I've been productive

I was so excited to post today, actually I could have posted sooner but Little Sister got sick this week. She's been running a fever for the last 2 days. Hopefully we have seen the worst of it. Yesterday evening her fever hit 103.5F! Of course I panicked and called the Dr. I got the after hours answering service and the Dr called me back within 5 minutes, which was great (I've had other Dr's that would take forever to call back.) Basically she told me not to worry, toddlers apparently tend to run fevers a lot higher than adults (up to 104-105) and still be ok. That seems a little high to me but I was reassured nonetheless. She gave me some instructions on alternating Tylenol and Motrin. After a nice bath my daughter went to bed with a much lower fever. I was relieved! Today she has woken up a little warm but in a much better mood than she was in yesterday.

This morning one of our toilets started bubbling! Yikes I have no idea what that means! All I know is we have a septic tank and I don't want any problems! My husband thinks we just have a clogged vent. Or maybe something to do with all the rain we've gotten, he thinks the lines might just be water logged (for lack of a better description.)

So anyway I've been thinking all week long about what to post and believe me, I came up with plenty of ideas. I better save some for future posts or I might run out of things to post!

First an update on my DQS6 quilt. I need to get an updated picture because the one below is a bit old.
The good news: I have finished all the quilting around my shapes and now need to do the background quilting. The bad news: Somehow, (I have no idea how) I got a mystery stain on my quilt top! It's like a black grease stain. One minute I'm quilting away and the next thing I know... wham a stain on my quilt! I was so mad when I saw it, but try as I might I could not locate the culprit of said stain. It pretty much hindered my progress as I tried to figure out a way to deal with the stain. The solution: Luckily my little crafty brain has come up with the perfect solution. I won't post my solution until I get a current picture (so you can see the problem) so stay tuned and you too may be able to one day save a quilt!

The other thing that has kept me busy this week is that I have been painting the trim in my kitchen! We actually never did it when we moved in about 1 year ago. Lately it's really been bugging me. Especially the laundry room door. It was disgusting, and no amount of wiping and cleaning it made a difference.

Before: Super dingy

After: Bright and cheery

Well I had a nice little tutorial all made up with tips on door painting... apparently it didn't save! Pooh! I could have sworn it saved, I'll have to search my hard drive for it. It's not that hard to repaint your trim or doors and it makes a world of a difference! So check back later in the week!

One more thing! Check back later in the week for a great quilting tip and my first giveaway!!!

Turning over a new leaf

... or at least try to.

After thoroughly enjoying blogs of such high caliber as Lolly Chops, Don't Look Now, and oh fransson, to name a few I have decided that I really need to work harder on my blog. I would love to have a new post every week and share some things with you. So I have decided to have a designated day and time for me to work on my blog. I think for now I will pick Friday mornings for a post. I think I'll even set up an alarm reminder on my phone *goes off to find phone* OK an alarm is now set for every Friday morning!

So rather than having a bunch of random things to post (oh don't worry I'm sure there will be plenty of that as well) I've decided that I'm going to focus on giving my house a little more oompf and making it feel more like a home. I've got a list about a mile long of simple things I want to do to just make this 15 year old house a little more cohesive. So join me on this little adventure and maybe you will learn something along the way (or not).

Petit

Doll quilt progress

I have now officially started on my DQS6 project. I hope my partner likes what I have picked out! I pulled all of the fabrics from my stash. I honestly was hoping to use up more of the stash. I have like 6 yards of the butterfly fabric and as you can see I only used a tiny bit. 2 4"x4" squares to be exact!

I'm modifying a pattern called "Bandana beauty" from the "Easy Quilts" fall 2008 issue. It's the center panel reduced by 50%.
This is the preliminary layout on some off white fabric. All of the colors were pulled from the butterfly fabrics and are deep and vibrant (sorry for the poor lighting.) I'm not sure I like the polka dots. The colors are perfect but I think it gets lost in the layout, not enough of a punch. What do you think? Maybe I'll just have to take a better picture tomorrow during the day in some natural light.

My other thought was to swap out the polka dots to this other pink fabric:

I'd love your opinion!