Feeling Productive

So I took all my quilt pictures...be ready for a feast of the eyes!

This is the back for my puzzler quilt. I still have to sew all of the blocks together, but I LOVE this quilt. The colors are amazing.

The fabric for the back is a purple with bats on it...how perfect. It looks more blue in the picture, but it is purple in real life.

The rain boots were too cute and perfect for the back of this kids quilt.

This is what I originally bought for the back of this quilt...it doesn't really go with it, but the fabric was beautiful.

Then I came home with this (kind of on accident...I was hoping there was enough for the back of my puzzler quilt) and realized it worked MUCH better with this quilt.

This is the back of my black, white, and red quilt that I just got back from the quilter. It is my favorite quilt that I have made. And the back just cracks me up.

Here is the front of the quilt. Almost as amazing as the back. :)

This is the fabric that I bought "just because". I don't really have plans for any of it, but I'm sure whatever it becomes it will be amazing.

This is the back for a charm quilt that I haven't started....bold move I know.

I can't believe how well this fits with my winding ways quilt.

I can't wait to get all of these quilts done! Even after getting all of these done I will still have five tops done, plus all of the projects that are in the process of being finished. I was pretty excited to find so many perfect backs at such a good deal. It was a Christmas miracle!

Package This

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this, but in case I didn't we got rid of our cable! We have been without cable (and our house phone...since only my mom and the ADN called us we decided it was time for it to go too) for almost two weeks now and it is awesome. We bought an amplified antenna and I get channel 2, so all is good. And we are saving TONS of money (about $70/month) which also makes me happy. Cable was just such a waste. I never watched it, and when I did I got sucked into things that I'm pretty sure made me dumber. And GCI is such a rip-off with all of their stupid packages and bundles. So we said so long to that. Between netflix and all of our DVDs we have plenty of things to watch.

On another note, I have been buying a ridiculous amount of fabric lately. All the shops are having their after-Christmas sales and fabric is 40-70% off. So I bought backs for 6 different quilts and then some other fabric that I'm not sure what I will do with but I needed it. I will post pictures of the quilts with their respective backs soon. Today my goal is to clean up my mess of a craft room. It is seriously out of control. I'm not sure what happened, but it looks like a hurricane hit it. Hopefully by the end of the day it will be useable again.

Lazy Saturday

This morning Weston and a group of his friends left for a three day long ski trip. They are skiing from Hope to Cooper Landing on the Resurrection Pass. Three days is a bit too long for me to be outside...so I'm roughing it here at home. :) And since Frito is gone it is just Maverick (mom's dog....known to Craig as Emerson for some reason) and me. And he loves to nap as much as me. SO....we haven't been getting too much done.

I did cut two quilt tops out while at finishing class this morning. So hopefully I will get some sewing and cleaning done tomorrow. Today I have been enjoying the first season of 30 Rock. LOVE it!

That's so Blu

Weston has been wanting a blu-ray player for a while now. Whenever we go to Costco he spends forever looking at all the different sound system and blu-ray set ups...it has been driving me crazy. I don't care about getting a blu-ray. They are expensive, I can't see that well anyway, and I'm not sure that it makes THAT much of a difference. Weston had finally picked one out the last time we were at Costco (the sony sound surround sound system that has the blu-ray with it...a steal at only $700) so he was determined to drive me so crazy that I told him to just go buy it and leave me alone. That is always his plan. We were dog walking and he kept talking about all the things he learned about blu-ray players on the internet. "I don't think we are going to make it to the end of the year without buying a blu-ray player" I told Frito. Apparently we weren't going to make it to the end of the day. We went to Diamond Costco....but they were sold out. I told Weston we should run to the other Costco just to check. It was very traffic-y and we were on a time crunch (Weston had to give a tour at work at 6:30 it was now 5:50) but we were determined....or rather he was determined. We didn't see it. Weston had given up hope. And now he was pouty and wasn't going to even look if he wanted a different one. But I had not yet given up hope. I didn't want to hear about how cool these things were on another dog walk....I had to come home with one. And hiding in the corner...under another brand was the system we wanted. One box. I grabbed a cart and saved Christmas.

Surprisingly, I can actually tell that it makes our regular DVDs better. We also bought the Dark Knight on blu-ray and it is amazing. I hadn't seen it, but it was better quality that you get at the theater. And now I don't have to hear about how badly we need one anymore.....hopefully they don't come out with anything better anytime soon.

Holiday Break Day One

Whoo hoo! When I walked out of school yesterday at 10:30 I felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I don't have to go back to school until January 5th. Amazing. The only thing that is a bummer is that I am sick. Of course I would get sick on my break....but I will beat this over the weekend and be back to 100% in time to enjoy my break!

So this last week Weston and I watched the movie The Happening. I was pretty excited to see it as it had a lot of hype as it was the first move by M. Night Shafhngnkmfa (insert correct spelling there) that was rated "R". Well...it should have been called "Nothing is Happening". The movie was SO boring. You never really find out what is causing it...there is speculation, but no conclusion. The characters aren't very developed. The plot doesn't ever go anywhere. Lame. I was mad I lost 90 mins of my life watching it. So take it off of your netflix queue unless you like to be bored.

On the crafting front...I was cruising along on my dad's second slipper when I got a phone call from Weston. "I'm going to leave the house just the way I found it so you can see what happened." Not a good sign. I get home and the house is a mess. There are couch cushions on the floor, my yarn basket was ripped into. Yarn was everywhere. Frito had not only tangled up the yarn for my dad's slipper, he had decided that he wanted to chew on the needles and destroy them. Really? Of course he had to do that. So now I'm going to try and pick up the stitches, but odds are I will have to start over. Good thing my parents are out of town for Christmas!

Woop Woop for the Weekend!

Last weekend was crazy. I had too much to do and I felt like I didn't get to hang out with Weston and Frito enough, which by Sunday was making me cranky. This weekend we have nothing planned. The only thing I HAVE to do is pick up some medicine and buy Frito some more dog food. WHEW! That might wipe me out. :) And then only four more days with students and it is winter break!!! Yea! So I am looking forward to my relaxing weekend.....

Insurance...

I can't remember if I blogged about it, but a while back Weston and I watched the Michael Moore movie "Sicko". Now, I am normally not a MM fan. I think that most of his documentaries don't do a good job of showing both sides of an argument and are simply meant to ruffle feathers. This one is different. This one takes a hard look at our health care system and the health care systems of other industrialized nations and shows the good and the bad of each one. Ours is riddled with problems, which anyone who has had to pay to hear that they aren't sure what is wrong with you... can attest to.

Anyway, on to my bummer of the day. Weston recently enrolled at his job for insurance. Which means I get to opt out of mine. YEA! We couldn't really afford mine....at $300/month it is a bit steep. Except for the fact that I apparently faxed in my form a day late. See, Weston signed up on 11/13 for insurance. I had 30 days to opt out....I know what you are thinking. But Sally today is only December 8th...how could you be late? Oh, well that is simple. Apparently even though Weston signed up on the 13th of November it was retroactive and the effective date was 12/1. Which means that when I faxed in my form on December 2nd I was a day too late.

And that is how I became double insured.

And poor.

Yea America.

I wish I didn't love Alaska so much, because Europe looks like a great place to live and they had a pretty cool healthcare and higher education system. Damn you Alaska for being so wonderful.....

Amazing Kitchen Wonders

This is a picture of our dinner the other night. Weston and I don't eat out that much and I've been meaning to blog about how awesome he is at putting together a wonderful meal. This night we had sausage with peppers and onions along with mashed potatoes and rice. It was wonderful. When we cook dinner Weston is usually in charge of the meat and I am in charge of the sides. Works out well.



This is what I call our bakery. My mom got this for us for our anniversary. It is BEAUTIFUL and I love it. It is a cake display with alaskan animals carved on the outside. Wonderful. Anyway...I bake a lot. So the new plan is that I can bake as much as I want as long as it will fit in the bakery. It is funny when people come over and ask if the sweets are for eating or just on display.

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. It is too warm and now super icy out which is horrible. It needs to snow at least two more feet now.

You scream! I scream!

We all scream for ice cream! I have made ice cream three different times now and it is so good it might kill you. The first time I made cookies and cream. Yum to the max. It was devoured as we had a bunch of people over and we were all hanging out by the fire. Wonderful. The second time I made mixed berry ice cream and luckily there were people over again because I realized that I don't really like things in my ice cream (except cookies and cookie dough) so I only had a little bit of that ice cream. Then last night I made just plain vanilla. Wow. It will literally stop your heart it is so rich.


In knitting news, I am knitting my dad a pair of felted slippers for Christmas. Here is a picture of one of them....they are giant. I can not wait to see how they look when they are done. It didn't take too long to knit this, so I will probably be able to finish them by the end of next week.

Promise not to rant

Ok. I don't want to get up on a soapbox, but I did want to blog about this very briefly. Over the weekend a dog was killed by a trap. A trap that was sitting in a bucket of rotting meat on a porch. In a neighborhood. Where you shouldn't be trapping things. My heart truly goes out to the family who lost their dog. I can not imagine that happening. Pretty sure I would lose my mind. I realize not everyone is a dog person, but what happened to that dog is just plain inhumane. I hope that what happened was an accident and the person will be ticketed or fined for the trap being in a CRAZY place. (It could have been a child, or another adult who got severely hurt by that.) I also hope they apologies and offer their condolences to the family who lost their dog.

Anyway, I got really worked up about this over the weekend because I made the mistake of reading the comments on the ADN website. They were so heartless and rude I could not believe it. I don't want to rant here, but I did want to say how badly I feel for the family. Losing any member of a family is a big deal...even four legged ones.