Today, I stayed home from work and went to my LQS. (LFS?) Recently when Cassie and Lene started up their joint quilting blog, my interest in appliqué was rekindled, but I've never really seen it done. I'm quite visual, so to learn to appliqué someone needed to show me. Anyway, they had a beginning hand appliqué class, so I signed up. I was happy to see that there were only two of us in the class, so we got a lot of direct instruction while still having fun and chatting. I came home and finished my little class sample and made two of my homework assignments.
The red one was the first one I did, and the other two I did this evening. I'm supposed to do a total of six - the red one is cut-away, and the other two are needle-turn. (From what I can tell, the only difference between the two is that for the first one, you cut the fabric away as you stitch it, and the second you cut it to the seam allowance ahead of time. Semantics.) Anyway, I kinda totally love this and would still be stitching away if my legs and arse hadn't fallen asleep from sitting there for so long.
The second temptation came in the mail. I wasn't expecting it so it was a nice surprise.
I was supposed to receive a shipping notice, but seriously, how can something from "beaverslide" NOT fail the porn filter?
Anyway, heads up, Lynn in Tucson, because if ever you ask what tweedy yarn you should use for a project and you haven't already checked for Beaverslide, I shall taunt you and deny you cake. This stuff is some serious YUM. Soft but woolly, sheepy but somewhat refined, tweedy without being annoyingly so.
That is 15 skeins of sheeptastic goodness. (Seriously, y'all, making a sweater coat for a plus-sized gal is no small undertaking. And also, thank goodness this sucker doesn't have to button over my bump.)
That picture is fairly true to color, except the tweedy bits aren't so bright in real life.
That's kinda more like it.
So, now I have the means to make my Linden AND I have the knowledge to sit and stitch tiny hearts to tiny squares for no discernible reason, other than the fact that I clearly like fiddly hobbies.
And, filed under Reasons People Suck, here's one for you. Our new house has a pool. It's neat, and I'll be excited to have one, having grown up with one myself. (Seriously, though - we move from the desert to the coast and THEN got a pool? Sheesh, I do things backwards sometimes.) Anyway, the realtor was nice enough to go out again and send us some pictures so we could show our families, since we forgot to do it while we were there. We noticed two fence slats missing that had been there before, so he mentioned it to the listing agent and told her they'd need to have that fixed before we took possession. She groaned, and proceeded to tell our realtor they'd already had it fixed once, in addition to going to the neighbor's and telling them it was trespassing to use the pool since it wasn't their property. What kind of gall does it take to do it after you've been told not to already? And to make it patently obvious who was doing it? (Apparently the listing agent got her husband to dress "like a detective" and hand-deliver a cease and desist letter on her company's letterhead. Hee.) The worst part of it all? There's no effing lock on the effing gate. They could walk in whenever they wanted and not damage the effing fence.
Lest you worry that have enough gall to try it again after we move in, I will show you my security system.
They sound more ferocious than they are, but I'm not telling the new neighbors that.
