Quilt Brag

Earlier this year I paid off my car. I then promptly celebrated by asking for less hours at work. Since then I've been working an average of three days a week. I keep myself busy the rest of the time with in home crafts such as quilting, drawing, refinishing furniture, and occasionally cleaning and cooking.

I would love to give tutorials on my projects (since that is the kind of blog I like to read) but it never occurred to me to take process pictures. I'll try to remember in the future, but for now I'll just give the finished project picture and anything else useful I can find.

I've been quilting since I was eleven. Mom taught me how to tie quilts before that. but the first hand stitched quilt I ever worked on was a wedding quilt for a close family friend. It took us a long time to finish even though it was in the Living room and a disruption to family space. I think we gave it to our friend for her second anniversary (not the last time that would happen with family wedding quilts).

I learned to sew on a machine in seventh grade home economics class. Mom had tried to teach me earlier but our personality conflicts had ended that experiment. Mom became my sewing tutor instead and has been my encyclopedia ever since.

I designed my first quilt at seventeen out of denim. It was a square patch tied quilt and weighed so much I couldn't use it and eventually gave it away as a picnic quilt.

I've made a bazillion quilts since then (actual number) I've given away many of them and don't have pictures of the majority. I learn as I go and I usually design them myself, which is the fun part for me, but it means  I have to learn a lot of things the hard way. I don't actually know how to read an official quilt pattern. I'm very visual and I design my own on grid paper or on the computer.

Okay, I've been going on way too long.

This is an original wall hanging design of intertwining snakes incorporating triangles, an in places asymmetrical diamonds(kite shapes) to save time.

Two Snakes.

The finished size is 24 x 30 in. 

Here are close-ups of the snake heads

I can't find a name for this quilt pattern, I think of it as a pinwheel but that name is already in use for another design. It's basically an octagon inside a square and the octagon has been equally divided into triangles. So you have eight 4 1/8 x 4 1/8 x 3 1/4 in. Isosceles triangles and four 2 5/8 x 2 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.  right angle triangles per square. (measurements include a 1/4 in. seam allowance) Each side of each finished square measures 6 1/4 in. there are twenty squares in the design. 

I guess I could call it the Stop Sign. The fun of designing Two Snakes was to see how many fabric squares of different combinations of value (light, medium, and dark) I could put in my wall hanging and still have a cohesive overall design. The original pattern was done in pencil with ink added for the dark areas. I then used  the two red, two yellow, and two green fabrics from my stash and grosgrain ribbon for the snake tongues.

Next time: Grosgrain ribbon + buttons+ a little fabric= summer grass and bugs.

Breathing Night & Day

As long as I can remember I've had trouble sleeping. Last Summer I shared a cabin with Mom and Dad at our family reunion, and Mom told me she thought I had sleep apnea. She said I would take a big breath, a small breath, a tiny breath, and then stop breathing for several seconds and then start over again. I didn't have insurance at the time so there wasn't a lot I could do about it. I do have insurance now, so a couple months ago I had a sleep test. It was an at home one that lasted three nights. The results were that I stop breathing on average 20 times per hour. This is considered moderately severe sleep apnea. It kind of took forever for me to get a CPAP since there was a misunderstanding between the diagnostic company and my doctor's office on who needed to send the order to a respiratory company. I started a harassment campaign to both and eventually got some results. A nice lady from Symbious Medical called me the day after receiving the order and set up an appointment for the next day. She came and explained how to use and care for the machine. I tried a couple of masks on and decided on one. It is not beautiful, but I wasn't expecting beauty. My machine works great and I am sleeping better.

My breathing at night has improved, but the way the machine works, is that it blows filtered, humidified air into my nostrils, gently at first, but with more force as needed to keep air going into my lungs. My lungs are taking some time to adjust. The first few days I had trouble catching my breath during the day. I found I couldn't walk my normal quick pace, but had to really slow down. I thought it might take just a couple days to adjust, but soon I started to feel like I had a corset on that was squeezing the life out of me. I cut down on the hours I used the CPAP at night, but I wasn't improving. I called Symbious, to see if I need to make an adjustment on my machine, I got an answer back that some times the machine would slightly aggravate asthma, but if it was severe to call my doctor. I called my doctor, (this office, by the way, is nearly impossible to get a human on the phone) and got an appointment and eventually two inhalers, that have reduced the chest pain and improved my day time breathing significantly. I'm still a bit sensitive and now I think I'm cacthing a cold, but my night time breathing is better and I'm not always exhausted like I used to be. so life is looking up.

Here's a picture of my face mask, I'm not showing one on me since I'm too vain for that, this is the picture from the instruction manual.

I thought I looked like a giant mosquito, Alan tells me I look  more like a mole with a miner's headlight. Ah well, night-time vanity is not as important as a good night's sleep.

Wedding Pics (by request)

So to reward our very first commenter (thank you Amanda) here are some of our favorite wedding pictures. These are all taken by 2G Photography.

So it Begins

We've just passed our six month anniversary, and we've had very little contact with friends and family since getting married. We have simply been sucked into the vacuum of early marriage, where we just don't want to go anywhere particular because we get more time with each other at home. I haven't minded this at all of course because I am a part of it. Well, as an outreach to all those who have been ignored, we are starting this blog to share a bit of our lives and publish our opinions and experiences. Neither of us are normally big picture takers, but we did take a lot of pictures on our honeymoon to Walt Disney World and Universal Studios. So since this blog is still young and pretty barren, we will share a small selection of the hundreds of pictures we took in Florida.

On Speeder bike at Disney Hollywood Studios

On the bridge to Hogsmeade, in front of Hogwarts at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure

Alan by his buddy Iron Man at Islands of Adventure

Emily the Viking in Norway section of the World Expo at the Epcot Center

Alan on left side of picture in front of the Spider-man ride, the coolest 3-D ride ever.