>Grandma Harbaugh’s yo-yos

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When my husbands grandmother died she had some sewing supplies.  They have since been divided among my sister-laws who sew and myself.  In the the items I chose was a small bunch of yo-yos that had been made but not sewn to anything.  So I sewed them together and framed them today I just love them so sweet and it is nice to have something from grandma, especially yo-yos.

She had a few more (3 and 1) in two different sizes which I will frame some time in the future.  Those are kind of fun as the paper template is still with one cut out from a newspaper with the date and all.

This is the entry way from my front room into my kitchen I think it goes well with the embroidery that I got from my old neighbor.

On the top shelf is the rocking horse my children used when they where just tikes but they have since out grown it so now it is a decoration.  The doll house is “The Littles” from when I was a kid.  It is a pretty cool little doll house has cast metal furniture that functions meaning drop leaf tables actually work.  This is sort of where childhood gets remembered on that shelf.  I have a few more things to put up there but I have to find them first in storage still working on that.

>Just a little bit of color…

>As most of you know we have moved recently. We had been working on remodeling the house before we moved into it and there is still plenty of work to be done. I like real bright rich colors and wall paper my husband likes paint this is the compromise. We picked red for the front room color what do you think. You can see a little bit of the color that is in the kitchen too the bright yellow.

>Moving day is near…

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So moving day happens in the next week and 1/2. Am I ready you would think I would be. But no the other house is not done but we are moving any way such is life. The garage looks a mess and there are two pod units in the yard and on and on. But in all it will be a great move closer to school and family moving back to a neighbor hood where two of our children where born. Old friends already waiting to see us. We have such a great family they have been helping us re-due our old home. All this through all kinds of family trials that you never saw on the blog that would have been TMI which are still happening. Life is good and we move forward. I am helping out at my children’s school. There is a teacher there that had a back operation recently and has had a hard time doing things. So I have been doing volunteer work helping out nothing like sitting through the same science lesson 4 times in a day but you know I am having fun and each time it is a little different depending on what the students ask. I have been enjoying that getting to know the other teachers at the school better can’t be a bad thing and it will be easier to do once the move happens. He only needs help for a few hours a day for a few months and I am having fun with it. Still leaves me time to work on projects and pack up home hoping to be able to do some big projects in the future if all goes as planned if not life must have something else in store. I am not signing off yet that will happen in the near future as our computer goes from one house to the other. May be a small break in the programing so to speak.

>Home repairs in the works

>This is what my husband, my brother-in-law (Seth), and I did on the Saturday before Easter. The colors of these primers in the photos are a half tint, so the rooms will be much darker when finished. My husband grew up in a house painted all white. The one exception was his bedroom; it was the only room painted a color (blue, about the shade of blue the bathroom is in these photos). I grew up in houses with wall paper, meaning lots of color and designs on the walls. It has always bothered me that we have lived in homes that are all one color. So, since we have to re-do our old home, we decided we would add color to the house. My husband still isn’t fond of wall paper, so we compromised; lots of color in paint. We will have white trim in all of these rooms. We have already painted the ceilings ultra pure white, much better than the dirty eggshell color that was there before. (By the way, the color you do see on the walls in the masking photos is what our tenant put up, and I hate the colors — very dirty, muddy colors.)

Masking up the house:

Kitchen.

View from front room to kitchen.

Girls’ room.

Master bedroom

Upstairs bath.

Front room (gotta love the make-do painter’s stilts. My husband wanted to buy some real ones but couldn’t find anyone who had them in stock locally).

Oops, it broke!

Kitchen.

Once again the colors on the walls right now are the primer which is a 1/2 tint to the real color. This is not the final colors of these rooms; they will be much brighter and deeper colors except the girls’ room; I don’t think dusty periwinkle will ever be very dark.

Kitchen hall washroom= sunshine yellow (gotta love the colors name). I picked this color.

Girls room = periwinkle; youngest daughter picked this color.

Master bedroom = hunter green; husband picked this color.

Upstairs bathroom = china blue; husband picked this color.

Front room = crimson red; I picked this color.

This room isn’t primed yet because it and the kitchen over lap walls because of bull nose corners, so we have to have the kitchen completely painted and masked before we can even start to paint this room. The primer for this room is gray because you do not use pink as a half tint for such a dark red color.

It looks like the Easter bunny attacked my husband’s head. It is round, like an egg, but much scarier painted.

I asked, but he said his neck didn’t hurt from where the face mask strap hit his neck. Sure looks like it hurt a ton.

>Demo

>So what have I been up to? I thought I would post more craft things. But then this project came up. Bet you could never guess what it was: demo as in demolition. Yep, I have been gutting a house for over a week now. I would show pictures, but the state in which our last tenant left the house has even me embarrassed. Well, hopefully, all that will change soon as we are putting in bamboo floors, and painting all the walls, and the list goes on and on. So I may or may not be crafty in the near future; I will defiantly be a a woman with a pry bar, though.

>A Look at Christmas

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I looked at this tree a lot while over Christmas vacation and all of it’s kissing balls lovingly made by my grandmother for all her family and friends. All the work that goes into making these for a woman of 94 years on oxygen — wow, lots of love! This isn’t even 1/3 of what she made; I took the photo after Christmas when everyone had already grabbed their new one.

This was kind of a unique Christmas for my family. We did go to California although, from a blog point of view, my readers would never have known it because I had the blog on auto publish. Meaning I typed up some things for the holidays well in advance and on the corresponding day they published.

But as for my trip, it was fairly smooth other than we had some major things happen that tilted the family, ie: two deaths three days before Christmas, and a cousin paralyzed also three days before Christmas. None of these events happened together, but all on the same day. My cousin is a young mother; long story short, her little girl needs her mommy to walk and help pay the bills. My cousin is a nurse in a prison and got hurt while trying to rescue another nurse (who just happened to be pregnant, meaning more weight than a normal person, and my cousin is petite). During a prison riot she was in a golf cart trying to pull the other woman into it to get to safety, and she, my cousin, got pulled out and hit the ground got hurt. Now she is in a lot of pain and can’t walk; any prayers for her would be greatly appreciated.

While at my Vavo’s home we sat by the phone for any news; I spent a lot of time looking at these items since they are in that room. This may sound strange, but I am glad it was Christmas; it just put an entirely different spin on things. The family was already gathering to be together, so we all got to strengthen each other and had the time to do it, too.

The pictures in this post are from my Vavo’s parlor in her home, the home I grew up in and will always think of as home and comfort. The cherubs are up all year. Peace be with you.

>Bad bad computer

>OK so I have not posted in awhile; it is my computers fault. It has this mind-of-its-own thing happening lately and wouldn’t let me see anything. The screen worked just fine; just no images could be seen, and I mean none. My desktop didn’t even show up — just a fuzzy, bluish sort of color — so my husband finally got 10 minuets and fixed it for me. Not his fault; he is so busy with work. The bummer was I had two actual days off work last week, which I never get, and I wanted to post the last two parts of my tutorial and no computer to do it on. So what did I do? Pay bills, run errands, and clean house (maybe that was a good thing because, with the job/commute and all that goes with it, I just haven’t had any time to do basic cleaning). So the three little ones and I surprised dad with a clean house. How sad is that, that something like that can be a surprise and a nice thing. Like I said, no time. I hung a few pictures that have been leaning against walls since we moved in one year ago.

Something else I discovered when my computer was working again (if you don’t keep track of the blogs you read with bloglines this will mean nothing to you) I found out while I wasn’t able to post a thing that all the blogs I read posted over 700, yep 700 and some posts, that bloglines saved for me to read, well at least look at the pretty pictures as that was way too much stuff to read; yikes!

Also during my disappearance I went to my MIL’s house to pick up some aprons that had belonged to Great-Grandma Harbaugh (30 + of them). They are not mine; they are just on loan. I will post about them more later. Trust me, you want to see them if you like aprons; such a variety of vintage and antique aprons.

>Here is what is left to do

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As you can see, lots of boxes and lots of fabric and supplies are all over my sewing room. Biggest mess is on top of that table where I work on projects. Like I said, it is nearest to the door which makes it a dumping ground. All the fabric on the table is 100% cotton; the fabric behind the door is 100% Pendleton wool mill ends. I use it, the wool, to make rugs and other such things. This isn’t stripped yet because I have about ten boxes of wool (the size of the green and blue totes in this picture) stored in my garage that is all ready to make a rug. For those who are waiting for the rest of the rug tutorial, the next installment or two will be on Saturday. I hope you have all your fabric washed and stripped, ready to sew and braid. If you click on the picture, it will take you to flickr where there are all kinds of notes on this picture.

>Progress on Studio

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I have the studio about 3/4 ths of the way straight. Too bad the last 1/4 is the worst part because that is my table where I work on most projects. It is also the closest to the door, meaning the easiest to dump things on, too. The sewing table, kids art area, and the light table are pretty much straitened up. The room is about 12 feet by 23 feet, so it is actually a pretty good-size room. Too bad the ceilings are pitched, or I could stack my boxes taller and have more floor space; oh well, better than what it was in the last house. The rug on the floor in this room used to be in the front room at my old house, now it is in my sewing room. Less traffic and less likely to get mud on it now, which is good because I don’t think I will make another that big in the near future.

>Studio Room

>My life has been so busy lately that my studio has become a dumping ground for half-done projects instead of a workable room. I have been working on getting it back into shape. See the vacuum in the back of the photo. I have lots of projects I have to get done right now, like my tutorial on making a rug and finishing that afghan repair; both need lots of room and the room is big but not when it is messy. It may not look like it from this photo, but it is an improvement. All those boxes you see are full of fabric, thread, lace, ribbon and so on. This is, of course, only half of the room; the other half I am still working on straightening.