Time to baste ...

With all of the work that I've put into the Celebrate Spring! piece, it's starting to become slightly distorted.   So, I decided today that I'd take it down and load it onto the HQ-16 to baste it.  I'll use Vanish, a water-soluble thread on top, and regular thread in the bobbin.  I'll engage the stitch regulator, and set the stitch length to about 5 or 6.

Speech postponed ...

Found out a little while ago that my speech tonight has been postponed to later in the month.  The snow is really coming down out there ... eeek!

Saturday Morning Snow ...

Here's what our patio looked like on Saturday morning when we woke up.  Luckily hubby didn't have to be at work 'til 11:30.  So he went out around 9 a.m. to plow out the driveway, and still had time to come in, relax and enjoy some orange rolls for breakfast before having to get ready to go to work.

Trees & Snow ...

We tried to get out of the house EARLY today to get the grocery shopping out of the way before the snow storm hit.  As it turned out we didn't end up leaving the house 'til around 10:45, and then we had to stop at Mom's office before we could hit the stores.  We did farely well at CVS, and pretty good at Meijer (29% savings).  We couldn't find the items at Walgreens that were on the list (bummer).  And we did make a quick stop at Burger King for lunch.  By the time we left Meijer, the snow was starting to fall.  Within an hour of us getting home the first plow was coming up the road.  I'd say we made it home at a perfect time.  We had a good dinner and occasionally looked out the window to see the storm.  Around midnight the lights flickered a couple of times, enough to shut down the computers in the office and my sewing machine (uggh).  All in all a busy day. 

Here are the trees in my Celebrate Spring! piece ... Some have just a thin, thin, thin layer of poly batting.  Others have a layer (or 2) of cotton batting.

Nickels in Red??

Of course this month's nickel swap color is Red. 

And more work has been done on my Celebrate Spring! piece.  Oops!  Guess you have to look at it upside down! :)

Tree Trunk ...

After working on my speech again for most of the day, I finally had a little time to sneak into the quilt room to work on my Celebrate Spring! piece. I finished the flowers, so now I wanted to work on the tree trunk. I picked out a brown Isacord, and decided to do some small stippling. But, I guess I was more tired than I thought (it had gotten late), so my stippling wasn't so small. And on top of it, I was kind of moving in a vertical direction with the stitching. I had placed one layer of extra-thin poly batting under the tree trunk, so I started getting some texture. But the amount of texture was really unbelievable, it actually felt bumpy. At first I wasn't sure about it - but I stepped back and looked at it from a distance, and boy does it look neat. I tried to take a picture - but it's really not capturing just how cool it is.