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...