Today was quilt class day and I had got caught up in another project and not completed my homework. At 8 last night I decided to get it done. Well, three hours later, defeat was staring me in the face. There was no way I was going to be able to make those pieces go together in a nice flat quilt block. Getting the star done worked fine, but when I tried to add the outside white pieces, it would start to bubble up in the middle big time.

Sooo . . .using my photoshop skills I created a paper piecing pattern for the silly thing and took it from there. Of course, it was not as simple as that. It took about hour to make the pattern and then a couple of hours to sew two of them up. AT 3 in the morning, my bed was calling and could not be ignored. This morning I finished them up and made it to class without a minute to spare. Taught me a lesson for sure.

So, now I am doing next week’s homework TONIGHT - no waiting til the last minute. We have class on the first and last Friday of the month so there is only one week between the last class of the month and the first class of the next month. Our homework for next week is to get all the inner blocks sewn together, adding strips here and there to make them all fit. Dayton likes how it goes so far and decided to take a nap on it. So, how is one to do homework when the cat likes to sleep on it?

You can see some of the blocks though - those star thingies are what gave me such a problem last night. Dayton seems to like the Carolina Lily the best though. Didn’t our teacher do a great job of putting together blocks for the quilt? She is awesome. You can see a little of what she does on her website at http://www.judysteward.com/ The photos on the website do not do her quilts blocks justice.

The cats are asleep, the neighborhood is quiet except for the bird calls, once a hour or so a car goes past, and all is quiet. There is no exploding artillery, no  low flying helicopters and not even a distant motor sound of a tank. It is so quiet here in the middle of town I wonder why people thought the country was quiet. Though the nearness of the Fort Hood artillery practice range might have had something to do with the noisiness of the old place.

Hubby has a nephew who would ask me how I liked the silence of the country when we moved out there. (He grew up there, but now lives in Waco.) I would explain that I found it noisier than any city I ever lived in because of the army camp. He would shrug it off and say that you get used to it. Well, I got used to the sounds of a city but did not think it was quiet. He did not understand that it was not true quiet if you had army noises that you had to get used to. LOL

It IS nice though to have peace and quiet - except for the trains that go through a couple of times a day that is. When I hear booming noises I can almost be sure it is thunder now and don’t have to run check the radar to see for sure. The cats seems to like it as well. They have settled in to a routine of eating and sleeping with a little wrestling and a few games of wigglebutt thrown in. Wigglebutt is that game cats play when they crouch down and get ready to pounce on something or someone - they have to wiggle their rear ends to get ready. You really are missing something until you see an extremely overweight, large fluffy cat do the wigglebutt like a kitten. Hey, she doesn’t think of herself as old or over weight, she likes herself just the way she is.

Things have calmed down so much for me I was able to get a few things made for the store. Be sure to check them out, tomorrow they will be on sale in the Friday Express for $2. You can click on their images to be taken to their product page in the store.

Oh, hey, I changed the blog theme - the other was just too busy. Whatch think? I will probably find something else soon, but thought this was a nice change.

So with this new house and all I am able to have a flower bed or two, or three or many more. Anyway, I only have one done so far and probably won’t work on any of the others until Fall when the temperatures go down. Triple digit heat and me do NOT get along.

Here is the one I have working. Hubby says that eventually this flower bed will be gone or redug so not to do too much. Soooo, I put a lot in pots. The youngest daughter gave me the strawberry flower pot so I have a bunch of herbs planted in that. And then there is a basil, a taragon and a jalapeno pepper plant in there. The spider plants were already there along with some mums and a lily or two.  Hopefully I will remember to water everyday. It is going to need it in this heat.

But, there is another thing that is going to need some water, a toad decided he liked the renovations and has moved i! (This photo was taken after the plants had grown a bit.)

Now if only we could figure how to keep the magnolia tree from shedding its leaves so much. That tree is on our list to remove for sure. It is soooo messy. We also have a Chinese Tallowberry tree in the front by the driveway that is going ot have to go.  It is way too messy. But hubby wants it killed from the roots up before cutting it down as otherwise we will be fighting little baby trees for years and years.I hate to cut trees as they really are nice to have around, but you gotta wonder what the builders were thinking when they planted some of the trees around here. There is even a cottonwood tree somewhere in the neighborhood that is doing its thing and sheddng all that mess to clog up our air conditioner coils. Of all the trees on our new property, there are only a few that are not junk trees. We have a nice pear tree in the back along with a few crepe myrtles but the rest, though big are just not worth much. And it is the same for every other lot in the neighborhood.

Hubby hopes to be able to transplant a few of the oak trees we planted in the country. They should still be small enough to move, but we will see. I expect it would take some experts with their fancy equipment and all. And expenses are kind of tight until we can sell the trailor or the house in Pasadena. (Taxes, insurance, and utilities on three properties just are WAY too much!)

So just how does this work when one has been absent from their blog for a while? OK, OK - - it has been longer than a while. But, hey, we bought a house and we now live in town and I started sewing again and I now have a grandson visiting every month. But enough with the excuses, hopefully I can get going again on this blogging thing. I really enjoyed it in the past.

The new house has been taking up a BUNCH of our time, especially the hubby’s. He just now got the trailer home ready to sell, not that there have been people beating down our door to purchase it. He finally got the closet doors in the guest bedroom up and working - daughter is happy about that when she visits - tempting items can now be shut away from the grandson’s eyes and little hands.

He is putting up solar screens currently and THAT has led to a bunch of other projects. Turns out the keys to those burglar bars are not the ones we thought. So, it involved getting a locksmith out to make some new keys. Then, bricks needed fixing that were about to break apart and let the burglar bars come loose. So that needed fixing. It seems he just can’t start a project without it leading to five more and it is so frustrating for him.

I finally got the curtains done in the master bedroom, I really love how they turned out. Now I need to finish the bedspread that will go with them. That is a huge project, but I am about half way through on it. Though I keep taking time off from that project to do other things. This week I made a cute bag to carry my stuff back and forth to the quilting classes I am taking. It took so long cause I made the pattern as I was going along. It really came out a lot bigger than I thought it would! I am hoping that I will be able to sell the pattern to it in the quilting store, we will see.