SOOOOO Neat.

You’ll never guess what I made. That’s right, a muumuu!! Ok, no. A purse. Imagine that. Annette is doing jewelry shoes and agreed to try to sell my purses at her shows. She is going to have a table set up at Ceylon days this weekend. The last three purses I showed photos of (including the ones in this post) will be for sale at the show. I don’t know if anyone will be interested enough to pay for them, but it will be neat to see. My friend Catherine was asking about how big the purses were so I put a dollar bill in the picture for a size reference. This purse is a little different since it has the pockets on the front, but the inside is the same as the others I've made. I think it's one of my favorite color combination, but you have to be a careful person if you want to keep the white/cream clean.

I was in Fairmont for Annette’s 50^th birthday party last weekend. 50 is the new 30 in case you haven’t heard. It was a fun time. I ate several cookies and cheeseburgers. It was an all day grill out, and we hung out in the garage playing a bean bag toss game. I called it “toss across” and then got made fun of, but no one else came up with a neat name, so screw them. I decided to make Annette a bag for her b-day. She doesn’t know yet, so I hope she doesn’t read this first and ruin the surprise. It’s the same as the brown reusable bag I showed a few posts ago. For hers I put a piece of plastic stuff in the bottom to make it more sturdy. If my purses sell at all I might make more of the reusable bag things to try to sell too since they’d be something I could sell for a lot cheaper.

This weekend is the quilt show. I have never been to one, so I’m excited. I signed up to sit at the registration table for awhile to help out and then I’ll browse the show. I decided to skip on submitting anything for the show since it would be hard to make the drop off time and I kept forgetting to submit the form I was supposed to fill out and now it's basically too late. I guess I’m also nervous for people to see my stuff next to stuff made by people who knew what they were doing….

Someone finally guessed what the last name that tune was. Jack got it right with "Imagine" by John Lennon. This video is the last song I have recorded. If anyone says they want more, I'll keep doing it (if I can find more bits to learn), but otherwise I'm calling it quits. I think this one is easy so I"m not going to give any hints except for that it's another classic rock song. Good luck.

The PIT!

A few years ago my sister and her boyfriend moved in to a new house. Recently my sister learned that the house has a mysterious abyss in the basement. The place is really old and has an unfinished basement. In the corner of the basement is a mildly terrifying looking "door" which is actually just a wood slab covering a stairway. I found it odd that there was a second set of stairs in the basement that led "up" but "up" was really to nowhere.


When you go up the steps, there is a few feet of space and then the bottom of part of the house with a bunch of support beams. But the weird part is that the floor is broken up by a giant pit. It is about three feet wide and as long as the room (maybe 12-15 feet). It is maybe four or five feet deep and filled with a bunch of random stuff like pieces of mystery garbage and old tires. It is the perfect place to trap a small child for torturing and killing.

When Meg took me down there to show me, my first question was whether or not she was going to kill me. I tried to take some pictures to capture the terror factor. They look less scary then it was in person. My mom thinks that the pit might be an old coal storage area from back in the day when it was burned for heat. I'm still not entirely convinced that it isn't a torture chamber for children.

As far s name that tune. No one bothered to venture a guess as to the previous post, so I'm not going to tell you what it was or give you a new song. Jerks. I also only have one more video, so I want to wait a bit longer before I post it.

So Neat. Part three?

I finished my purse a little while ago, so I decided to post a couple pictures. I pulled out all the bells and whistles for this one. I have an inside zippered pocket, two small pockets on the sides on the inside, and a pocket on the front of the outside under the flap....Maybe the photo can make that one make sense. I don't know if the true color comes out in the photo, but the outside is a deep, olive green color. The inside color I think shows pretty well. I also added some velcro to this purse. Sometimes the wind would blow the flap up on my old purse and it was annoying. I'm hoping the velcro will eliminate this problem. The purse wasn't quite finished when I took the pictures, so ignore the end I needed to sew shut and the velcro that wasn't sewn on.

Joann Fabric is having a sale this weekend so I'm thinking about going out and getting a few sets of fabric, making some purses, and seeing if I can sell them on Ebay. Anyone want to buy a purse for 15 bucks plus material? You can pick the fabric.

Daniel got the last name that tune correct. It was Don't Let it Bring You Down by Neil Young. This new song was a solo effort from a guy who used to belong in a popular band from the sixties...? It should be another easy one. I biff a lot, so pretend not to notice. I think I only have two more videos left after this, so I'm either going to have to learn more song bits or abandon this game.

So Neat. Part Two.

I got the photos of the two purses I made for my friends. They are messenger style bags based on a vague idea of a pattern that i made about 6 years ago. It's pretty simple, but I like the purses and changing the fabric personalizes them a lot. I am working on my own purse now, but since I don't really carry one unless I don't have coat pockets to keep my stuff in, I haven't had much of a need and thus haven't gotten it finished. I'm thinking I should turn it into a business, but I don't figure anyone wants to pay me enough to worth it.

I've been greatly enjoying the nice weather we've been having, but it's kind of ruining my plans of going snowboarding one more time this seasons. I haven't been out since the lesson I wrote about earlier, and now the snow is probably melted away. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to focus on when I can get motorcycle out of storage.

I'm not adding a name that tune on this post. But I will say that Daniel correctly names the previous tune as "Don't Let it Bring You Down" by Neil Young.

So Neat.

Andy left on Wednesday to go to the cities to have a belly button hernia operated on. He is staying up there for a few days to rest, so I've been home alone. A friend from work wanted a new purse, so I said I'd make one for her which sparked my sewing side. Since Andy isn't here to be bothered by the noise, I brought my machine out of the dungeon room and into the somewhat warmer kitchen. I made two purses for friends, two pillow covers, a bag, and a coin purse sort of thing. I also bought fabric to make one more purse for myself.

I got the pattern for the bag from my aunt a long time ago, but never got around to making it. Turns out it's ridiculously easy and makes me think I should make more. Too bad it's not closer to X-mas, or I'd be set.

I forgot to take pictures of the two purses I made, but I might obtain them in the future, so if I do I will post them.

Andy will be coming home tomorrow or monday. He's not feeling great, but he is starting to feel a bit better and even got to shower today! He's not supposed to life more than 10 pounds for 6 weeks, so I guess I have to be the man when we get groceries.

I'm running out of songs for name that tune. I had to record this one tonight. This one is by an artist that has already appeared in name that tune, but I just learned the song, so I figured it would work. It came off an album released in 1970. That's about all I've got for hints. Good luck. Richard got the last one right again. It was "Nutshell" by Alice in Chains.

This past Sunday I went to Mount Kato for my second snowboarding lesson with Catherine. Her 6 year old nephew asked her to go snowboarding with him in Colorado. She's never snowboarded, so she wanted to take a lesson to see if she should even attempt it in Colorado. She asked me to come along. I've always wanted to learn, but have never tried so I was all for it. After our first lesson, we decided that we'd both like to go again. There is still a lot to learn about technique and stuff, but I think I've made decent progress. I had a blast and want to keep going....too bad lift tickets cost a million bucks. I'm not sure how often I'll get out there, but I'm hoping to go at least a few more time before the end of the season.


In the last post I showed a photo of my quilt challenge project. I made a new one that I think is neater. I found out that I could submit both. Here is a photo of the second project. It's an oven mitt. Since the project had to be submitted "in a pot, on a stick" I decided to go with cooking pot instead of flower pot which seems to be what most everyone else thought of first, and then I used the stick as a stirrer.


Andy loves to make hard boiled eggs. Last time he made them, he found a surprise. One of the eggs had two yolks. He was pretty excited because it meant TWIN CHICKENS! So we decided to take a photo. I thought it was pretty neat too, so I decided to share the anomaly. Let's play a game. Guess if the hands in the photo are mine or Andy's.

Last post's name that tune was correctly identified by Richard again. It was "Simple Man" by Lynard Skynard. For this post, I don't feel like looking up details, so I'll just say that it probably came out in the early nineties as part of the whole grunge thing.

Lastly, I would like to apologize for poor picture layout on this stupid blog. The preview function is really not accurate and the result is a stupid layout when I have photos. The end.

Check Ya Later

A couple of weeks ago, I turned in my two week notice to Jackson Hewitt. I timed it just perfectly so I would only have to work one more day. I was only working on Sundays, but I really was growing to despise the job. I'm not a fan of whiny jerk off people, and I had to deal with a lot of them there. I also hated losing a day from my weekends. So last Sunday was my last day there.

For quilt club we have something called a fat quarter challenge. (A fat quarter is 1/4th of a yard of fabric, so it measures 18 x 22) This year the project was to submit a "quilt on a stick." We got the fabric and a stick and could make anything we wanted as long as the sewn part was smaller then 10 x 10 inches and we used at least one square inch of the challenge fabric. I had a grand vision for what I would create. It did not turn out as grand as I'd hoped... much less grand in fact. But here it is. The challenge fabric is the shirt fabric. I also used part of my stick to make the tree trunk. There is a hole on the bottom of the square for the other part of the stick to go into. Part of the challenge was that the project needed to me submitted in a pot on the stick, so the stick holds the project up. I have another idea I might try to do. The projects will be on display at the library for all of March and then will be up during the quilt show in April.

Richard correctly named last weeks tune as "The Rain Song" by Led Zeppelin. Nice work Rich. I didn't even know you read this. This week's song is from the first and self titled album of a band that came out in the 70's. Your hynt is thyt the bynd lykes Ys.