I wished that I had saved for my Hugs and Kisses quilt. I had 19 blocks pieced and enough paper pieces printed off for another 6 blocks. That would make a setting of 5x5. I would rather have a 5x6 setting but I'm not sure if I want to make the extra blocks or just finish that last 6 and call it DONE. Here is where I placed a few blocks up on my temporary design wall. I still have to sew on my corner pieces for each block but what color do you think I should use? This photo would show you sorta what it would look like with white corners.Here it is with cheddar corners.
Here it is with red corners. The red is not this bright, I think it is just where the light is shinning on it.
So what it your opinion on the corner pieces, white, cheddar, or red? I would like to get this one finished and marked off of my list of UFO's. I actually pieced a few more of the triangle pieces yesterday so it really wouldn't take me but a few days to finish it all.

While I was upstairs most of the day yesterday my babies were up there with me. Most of the time it is just Smokey but yesterday there were all up there. I keep calling them my three stooges. Smokey always sleeps on this quilt, he wants to be wherever that I am at all times.

And last, I snapped this quick little photo of Rev. I realized that I had not posted a photo of him on my blog. This is Andrew's little stud colt that he drove to Tennessee to pick up. He is a Tennessee Walking Horse and has a wonderful championship bloodline. His papered name is "The Revenge of JFK" He is such a sweet little thing. In a few months he will be headed off to the trainer so that he can get ready for the show ring. I'll try to get a better photo of him soon. We now have 6 horses here on the farm. I love them all.
I'm off, I have to get my day started. Richard is getting ready to leave and Hunter is in the shower getting ready for school. I need to clean my sewing room back up so that it will be ready for my loaner machine this afternoon.

Kristie