Black Friday is quickly approaching! Where did this year go already? Be sure to check back here on Friday, November 28 for more information. I will also have more on Etsy that day. You can see the shop here:
I will be hosting a special giveaway! More details to come.
Happy Crafting!
Rachel
I didn’t get a ton of sewing done this week, but I did finish a few things, which felt great. I have one quilt in my sights for next week as it only needs a binding, so that is my goal.
My biggest finish for this week was a very quick quilt I made for my son.
It’s not the prettiest quilt I have made, but it was made in under an hour and my son adores it, so it was a win-win! I wrote a quick tutorial for it too (though I warn you, it’s pretty rough!! LOL). You can find it here:
My second finish was a tutorial for EQ7. I got this as an early Mother’s Day present and have been having loads of fun using it. I had a hard time finding tutorials for the program online, so I figured as I was playing around I would type up some quick tutes for anyone that might have this program.
And of course I will share the resulting quilts as patterns on my blog too! For now I have posted the tutorial for the basic quilt design in Electric Quilt 7 here:
I am having so much fun using this program. I have wanted it for a while, but never actually went through with buying it. I wish I had!! I think you’ll be seeing a lot more patterns round these parts. I already have my Sew Out Loud paper piecing pattern done up in EQ7 so I can share it with you guys soon!
And if you subscribe to my newsletter below, you may even find some fun stuff in your inbox soon (hint, hint)!! 🙂 🙂
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I think that’s it for this week, I am looking forward to next week and seeing what I can get done!
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
So time has really flown by in our house lately!! We have started homeschooling and just as we got a good groove going for that, we headed off to a dream vacation in Disney. Our trip started as one week and morphed into two! We are back now though, and we are once again falling back into the ebb and flow of every day life. I thought I would share a bit of our homeschooling and our trip with you today, but be on the look out for many more quilty related things to come real soon!
We started homeschool a little bit early this year for two reasons. First, I knew we would be heading to Disney in mid-September, so I wanted to start a bit early to make up for any lost time. And second, my son was excited to just get started!! We learned about many interesting things, just a few that I took pictures of are ….
Pirates …
Making a homemade compass …
Flying a Kite …
Capillary Studies …
The science of cleaning pennies …
A new hobby, letterboxing …
and a trip to the Art Museum …
We had so much fun with all our activities, and we both learned so much. My style of homeschooling would fall under the category of “Relaxed Homeschooling”. Which to us basically means we do not have a curriculum to follow. I have a general guideline of things I would like to see him learn, but for the most part I am allowing him to express his interests in a topic, and we are building our own curriculum around that. It is really working out very well for us.
Our trip to Disney was simply AMAZING. Having never been there before, I had no clue what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised at every turn. I am in the process of writing up our trip report right now. I took notes after each day, so I could be sure to keep a record of this wonderful trip. I am not sure my family will have the opportunity to travel again for quite some time, so I want to be sure to remember this wonderful family trip. Here are just a few pictures of the trip.
Although the trip was so awesome, it is nice to be back home and back into the swing of things. My goal for the coming weeks is to get some tutorials done, and do some updates to the store. Be sure to keep an eye on my blog for all the fun things to come!
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
Last night I was perusing some of my bookmarks in vi.sualize.us. If you have never heard of that site, it’s similar to the newly popular Pin It site (can’t think of the name right now), but has been around for years. You can use the site to keep track of web bookmarks using one picture from the page. I really enjoy using it as it gives me a nice visual of ideas. I thought it would be fun to use a random number generator to pick one of my bookmarks/pictures to share with you. I have a lot of quilty stuff in there, as well as scrapbooking and cooking, so it’ll be fun to see what gets picked to share.
So I have 442 pictures saved in my account. Using random.org, it told me to share picture number 167 with you. So here it is:
Well isn’t that just darling?? This is a funny picture from i can has cheeseburger. I have this blog in my feed reader for when I need a little giggle. Usually this site puts funny captions on pictures of cats, but this one was so random I found it quite amusing and decided to bookmark it!
I hope you are having a great Friday! You should take a browse through your own bookmarks today, you never know what amusing things you might find! (If you find something totally random, feel free to share it here with us!)
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
Hello out there in blogland!! Today is such a dreary day outside, that I wanted to share some of my latest quilting projects with you when I realized I haven’t really been quilting lately!! I do have quite a few older projects I need to post (which I will do eventually), but between getting ready for my son to homeschool, the new quilt store, my full time job, another online business I run, a non-profit I am vice-president for, oh and being with my family, well something had to give. Sadly it was my quilting time. I have done a tiny bit of applique on my “Family Reunions” quilt, but that’s pretty much it.
Speaking of homeschooling, I think we have finally settled on a style we are going to loosely follow. It is called the “Thomas Jefferson Education”. It’s not so much a way of home schooling, but an ideal. I really like the concepts behind it, and have found some great reading materials on how other families have implemented this in their homes. You can read more about TJed at www.tjed.org if you are interested.
I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you that took the time to comment on my last homeschooling post. Your words of encouragement mean so much to me as I go on this journey. Each day we get closer to D-Day (or would that be H-Day? LOL), I am more at ease about the process. But it is still a little intimidating to think about all the possibilities, worry about meeting new people, and making sure I don’t screw the whole thing up! So your kind words really help me know that this is the right choice, and we will be fine. So thank you.
In other exciting news, my husband and I like to mark big changes in our lives, with a fun trip. Last time we had a big change we went to Gettysburg, and this time we are going to see this guy ….
Yes, we will be going to Disney World! Yay!! I am so excited! This will be my and my son’s first time going. My husband has been before, but not for quite a while. We are taking advantage of one of the free dining offers that Disney did for 2011, so the cost is really reasonable. We are going for a whole week, so there will be plenty of time to take in all (some? very little?) of the sights. It will be just the right thing to mark the beginning of this big change in our lives.
Sorry for my ramblings today, hopefully you will find my next post more exciting! I am participating in Sew Mama, Sew‘s Giveaway Day. Be sure to check back on Monday for all the details and a fun giveaway. I haven’t decided on a prize yet, so if you want to check out my store (here) and tell me what you’d like to see as a giveaway, I may be obliged to listen.
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
I am so looking forward to this weekend!! I have so many aspirations for getting things done. Most likely many of them will not happen, but it is so much fun to go into a weekend with such high hopes.
If you take time out of your weekend plans to read this little post, be sure to check out my giveaway post from a week or so ago and comment over there for a chance to win a Darcy pattern. The post is here. I will draw a winner on May 1.
You may also want to pop over to the store and check things out. May is our official Grand Opening month and all the items in the store are listed at 10% below retail, no coupons needed!!
If you sign up for the newsletter while you are there you will also be entered into our monthly pattern giveaway. The first newsletter is one of my goals for the weekend, so that should be out sometime this coming week.
May will be a very busy month for giveaways for the store. To celebrate my Grand Opening, I am having giveaways and sponsoring sites in a few different places around the blogosphere. Be sure to keep an eye on my blog and I will point you in the right direction.
I hope all of you have a very fun and productive weekend!! Let me know what you’re doing if you care to share!
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
You may notice that my blog is going to be a little quiet for a bit. This has been a rough month so far. On November 30th I had one Grandmother pass away. We held her funeral on Saturday, December 4th. Then sadly on Sunday, December 5th, we found out that my other grandmother passed. I attended her funeral today. Needless to say, these past 2 weeks have been wrought with sadness.
The sadness of my grandmothers’ passing came as a great surprise to me and came right in the middle of a large project I am working on. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but I have some exciting things going on relating to the quilting world. These exciting things are occupying a large portion of my time right now, so I have not been able to sew as much as I would like.
I will keep you updated as things progress, but for now I hope you can understand my quietness and I hope you will be here to share in my exciting news when I return.
Happy Quilting!
Rachel
I have blog envy. I hate to admit that, but I do. I have about 250 blogs in my Google Reader, and while I don’t read them all all the time, I do read a lot of them. They are all so very interesting and it gives me blog envy. I would love for this blog to be alive with not only my quilting escapades, but my own voice too. Cupcake ‘n’ Daisies recently asked her readers what makes a good blog, and when I went to post, I thought about what I like in a blog. I like blogs that have a focus, photography, food, quilting, crafting, scrapbooking, finance …. But I also like when these writers incorporate their own lives into the blog. This is something I generally don’t do, and something I want to work on! I know there are not many of you reading this out there right now, with I’m cool with that, but I am not trying to impress anyone, I am just trying to share a little about me and about being crafty. So this long winded brain dump is to simply remind myself to not have so many expectations for my blog.
And since I think every blog post is so boring without a picture, here is one I took of my son’s Toy Story Legos, I was trying to get all fancy with my new DSLR. I actually think the pic is quite endearing.
Happy Quilting,
Rachel
