Owl Madness and Mr Random Goodness!

Mr Random has been good to me in the last week! First off, with the Long Weekender Blog Hop, I won a gift certificate to The Fat Quarter Shop =) The fact that I won it 2 days before their amazing Black Friday Sale was as super bonus!! for 25% off I purchased an Art Gallery Fabrics Grab Bag and a Bloggers Choice Bundle. I am super excited for the grab bag, it contains 9.5lbs of Art Gallery fabrics in sized from .5-.875 yards! woot woot!!! I love AGF, especially the Pat Bravo lines. You point out someone who doesn’t like Rock N’ Romance or Indie, and I point out someone who is probably the husband of the person who bought it!

Then this morning, after a particularly harrowing night with my poor teething little Mr Moo Moo ( yes I call him that and it will come up at his wedding!) I opened my email to discover a message from Melissa at Happy Quilting saying I was the winner of this gorgeous bundle of fabrics from Julie at the Intrepid Thread.  I love Intrepid Thread. Julie is very nice and will make custom bundles for you if you cannot fit everything in your shopping cart! The shipping is reasonable too!

Its been a good week, other than last nights debacle ( we won’t get into that, thank goodness for mom support groups on Facebook!) My friend from Calgary came to visit, and she is getting MARRIED!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!! So we went to look at dresses, and baked cookies =) It is a recipe out of an old Betty Crocker Cookbook from like the 60’s, and they are amazing! Sub out the chocolate chips for Penut M&M’s and you will go into cookie coma heaven. Here is a re-enactment of my morning

Thats pretty much how it went…..

I also recieved an overwhelming response to a recent post on Facebook. I found a bag of some Owl Ornaments that I made last year. I decided to sell some of them in the Mom Swap group. I had no idea what a whirlwind that would become. My little owls are the MUST HAVE item of the season right now. Personalized and a great price ( I definitely undercharges, cest’ la vie!) I wound up selling the 11 I had in less than 4 minutes, and because of FB’s way of ordering posts randomly if they are posted at teh same time, there were people whi should have been ahead of others and why did they get skipped will there be more…….wow. So I decided to make more. I now have a house full of owl ornaments. I have 39 on the go, those took about 4 hours to come in and I had to create a waitlist, which I had to close last night. The waitlist is at 33 owls. Add that to the stocking orders tand the custom quilt order, and I have a busy next couple weeks!!

Owl Madness

Ready to stuff!

Its taking over the house!

Thankfully my husband said he will stuff all the little basssss-….I mean darlings…… when he gets home from work. On the upside I have an excuse to purchase a fancy new SHARP pair of embroidery scissors.

Its time to eat dinner! Peas for the Little Mister and a honey mustard glazed ham steak for mommy! Yum!! the secret recipe?? Dijon mustard and syrup. put in a measuring cup until it looks like it will cover the ham. mix, cover the ham, season with thyme and rosemary, bake for 20 min.

Happy Quilting!!

A Moment of Discovery

Do you ever have those moments where you go, know why didn’t I think of that? That’s what happened to me the other day while reading Felicity’s blog. She posted about her Craft Buds month entry, and mentioned that she got her book from the local library.

“SAY WHAT? The library has modern quilting books? Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before!” I said to myself.

Needless to say I promptly went online and searched around the Surrey Public Libraries website, and boy, do they ever have quilting books. Not just modern quilting, but any kind of crafting book. And new ones, modern ones! Tula Pink, Elizabeth Hartman, Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, and not one but three Kaffe Fassett? My library card now holds a coveted spot in my purse, and I almost have the numbers memorized to log in online and reserve books, but because I am a new cardholder my limit is 10 books at a time. I laughed when she said that, 10 is more than enough to keep me occupied for 2 weeks. I maxed out my limit the first night (better on a library card than a credit card) and have 8 books on order. I have to bring the lot of them back this weeks and exchange them for the next batch (Quilts from the House of Tula Pink is in this batch, yippee!)

While digging through my little trove of quilty goodness, getting inspired and copying templates, I discovered something about myself.  A couple of the modern quilting books were centered around minimalist quilting, or had projects that fall into that category. As much as I can appreciate the design and time that goes into them, I found myself thinking more and more that these were not things I would make for myself. Only one color and a plain white background…? I am not a minimalist!

I love to put as many colors as possible in my quilts.

Rich, vibrant prints and blenders with a tone-on-tone black background? Yes please!

Batiks? Let me at ’em!

Don’t get me wrong, I really like many of the modern quilts I see, and there are many that I would like to/will eventually make. I love anything Tula Pink, I think Pat Bravo makes some amazing fabric lines, and the use of solids is stellar, and I love the projects that come up in the blogs I follow that put a modern spin on the traditional quilts. Don’t even get me started on the amazing quilts of Kaffe Fassett! I just can’t make a quilt with only 3 fabrics in it when there are so many out there just calling my name. Use Me!!

Flights of Fancy, using Nest by Tula Pink for Moda

I am looking forward to this week’s mail, my order of Rock n Romance by Pat Bravo for Art Gallery Fabrics will be arriving! Hurray! I ordered a fat quarter bundle from The Intrepid Thread. It has all the prints with an equal number of matching blenders. I am going to use these to make the Starburst Quilt.

Happy Quilting!