Fireflies

Now that it is hot out, the fireflies have emerged and there is nothing quite like sitting on a porch trying to guess where one might pop up next. It's one of my favorite things about summer. 

But even after being out in the Midwest for 5 years, they still seem mysterious to me. I don't actually know tons about these little critters, but I discovered this fun firefly website called http://www.firefly.org/ and learned some new things about fireflies. The most fun facts are:

• Fireflies produce "cold light" which I guess means that no heat is emitted when they light up. This means they emit 100% of light. (as far as I know no man made light can do that)
• You should never feed fireflies to reptiles (I guess they can poison them).
• And fireflies are disappearing around the world. Never would have thought that if you look outside our window.

One of these day's I'll get brave enough to try and catch one. But that might be a while. As pretty as they are, they still kind of creep me out.

Hot Cross Quilt

So I took a break from the larger quilt I'm working on (mainly because I ran out of fabric and didn't have enough money in my budget to get more fabric this month) and finished a smaller quilt that I had been wanting to try for a while.

This is a 30 inch square quilt and I really liked how intentionally scrappy it looks. I also love the way the blues and whites played off each other.

The pattern is called "Hot Cross Schnibbles Charm Pack" and is intended to be used with what's called Charm Packs (prepackaged 5inch fabric squares). I couldn't find any charm packs I liked so I just collected a bunch of blue and white fabric and cut them into 5 inch squares which are the size of the squares in the charm packs and used those.

I loved how fast this quilt came together and I'll probably keep this pattern around for a while.

The other fun part was I ran across an easy way to do quilt binding. It was so much easier than what I had been doing and it looks much nicer. You can find the instructions on how to do this easy binding here: http://heatherbailey.typepad.com/photos/continuous_quiltbinding

Quilt Experiment

One of the goals I have for this year is to complete projects that have been sitting around in my closet. This is one such project.

I began this quilt about two years ago after being inspired by some fabric I found (the outlining multi-color squares in the middle). This ended up being a 5' x 4' size quilt and everything from cotton, to silk, to wool was used in making this quilt.

I didn't really have an overall plan for the quilt nor did I have a pattern. Having no pattern proved harder than I thought. At almost every stage I ended up spending hours staring at the quilt thinking, "what's next"? I also found it harder to actually create what I was seeing in my head.

Moral of the story: I don't think I'll ever not work off a pattern again. Or at least, I think I'll wait for a year or two before trying that again.

But it's finally done and I think I'm happy with the overall result. If anything, I'm super excited about how the colors worked together and that I got my corners so straight.

and the winners are...

Yup, it's that time of year again when Beloit puts out it's well tried and true "Mindset List for the Class of 2007". Below you will find my favorites!

• Iraq has always been a problem.
• Paul Newman has always made salad dressing.
• An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission.
• Gas has always been unleaded.
• They would never leave their calling card on someone’s desk.
• Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.
• They have never seen a First Lady in a fur coat.
• They have been "dissing"and "burning" things all their lives.

-taken from "Mindset list for the class of 2007", click link for full list.

Do things really change this quickly?