Friday, December 30, 2011

Smocking By The Sea


What a gorgeous week we have had along the beautiful Emerald Coast of Florida. This was my Christmas present from Kurt - to come to Florida this week to visit my parents and enjoy some time at the beach. I brought my smocking along and found there isn't a more beautiful place to smock than at the beach.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Quilted Coin Purses

I had originally planned to make pieced quilted coin purses for my mom, sister and grandmother. I was really excited about them, However, my 3 weeks of being down with pneumonia sort of got in the way of those. I ended up having to cheat. I found this cute prequilted fabric at JoAnns. It looks a lot like Vera Bradley fabric. I just used the prequilted fabric and seam binding and made cheater coin purses. I think they're still very pretty - even if I didn't quilt them myself.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Timothy's Solo



Some of the kid's choir did a preview song from their upcoming performance this Sunday for the Awana Christmas program tonight. Timothy did awesome!! I can't wait until the whole show on Sunday!

Monday, December 12, 2011

Thimbles!

This is 50 of the thimbles in my thimble collection. I have 7 or 8 more and another display case just like this one. I have wanted one of these display cases for YEARS. I started my thimble collection well over 10 years ago, and have collected a thimble of every touristy place I have been. I had housed them in various ways - shelves - shadow boxes, etc, but never had a real display case like this one - until yesterday. Jonathan drove by and saw that someone was throwing these out in their trash, so he got them for me. They're both in great condition and look so nice. Each one holds 50 thimbles, so my collection has plenty of room to grow in the 2nd display case. I love to look at my thimbles and go down memory lane of where each one came from and remember the special times associated with that thimble.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

All those shirts!

Remember those 20 t-shirts I was embroidering? Well, I got them all finished with a day to spare! The kids wore them for the first time when they did a sneak preview song in the worship service today. I think the shirts look pretty good. I had a great time embroidering them. It felt good to be useful to our church!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Martha's Christmas Dress


This has been a *very* busy day. I am in the midst of embroidering 20 t-shirts for the kid's choir at church. I decided to divide them up and do 4 t-shirts a day for 5 days. Today, I actually did 5 of them. :-) I also needed to make my ornaments for the Martha Pullen Fan Club ornament exchange. I dug out an old cape made of red velvet that I decided to recycle the fabric into my Christmas ornaments. I am making Santa's sacks. Anyway, while working with the pretty red velvet, I thought how nice it would be if Martha had a new Christmas dress.

I pulled out McCalls 9618 and made view C. It's a little big on Martha. I am not sure why. She is a little thinner than some 18" dolls, so I guess that is why. I embroidered a little snowman on the dress. It is just one of the designs preloaded onto my machine. It turned out pretty cute.

Oh, and while all this sewing was going on today, I also baked 4 dozen cookies - half of what I need for the cookie exchange at church tomorrow night. :-)

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Portraits


Kurt and I decided to get portraits done. We have wedding pictures, but we've never had any other professional pictures done. We were so pleasantly surprised with how they turned out. We went to Portrait Innovations to have them done. It was actually alot of fun!

Thursday, December 1, 2011

For my Owl-fanatic Niece

My 17-year-old niece has always loved owls. It's hard to find things with an owl theme, but recently I was in my local Fabric Mart and stumbled upon this owl flannel. It was the only flannel in the whole store, and it just happened to have an owl theme! I decided it would make a perfect pillowcase, so that is what I made with it. It turned out pretty cute.

Do you know what this is???

This is an x-ray of someone with right lower lobe pneumonia. It's not my x-ray, but it could be. Over two and a half weeks ago I began not feeling well and running a high fever. I was totally exhausted. My doctor first thought it was viral. However, when I got worse instead of better, I went to the ER. I arrived with a 103.2* temperature. An x-ray revealed that I had right lower lobe pneumonia. They began pumping me with two different antibiotics and fluids, and then sent me home with yet another antibiotic. It's been over two weeks now, and I still am not over it. My last x-ray earlier this week showed that the pneumonia was 80% cleared. They didn't want to put me on another antibiotic so they could see if my body would just fight it off. I will go back this Monday for another x-ray. It's been a struggle. I have so many things I want to do, but so little energy. I am determined to not overdo it though because I have been told that a relapse would be worse than the first illness, and I never want to be that sick again!!