Holy Tornado & Holy Snowstorm!

About a week ago, a small tornado came through our neighborhood, less than a 1/4 mile from our house.  The winds toppled a giant of a pine tree in our front yard.  The tree blocked off our driveway for several hours and thankfully missed our neighbor’s house by a measly 5 feet.  In the photo below you can get a sense that the rootball was taller than my minivan!   I told the kids instead of joining the pool this year, we’ll just pour some concrete in that hole and have our own swimming pool.  A few years ago another tornado blasted right through our backyard, ripping out nearly all the trees and knocking two of them on our roof.  Tornadoes?  An earthquake?  Now another snowstorm?  Seriously.  I am done with crazy weather!

We are expecting 6-10 inches of snow today.  I spent last night after the kids went to bed putting a new quilt on the longarm frame ready to be quilted today in daylight.  I’m trying a few new things this time.  Gray thread instead of white.  I fooled around with the tension a little after watching a few videos on You Tube. (Thank you, Mary, for that advice!  I learned so much in just a few minutes!)  And this time I am going to try basting the quilt first with the machine to avoid any tucks on the back, which happened with the most recent quilt I had on there.   I didn’t notice the tuck until I’d taken it off the frame, and while it was small and pretty insignificant, I don’t want that to happen again!

This quilt is quite large by my standards, 70” x 70”, which would have been doable on my domestic machine, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed the process.  I’m going to be quilting swirls all over this one to practice because I will be quilting a friend’s quilt very soon and I want to have my swirls lookin’ good!

As soon as I get this quilt done, I’ll be moving on to making a baby quilt and making something for the Pantone 2014 Challenge.  I wasn’t sure I’d have the time, but since purple is my all time favorite color, I decided this was my chance to make something awesomely purple, so I picked this pillow cover pattern by Jen Kingwell in the February issue of American Patchwork and Quilting.

I ordered two different solids in orchid that were supposed to arrive today via USPS (probably more like Wednesday at this point with the 4 inches of snow already on the ground, but I’m still holding out hope the package miraculously arrives in my mailbox this afternoon) and I’ll use that as my starting point for picking the rest of the fabrics. 

So far I picked out a few “orchids” from my stash, but I really need the solid before I commit to a shade.  I’m really partial to the purple in the Denyse Schmidt fabric, but I don’t have a lot in that color, so I’ll probably go with the lighter color so I have more fabrics to choose from.  But after looking at this photo on my computer monitor, maybe all the colors look good together.  Are you doing the challenge?

Strangely enough, I realized the other day that I painted our downstairs bathroom orchid last month. 

I’ll tell ya, it’s difficult to get a good photo of a bathroom without the paint or mirror reflecting the light.  This is the very photogenic corner of the back wall.  You can see part of the lovely owl picture my husband reluctantly put up and endures looking at every day.  The paint color is called “flower market” and is a mistint I picked up at Lowes.  You now, picking paint used to be a huge headache for me, but lately I’ve just been buying mistints off the shelf.  No more agonizing over the right shade, and you can’t beat the price!

Have a great day!