Gone for awhile

I have been feeling very blue for the past few weeks. It is an awful feeling when depression hits you. It does not help that we have had several days where the sun was unable to break through the clouds and it SNOWED all day long. It also does not help that the cold weather makes my joints swell and ache. Aw heck, Who am I to complain? I have a house, 4 happy healthy kids (youngadults?) and a man that loves and cares for me. A time to be thankful in light of all the distruction in Haiti.

Well on to what has helped me to come out of my blues...My son and #3 daughter have had the last few days of for the NYState Regents Testing. DD#3 has no tests this time around so she has been hanging out with mom. We spent a few lovely hours working on her "Purple Passion" quilt. This is her first attempt at quilting so I have been bery impressed that she is sticking to it.

On the left I am showing her how to use a rotery cutter. We started out by cutting 4 1/2inch stripsFrom there we cut them into 4 1/2 inch  squares. On the right is DD#3 cutting squares. Notice that she is a lefty and I am a righty. It took us awhile to figure out that we needed to move the rueler to the opposit end of the strips in order for her to cut them more easily.

All of our hard work paid off though. We cut over 400 squares. The 10 colores that she picked out flow nicely. We played with them for a while until we found a pattern that we liked. We hung the completed strips from magnetic clips and hung them on our fridge to check our pattern. I especially like that they will be progressing in a stairstep pattern. The best part is that She did all of the sewing by herself on my machine. Her seams are very straight and, for the most part, are a very tight 1/4 inch

In other crafting: I completed this lovely granny square throw for DD#3. It is made up of my many odds and ends of yarn. I just crocheted each one until there was not enough to go another round. I used up quite a bit of my yarn stash. In all there are 9 different yarns in it. On the left you see DS haming it up. He felt that since his sis got to be on mom's blog he should be there too.