Fun times in Amish country!

Deb and I spent a few days at our friend's B&B this past week and as always, it was awesome!  We stay at Sheep Hill Bed and Breakfast whenever we are visiting Lancaster and it is a fabulous experience every time.  They had no real snow this winter, but of course we brought some with us!  It snowed all day on Monday, but it was not bad for traveling and shopping.  The only weird thing was that almost everything was closed for the snowstorm!!  We were like, "This is not even snow!!"  Holy cow, it was strange.  The roads were perfectly clean all day.  About 85% of stores and restaurants were closed!

The first night out, we went to a wonderful restaurant called Greenfields.  This was what the Bloody Mary looked like!  It was a meal in itself...bacon included.  It was our first time there, but we will be back.

A normal sight while in town!  It is nice (except for the manure!).

On the last night there, we found this little restaurant in Lancaster city.  It was called Horse Inn.  The fun part was finding it, which was like impossible!  There is a parking lot, but no restaurant!  Anyway, it is between two alleys with no street signs, or anything.  It was like being in the movie "Labyrinth" where you just mysteriously end up inside.  Once in there, you sit in a horse stall for dinner.  The food was amazing!  The service was excellent.  A fun experience.

View from my window in the B&B.

Full view of our little stall!  This was such a memorable time!

On the last night, we went to see NOAH at Sight and Sound Theater.  This is what the theater looks like.  It is on top of a hill and can be seen everywhere!  Magnificent.  The show was amazing, as usual.  We try to see whatever is showing when we are in town.  Tickets are hard to get, so we order ahead.

There is a great quilt shop about 30 minutes from our home base.  It is a great shop run by Mennonites (I think!  They might be Amish).  There is so much fabric in there.  Next to the shop is this deer farm.  They are beautiful animals, and very friendly.

Since being home, I have been cleaning, cooking and sewing my little head off.  I was having a terrible time with my new embroidery machine (and having sleepless nights over it) but have since discovered that ALL of the problems with shredding threads were from my iron-on Sulky stabilizer!!  That probably explains why my last machine was doing the same thing!  So, now that that is taken care of, I am embroidering all day and night.  I have made dozens of embroideries since realizing the problem.  Will show some tomorrow for Easter!! Hope you all have a wonderful day.  Easter is one of my favorites because of what it means to me as a Christian. 

Bedroom almost done! Some fun pillows!

I have been feeling a little funky for the past two days (might have been around a few sick people, I think), so it was fun to come home from work and have a package waiting for me!! My mom loves to make pillows and made these for me!  The chicken fabric is so cute!

Tomorrow Ken is moving us back into our bedroom!  He did such a great job painting the walls/ceiling and refinishing the floor.  It looks so pretty and fresh in there.  Wish I could put a bed in there and nothing else.  The furniture we have is too big for such a little bedroom, but we have made-do for all of these years, so it will have to go back in.

The paint looks a little neonish here, but it is really very soft in appearance.  The lighting made this part look too bright!

The other pillow from mom!  I just love them!

The walls are a very pale yellow and the trim is about 3 shades darker.  It looks to nice that I cannot wait to sleep in there and wake up in such a happy room!

So, tomorrow night it's back to our room.  I need to buy new sheets for the bed tomorrow after school.  I got bleach on the old ones when I was washing the ceiling. 

Baby girl quilt with a twist of Shakespeare

My friend Katie is having a baby girl next month and she just loves cats, so I found these great embroideries at Embroidery Library a while back and decided that as an English teacher, I had to have them.  Katie teaches math in our building (as does my best buddy Katy, who is also pregnant right now! I hope it's not catching!) and she is just the cutest little thing with her very, very (did I say VERY) round belly!  She will love this baby quilt for her little girl.

This fabric line is so colorful and modern that I thought it was perfect for a modern little baby.  The blocks are all simple four patches that I made by following directions on Missouri Quilt Company's youtube videos.  They have something for everyone.

The shower for Katie is this Wednesday, so I am trying to get it done by then.  Of course, then I will be making a baby quilt for the other Katy, so the baby fun just keeps coming.  Isn't it nice to see the young people having babies?  It makes me feel so hopeful for the future.

Today Kenny primed the walls in our room and right now he is painting the ceiling for the second time.  Aside from peeling the wallpaper, I have done very little up there.  It seems weird for me to do so little.  However, watching Kenny (and Rob when he was here) do so much hard work made me tired.  Guess that's sort of like pitching in!  Hope you are all having a good weekend!

Superbaby quilt for superbaby Jake!

One of my best friends from work is having a baby this spring!!  She and her husband are really good friends of ours, so I actually know their hobbies and likes, etc. which made this quilt a lot of fun to make.  Her husband is a total comic book junkie and loves all things superhero-ish.  I looked online and got this great Marvel comics fabric and I got some nice embroideries with superbaby stuff and then I got to work!  I had to design the quilt to make sure I got good use of the main fabric so that it could be really seen.

Then I added little touches with my new Ellisimo that included things like the baby's own superbaby website.  That was fun to sew out.

Just needs a binding now!  The shower is tomorrow afternoon, so that's no problem.

This is a quilt I made years ago and finally sent to be quilted.  It's just so springlike, isn't it?  Janet from Farmhouse Quilts did it for me.  She does great stuff!

The house is still a dusty mess, but Ken has the floors almost ready to be finished.  I am estimating that we will be able to live in there for good again in about 10 days since there is wait time between coats on the floor, primer on the walls and all of that work that is left to be done.   So today I quilted the baby quilt, will bind it and get a few other things done.  I know that the baby's dad will love this quilt.  That's why it's a little bigger than a baby-size.  I thought he might use it too!

15 minute quilt block and a lot of messes

This quilt is a result of a cool class I took a few weeks back.  It's a 15 minute (or was it 5?) quilt block.  It was fun and relatively easy.  I used my fabric stash and just threw together any colors.  Fun.

Now on to the messes!  Ken and Rob worked on the floor and moldings today.  It's after 8 and Ken is just finishing for the night after sanding all day.  We have our bedroom furniture all over the upstairs.  What a mess.  Our bedrooms are small and with the extra stuff in there it is like a closet.  I took one bedroom and Ken has the other.  I slept with Penny and the cat, which made me hot all night.  How did Evy do this every night all of her life!?

You can barely walk around to get to the bed in Rob's room.  This is Ken's dorm for the next week or so.

While Ken and Rob were upstairs sanding and strpping moldings, Emma was getting nervous in the living room.  Very nervous.  Like eating stuff nervous.  She ate things...like money.  Like 30 dollars!  This is all that's left of three ten dollar bills on the coffee table.   She ate a few bills as well.  LIPA, insurance bills, etc.  Gives a whole new meaning to the dog ate it! 

Tearing down wallpaper and using my new Ellisimo (a little)

I decided not to go away this vacation because there is just too much to do around here and I had to get to some of it now.  Kenny and I want to paint our bedroom before he gets back to work in a few weeks (wow is that going by fast--he never even stopped working until a week ago!)  so I had to tear down the old wallpaper which has been there for almost 30 years.  The first afternoon I got to work, I was not wearing my happy face!  It was not coming off very well no matter what I did!  Then Ken said I should hire Rob to come the next day to work on it with me.  Here is Rob setting my iPad for Science Fridays on NPR.  He came up with a plan to make it go more smoothly and it worked pretty well.  Instead of scoring the paper, he totally soaked it and kept putting DIF and hot water on it with the scraper (it looked like he was putting on wallpaper instead of taking it off), then we soaked it with hot water and vinegar right before we started peeling.  It worked most of the time but there were occasions when we did have to score it anyway.  Anyway, it took us 3 hours to take it all down and clean the walls.  Not bad.  I bleached the walls today, so my job is now done until we paint.

Today I tackled my little sewing area by the dining room.  Since I got the new embroidery machine, I no longer need my 20 year old big computer system.  So now I can organize my stuff in the cabinet that housed it for all these years.

While I was cleaning my sewing room out, I got to make a few embroideries.  This is for a baby quilt that I have to make by March 3.  The dad of the baby is a total comic book/superhero freak, so I got the coolest fabric with Marvel comics on it (will show that when the quilt is done) and I got a few embroideries with superhero kids, etc. on them.  I made this little guy's hair dark like the hair of both his mom and dad.

Wallpaper messiness.  Can't wait til my room is all done!!  It will be a month I am sure since so much has to be done and Kenny is working alone once I am back to work.

I totally loved this wallpaper back in the 1980s!  It held up over time since it was just country style.  Glad to see it go though.

My friend Colleen from PQ and I were joking about who would use the embroidery part of our machines first!  I won!  She manages the quilt store, so her time at her own machine just doing personal sewing is much more limited than mine.  When I got my first machine 10 years ago, it took me SIX months to work up the courage to embroider!!  This machine is easy to use, just like my old one.  Actually, it is much more user friendly.

This is the nemesis for the baby quilt.  He is so cute in his evil little way.  I used a variegated thread for his spiky hair.  I had a little tension problem a few times and that's why the white shows up on top when I was using black.  User error I am sure since once I rethreaded it, the problem went away.  It doesn't look as bad as this picture makes it look!  :)

Even though I am tired now from all the work I did this week, it feels good to be getting ready for a new look.  Once our bedroom is done, then the whole upstairs is like new.  That's something to look foward to.

My new baby! Ellisimo Gold is here!

I have been searching and researching embroidery machines since the fall and finally made the commitment to this Ellisimo Gold last week!  While my old one is still pretty good, it does have a few quirks now that it's ten years old, and no matter who I take it to, it still acts up from time to time.  Not very relaxing when you sew as a hobby.  So, I plunked the money down last Saturday (almost two weeks ago actually) and it came yesterday.  Perfect timing since I am done with drama club since Tuesday night!!!  I am on vacation next week so plan to do some serious embroidery while I am off.  Can't wait!

Look at the size of the embroidery unit compared to my old machine!!  It will be amazing!!

Funny how I still love my old girl, though.  I used her tonight for hours!!  I have missed sewing every night.  This weekend I will be at the quilt store in town two times (YAY) and the one in Cutchogue all day on Saturday.  It feels good to have no more huge obligations after school.