Sunrise Quilt Studio

We're getting snow again this morning. It was predicted to start around 5pm., but I guess it was in a hurry :) Mot is in 7th Heaven. She LOVES snow! We ran out to Aldi's around 10am to pick up groceries for the next 2 weeks and it started snowing while we were in the store. Mot has been in and out of the house ever since we got home. They were predicting 3-5 inches of snow. Now that it has come so much sooner than predicted, I don't know what the update is. I'll have to watch the news at noon to see if we're expecting more. It's warmer today so I hope to get quite a bit of quilting done. It was way too cold in the basement yesterday to quilt and Tuesday was spent traveling back and forth from here to O'Fallon and back so I didn't get to quilt. Yesterday I was battling a headache, so I didn't quilt then either. Susan

Today I'm catching up on laundry - a never ending chore, and quilting. I'm working on Ruth's last quilt and hope to have it done by the end of the week. It' has very pretty pinks and soft greens in it. It's a very "spring" season-type quilt. Tomorrow I have to drive to O'Fallon to take my mother to her physical therapy appointment. She is making improvement this month and will probably have more therapy next month. Paul, the girls and I went to the Home Builder's Association show in Jefferson City this Saturday. We have a lot of home improvement projects that we want to complete on this house and got some good ideas from vendors at this show. I'm expecting calls from a couple of companies to make appointments for estimates. We are wanting to install a stair railing on our front porch. It's about 5 feet high and doesn't have any kind of railing on the steps or the porch. Before I have customers come over to the house, we have to get that...

I finished piecing the Snail Trail quilt back a few weeks ago. This was a problem quilt for me. Even though I laid out the pieces and sewed them together using the lay-out, I found that 1 out of 3 blocks were pieced wrong in the end. I had to do a lot of frogging to fix the blocks. At least it's done and has joined the stack of personal quilts to be quilted. I have no idea when the quilting will be done, but at least this step is completed :)

I decided to bit the bullet and work on the pattern for my rhapsody quilt yesterday. I used the "close is good enough" method of transferring my 8" sketch to the full sized freezer paper pattern. That didn't work out quite right and I had to re-sketch some of my lines after I had traced over them with permanent pen-ugh! I'll have to be careful that I don't get confused and cut the pattern on the wrong lines. This is the first drawing of the full sized pattern. It's actually 1/4 of the total pattern. After looking at it and studying it for a while, I realized that the top arched segments weren't going to give me the effect I wanted. So I worked on them some more to make them look more like the original 8" design to the right of the large pattern. This morning, I worked on transferring the pattern pieces that land on the horizontal axis to the vertical axis. This is supposed to give me complete, one-pieced pattern pieces for these segments and make...

Monday was Sarah's 3rd Gotcha Day. That's the day we brought her home from Thailand. We celebrated with a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and chocolate ice cream on the side! A bit of an overdose of chocolate for me, but Sarah LOVES chocolate! She's wearing her India T-shirt. It's a hand-me-down from Hannah. Sarah's Thailand shirt is too small for her now :(

Hannah is very susceptible to colds and flu. She has been since we brought her home from India at 10 months of age. As she gets older, she doesn't get sick as often, but she still gets a bad cold 3-4 times a year. Today is the second day she is home sick from school with a bad cold. I can always tell when she is starting to get sick. She starts having small symptoms days in advance and then it hits her hard. At least she isn't running a fever with this cold, but she's still pretty miserable. I postponed Sarah's Gotcha Day celebration for a few days. She's fine with that since she still doesn't get the concept, but she loves getting presents. I have to take Hannah to the orthodontist later this afternoon and will pick up a cake then. We'll have a party tonight for Sarah complete with cake, chocolate ice cream (her favorite) and a present. I have to choose a present yet, too. I finished both of Joe's quilts yesterday and hope to get started on Ruth...

Yesterday was Hannah's 12th birthday. She was so excited to be an "almost" teenager. I'm not so excited about the teenager part and can hardly believe she's no longer the tiny toddler following me around the house chattering away. We had a birthday party with family over the weekend while we were in RS. Last night we had a family party with the ice cream cake that she requested. I couldn't purchase one in RS, so we waited for that until we got home to JC and bought it at Cold Stone Creamery. It was chocolate through and through - a very rich cake even for Hannah who loves chocolate. Sarah's 3rd Gotcha Day is the 21st. We celebrate that like a family birthday with a cake and a small gift. She's looking forward to the celebration - especially the present :D We've moved all our furniture out of our RS house and have it in our JC house. The family room is much more inviting now with furniture in it. The garage is still full of things that need to b...

We have more changes going on with our lives these days. We accepted a lease/purchase offer on our RS house and will be making a quick trip down there this weekend to move out the rest of the furniture we have in the house. Luckily we don't have a lot of furniture there so it won't be such a big job to move it out. The new occupants will move in the following week. Since we'll be moving the furniture back to JC, I spent yesterday clearing out the family room so we have space to put the couches. We only had the computer and my old treadle sewing machine and a TV in there, but we also had our Christmas tree up so I took that down. That in itself took most of the afternoon. Today it should be back to our regularly scheduled programing! School, cleaning and quilting. We had some really heavy thunderstorms last night, but we didn't lose power. The tornados that hit our area were northwest of us, so we didn't have to tend with that. At one point we had some extremely ...

Here are a few quilt shows that are coming up that may be of interest to the quilters. American Quilter's Society Quilt Expo in Nashville, TN. Held Aug. 20-23. Deadline for entries is May 5. http://www.americanquilter.com American Quilter's Society Quilt Expo in Des Moine, IA. Held October 8-11. Deadline for entries is June 23. Innovations, Tacoma WA. Also held October 8-11. Deadline for entries is not yet posted. http://www.mqinnovations.com International Machine Quilter's Association, Overland Park, KS. May 14-17. Deadline for entries is March 26. This is a show that I hope to attend. Check out the website at http://www.imqa.org . Also look at this website for the 4 quilt shows that National Quilt Festival puts on. http://www.quiltfest.com . The New Jersey show is Feb. 28-Mar. 2 and deadline is Jan. 25th The Denver show is May 1-4 with the deadline of Mar. 19 The Pennsylvannia show is Sept. 4-7 but the deadline has not be posted. The Mid-Atlantic show is in Hampton V...

For those of you who are quilting customers, I thought I would update you on my schedule. Things have gotten behind (not atypical for me) due to my mother's illness shortly before Christmas. Mom is doing a bit better and we expect her to continue to improve over the next 4 weeks. I spent a couple of days before Christmas and the week between Christmas and New Years at my brother and SIL's house helping out with Mom and rearranging/remodeling her apartment to make it easier for her to move around in. Mom is now having to use a walker to get around and she needed some work done on the apartment in order to have enough space to move around. We still have work to do to get it completely remodeled, but we will be doing that work over a span of a few months. So, for quilting.... I will be able to get most of my orders out by the end of January. I am currently working on Ruth's quilts, one of which has been on my machine since mid-December. Then I'll have Joe's quil...

Yesterday it was down in the 20's. This morning it's 9*! Hannah couldn't find her coat and had to wait at the bus stop for her bus, so she had to wear her brother's coat. She prefers not to wear a coat at all, but there was no way I was going to let her stand in 9* weather without a coat. It is supposed to be warm this weekend up to 60*, so the girls and I plan to take a few hours off and go to the nature center and walk the trails. We haven't been there since early October so this will be a fun change for us. The nature center also has a group that gets together once a month to make quilt blocks. This year they are starting a new theme which is symbols of Missouri. I think I'll join and have some fun making quilt blocks with this group of people. By the end of the year I'll have 12 new blocks to set into a quilt top. We're trying to get back to our normal routine, but it's going to be slow going. This is a short week and getting into a routine wi...