Birthday Blogging

Melissa was here last week which was really nice. We celebrated our birthdays together; Chris had a party at his house and it was a lot of fun. He has a friend who has Rock Band; they set it up and the real highlight of the evening was Siobhan singing the Beastie Boys Sabotage. It was so funny! Melissa has video of it and I want her to send it to me and I'll see if I can post it somehow.Chris invited a few people that I knew, and Sio asked Holly from work. Joan was in Alaska so they didn't ask her.It really was a fun party and I haven't been to a party in a long time. We didn't leave til 2, and with the time change it really was 3, and then we had to get up kind of early yesterday to take Melissa to the airport

Carla and Jimmy had their play on Friday and Saturday night, this is their second weekend. Melissa, who had spent a couple days with a friend in St Louis, met us at the theater early and we went to dinner at a Thai restaurant about a block away. The play was fun, too; Carla and Jimmy and the rest of the actors/actresses who are involved with them are so enthusiastic. I helped with some of the costuming. They were alright as far as costumes go, but kind of uninteresting. But they were perfect for the production and I understand they have to go pretty cheap. There was an opening act called the Puppet Bike which was kind of crazy but still ok.

Melissa helped me figure out how to do the border on my shawl. I didn't do the miter right, it doesn't look too bad, but I'll do better on the next one. I used a plain green yarn that Siobhan left here. I wish I had made it a bit bigger, but I didn't have a long enough circular needle. I'm going to buy a longer one at Hobby Lobby and maybe make another one.

The kids got me a new free motion foot for my machine, a spool rack for my thread, and the Quilters Design Wizard, which is just really cool. There are 200 blocks and 3000 fabrics, plus free downloads for more on the website. I played with it all last night, but the files aren't .jpg's, so I just took pics of the computer screen to show the program. What I really like about it is that you can look for fabrics by color or by type. And the math is almost eliminated; I can figure out what size I want to make it, choose blocks, border and fabrics, and it will come up with yardages and a guide for both rotary cutting and templates. I am going to design and make a baby quilt in the next couple of days for my Etsy store. It works for scrap quilts too.