Cousin visits

The kids’ cousin, RJ, came to visit the other day. He has taken up deer hunting with a bow, and the Hunter told him not to get any camo clothing as we had enough to outfit him, so he came out to pick up some clothes. The Hunter wasn’t home from his business trip yet, so the kids kept RJ entertained….

I don’t know about the kids, but I think RJ was wore out!

Youth duck hunting….

Well, youth duck season was last weekend. The Hunter and Big Brother took two different boys with them – one on Saturday and one on Sunday.  Both boys on Saturday got their limit of six ducks quickly…they were home by 3:00! WOW!

The boys with their fathers….

Sunday I was able to go with them and we took Caleb B. with us. It was his first duck hunt and just happened to be quite a bit tougher than Saturday. The water was up maybe 6″ or a foot from the day before, so it was a challenge to find a place to hunt. The birds could go about anywhere and find water so you really had to be where they wanted to be….We moved 6 or 7 times during the day.

We had 15 minutes of shooting time left when Caleb finished up his limit – here are the boys and the Hunter with their take for the day

Here is a gallery of photos from the day – click on them to see larger photos.

Finishes and design wall from Monday

So, I am a day late and a dollar short on design wall Monday, but here is what was on my design wall then –

As you can see, my sewing room is a bit of a mess. There are those round robin blocks still up. Haven’t been inspired to start putting them together yet, but there on the left you see my coin strips where I was auditioning the alternating strip width! That top is now finished. The bright yellow, red and blue quilt on the machine is a Quilts For Kids quilt sponsored by Downy. You can go to their website and sign up for a kit. They will mail it to you, you piece it, quilt it, and finish it up and mail it back to them. Pretty cool program – well, that top is now done also.

Here is my completed “The Mariner’s Coins” top -

The story on this top is that all the coins are leftover scraps from a Mariner’s compass block of the month quilt I did last year (I really need to post photos of that top – I haven’t even started the quilting yet!).  That quilt had all the blocks surrounded by sashing of 3″ finished scrappy squares. We bought fat eighths to cut into 3 1/2″ squares and there were always portions left at the end. There were also scraps left over from each of the blocks and from the mariner’s compass fabrics and backgrounds, so I cut them all into 3 1/2 by 1 1/2 inch pieces. The strips were pieced as a “leader-ender” project and were done fairly quickly. There are also some 3″ blocks left among the coins. Those were leftover from the main quilt also and I put them in for a little visual interest.

The original top had a deep burgundy or red fabric as the main solid color, so I wanted something different and went with the deep blue….also very fitting for a seaman’s coins to be at the bottom of the deep blue sea! LOL. The name of this quilt is “The Mariner’s Coins”.

I am tickled to get this one finished. It should be a breeze to quilt and will actually live with us here in our living room!

This next quilt is a baby quilt I did for a gal in my small group for Women’s Bible Study. We had the shower for her and little Axel, who is about 4 weeks old now, on Wednesday, so the quilt is already given away. I don’t keep quilts around here for very long!  It was a panel that had been in my stash for several years, so I just had to put it on the machine, add batting and a back, and I was ready to go. I did a “cheater” version of stitch in the ditch on it around the main parts of the sea weed, fish, etc to stabilize the top, then did wavy curls in the borders. These photos are close-ups of some of the quilting. Turned out pretty neat with a lot of texture. You should have heard Kayci (the mom) squeal when she figured out it was a homemade quilt. She was tickled and must have some sort of quilting kinfolk in her background.

LEADER -ENDER PROJECTS: If anyone has questions about leader-ender projects, see Bonnie Hunter’s Quiltville site here. While you are there, if you haven’t before seen any of Bonnie’s stuff, you have to take a look. She has a WEALTH of information on her – everything from her “scrap-users” system, to free patters, to tips, etc.

Pumpkins carved

Well, we did it! Woo hoo!

One problem – notice how unhappy Munchie looks? You know how brothers are….Mini-me was goofing around and broke the stem off Munchie’s pumpkin. See that stem-less, naked top? Munch was desolate….I had tried hot glue but the pumpkin was too moist. When she wouldn’t even smile for the camera, I had one of those “lightbulb” moments – I had done research a couple days ago on pumpkin carving and remembered that toothpicks could sometimes be used to “mend” a broken part of a pumpkin when you were carving them. So I took the stem and punched a little hole up into it, then punched a little hole into the center of the top of the pumpkin, inserted a toothpick (and another to tighten it up) into both, and Wa-La! a healed pumpkin with a stem!

Now look at her…. a little bit of a change in attitude for sure! LOL. She is back to posing like she normally does when a camera is pointed at her. And notice the pumpkin? Looks great!

I will show you what I used in a minute to do the carving, but for now the kit I bought included patterns. The kids each picked out one. Mini-me picked out the cool looking spider and Munchie first picked out the one with the horse (the headless horseman, but she didn’t notice that, just wanted a horse). Notice the size of Munchie’s pumpkin? No headless horseman was going to fit on the munchie pumpkin! Her second choice was this cat pattern which I still had to reduce to 60% of original size to get it to fit!

So this is “Meow”, named after Munchie’s white stuffed kitty she has had since birth.

Here is Mini-me’s spider. He doesn’t have a name as far as I know.

Now I am sure you remember my frustration with carving/cutting pumpkins from THIS post….as I said, I did research after that debacle. You  can use a dremel tool (if you have one and don’t mind a big mess) or you can buy little kits to make carving easier.  I had seen some on-line by the Pumpkin Masters and ended up finding and buying one of these at Wal-Mart Friday – the Pumpkin Masters Carving Party Kit.

I can’t recommend a pumpkin carving kit enough. This made all the difference in the world, and I am now one happy mama (you know what they say, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!).

By the way, if you want to see some really cool pumpkins go visit the Pumpkin Masters or PumpkinGlow.com. Or just Google “pumpkin carving” and you will be amazed at the incredible images you see! COOL!

On a “quilty” note - I notice these patterns would make really cool Halloween trapunto or applique patterns or even quilting patterns on a Halloween quilt…..hmmm. Another project….just what I need!

Signs of fall

This is one of two maple trees we planted maybe four years ago. They were both supposed to be October Blaze or Autumn Glory or something like that  and they were supposed to be ORANGE or RED. Well, this one is yellow, which has saved it’s life this year. Ever since we bought them they have been turning BROWN, with no color at all.  I was really disappointed as I bought them for the bright fall color. Well, when this one started changing, I took some leaves from it and from the other tree and carried them into the house to figure out if we actually bought sugar maples or something else.

I looked in our wonderful reference on trees of Missouri and we found that this tree actually is a sugar maple and therefore will continue to grow and thrive in our yard. The other one ended up being a silver maple…it is small and stunted and has not grown nearly as well as this one…so it will be coming out of the ground. Maybe to be replanted in the back yard…

In the picture above, you can see part of the trunk of the silver maple on the left, and our new red maple sapling is in the middle with the pink tape (and the RED leaves!!)

The kids and I planted this tree Wednesday afternoon while the weather was so nice – meaning in between rain on Monday and Tuesday and rain Thursday and Friday. It has been a great year to plant trees though. All the redbuds we planted this spring have survived and flourished.

We bought two other red maples and the Hunter has planted one for me, and I still have one more to go.

This is a little of the remaining color in our back yard. Notice all the leaves on the ground?  The heavy rains over the last few days have really knocked a lot of the leaves off.