Baking Soda Magic

This is my microfiber couch. I was ready to plunk down my $70 to have someone come out and professionally clean it, but then my mother gave me the amazing idea of trying to clean it myself. And since I clean almost everything with baking soda, I figured why not give it a try here.

What a difference! I simply wetted it with a cloth and then sprinkled baking soda on. Then with some elbow grease I rubbed it and rubbed it. And then I put it into the washing machine on gentle and the dryer on gentle. Et voila! $70 still in my pocket and a clean couch.

The photo on the left shows the original dirty couch and the one on the right shows my miracle baking soda cleaned couch. Quite a difference.

(A note to GM in Texas: I know that baking soda doesn't clean EVERYTHING! But I'm glad you found vinegar to clean up your rice pot.)

Slow Cookbook-ing

Since finishing up all my quilts last year, I decided to take a little break from sewing. Mostly this is due to my more active baby coupled with the fact that my sewing room is deep in the basement, about as far away from everything as possible.

Instead, I started reading more. And I read Francine Jay's The Joy of Less. What an unbelievable book! I would recommend it to anyone who wants to streamline their life. So I started to purge and downsize and generally question why I have so many things in my life. And one of the things that I have a few of in my life is cookbooks.

We all have them: cookbooks we like for only one recipe. Cookbooks with nice photos. Cookbooks that we got as a gift from our husband on an overnight trip to Denver about quesadillas when we really just like our standard quesadilla recipe with the cheese and salsa. Okay, he's a great guy, but maybe not the best gift giver. I am very happy with him.

So we have these cookbooks, but if we were honest with ourselves, we know that we really only use a few recipes and can chuck the rest.

Enter "Slow Cookbook-ing."

I am compiling all my favourite recipes (about 100 including 50 dessert recipes!) into one book that I will then get printed off. It is a full colour monster and I am about half done. To finish it off, I am going to write the most awesome index in the world so I can find all the recipes that I want instead of flipping through my hodge-podge cookbook with the glued-in recipes that I currently have.

It's a dream that's becoming a reality. Very slowly. Especially with the kids. But I plug away at it everyday and I'm hoping to be done sometime before my birthday in February.

Happy 30th birthday to me!

My Old, Old, Old Projects

A colour wash flip-n-stitch

I started this maybe when I was in high school. There are only two blocks finished, but I still have it and remarkably, I still like it.

This is in direct contrast to other quilt projects that have come and gone in my life. My mother pointed out that every quilt you make tends to be more beautiful than the last. I believe this to be true because our brain, the amazing machine it is, continues to change as we do new things.

As you may note from my other quilts (notably my I-Spy), I like the vibrant colours (no thank you to beige) and I also like the colour wash effect.

So this quilt is on my mind. I spend a lot of time just thinking of things as I'm doing the dishes and sitting with the baby and... I'm hoping to come back to this one again, although I'm thinking of changing the pattern a bit.

More Redwork

Nursery Rhyme block #2

Another nursery rhyme. Only 10 more!

Japanese Fans: Another New Project

Pilot Japanese Fan

Because I cannot just sit with ONE new project, I have been experimenting with another. This is a form of "stack and whack"which is a method of cutting out an identical part of the fabric pattern to make a kaleidoscope patter. (The right is an example I got from the internet.)

Well, I didn't want to do EXACTLY that. I wanted to vary the pieces just slightly so I could have a different effect. But I'm not 100% pleased with this block. You see, the pattern slowly moves down the geisha's body. And I am not really interested in looking at the blocks that don't contain a geisha's face.

So I'm going to do another pilot block.

PS This fabric, I have had since I was in high school. How is it that I acquired 2 meters of fabric which I have never used until now. And only now, am I using it because I am refusing to buy new fabric. This falls under what I said before about how new stuff is always better than old stuff.

Redwork Nursery Rhymes

Redwork

This is a first. I don't really have any projects on the go.

Okay, that's somewhat a lie considering that I don't believe in sitting still and I am notorious for neglecting my housework to do my various projects. These days, this includes dealing with all the photos since I got married 9 years ago, editing and restructuring a YA book I wrote in 2005 and sorting through my junk in the basement.

For sewing, I am working on a redwork project. Redwork is basically embroidery done entirely in red. This comes from a time when there was only one colour of cotton thread which was... wait for it... red. (Other threads were made from silk and much more costly.)

These are all nursery rhymes. I will have 12 of them eventually, but right now, I have one.

Regina Quilt Show -- I Won! I Can't Believe It!

My two ribbons and me. Maybe I should have done something
more with my hair?

This year, I decided to enter four quilts into the Regina Quilt Show. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but my I Spy quilt placed third in its category and won over all for the best use of colour!

I got two fancy ribbons which the kids oohed and aahed over. Then there was general feed back on all of my quilts (yes, they noticed the red wine stain on my citrus quilt and it was noted on the sheet).

The only thing that really bothered me was the placement of my citrus quilt which was put in the darkest corner of the show. Boo.

The flash makes the citrus quilt a bit brighter, but the
lighting in this corner was terrible!

This ribbon for best use of colour really makes me think about things. In a previous post, I commented that I felt debilitated by colour and as a result tend to pick colours that I know will work. I accept that black works with brown because Coco Chanel did it sixty years ago (or more!), but without Coco, I would never try something so radical.

But then I win this award. Out of the hundreds of entries, I got the one for best use of colour. I don't quite know what to think.

(I also know that my citrus quilt was also in the running for the colour category because they had marked both sheets with "*colour." I really don't know what to think now. My quilts were competing with each other for colour!)