Happy Halloween, shriek! Don't look, Lynz! CSI-Stairwell, again....

Trick! or Treat?

I'm out of yellow crime scene tape, thank goodness we still had chalk. ;) It was a busy night for those boy cats, apparently. Thankfully, dragging these in through one cat door and up a half of flight of stairs wore them out before they actually got them into the house. 2 dead rats and a shrew on the garage steps. Dang. Busy, busy. And so lovely to wake up to on Halloween morning! I know the girl cats are innocent because they are locked in the bedroom with us at night, they are not allowed out after dark. So this is a boy thing.

I wouldn't really say that it's becoming a habit, but it has happened before. Last time it was just mice. The boys have expanded their horizons, I guess.

Sammie, Beeswax and Murphy are very good hunters and would-be providers. Ugh. lol It's that time of year, though, when the rodent population seems very large, but I think it's dwindling as we speak. :)

I had a little helper this week, as I was making little quilt sandwiches.

The best place to play is where Mom is trying to get something done.

And she can't mind when you're THIS adorable. Gravey can go from zero to 60 in 2 seconds! I did get 2 of these sandwiches made, though, now I just need to quilt and bind them so I can give one to my Mum and keep the other on the sofa for me to use when I'm cold, which is pretty much always.

But that does tend to take it out of a girl. Plays hard, sleeps hard. She's a really good girl, though, stays close to the house and doesn't think that being outside is really all that exciting. That might have something to do with being abandoned at that cemetery when she was about 4 months old, bless her little heart.

She and Nosey Parker are really good sleeping/grooming buddies, now. They groom and tussle on the bed for about 30 minutes every night and then sleep together there, smashed up against me and try to cook me and then shove me right out. I love it. lol They're good little buddies for me, too.

Happy Halloween, people! Hope your morning isn't as gruesome as ours!

Ready for Breakfast! ....and now I can show you....

Parker woke up hungry. Note to self- bleach the towels, geeze. lol You wouldn't want to lie on the countertop without a towel, though, it's COLD. I'm actually going to quilt a small cover for that island, I have some Folklorica fabric just for that purpose!

Anyhoo, these 2 mug rugs were just delivered to 2 girlfriends, so now I can show you! One side is "normal" and the back refers to funny things that happened during our week together. I drove down to visit Jennifer and help her arrange her newly remodeled kitchen and Lisa drove up from Louisiana, we had a marvelous time and so many laughs!

My friend Jennifer is eating a lot of apples lately, so she got a cute apple fabric for her mug rug. She is normally a very lady-like person. She sneezed one day, while she driving. Unfortunately, she had a mouthful of chocolate/toffee popcorn at the time and her hands were occupied and she spewed bits of popcorn all over her dash. Sounds gross but her reaction to it was priceless. A whole lot of "OMG, OMG! I can't believe I did that, I couldn't help it!!" And with 2 witnesses, no less! So the back of her mug rug says "Achooo" with a spray coming out. I wish now I'd spelled it "Ach...ewwww, but I wanted to use the popcorn shaped "ooo's", to tie it all together.

On the apple, the little reflection thing is actually a silver tag that says "made with love". Awww! I do love her, she's like the sister I never had and just a beautiful person, inside and out, even when she spews bits of masticated, ground up food all over the inside of her car. Into the sun. Where it really showed up great! lol Bwahahaha. We'll never let her forget that, will we, Lisa?

Lisa is a big coffee addict, so she got a coffee theme fabric and I just had to use skulls and ladybugs together because it makes me laugh, just like Lisa makes me laugh all the time. She has the funniest, drollest sense of humor and acts out her little stories and makes funny faces and is just so fun to be around. Even when she's mad, she's funny. And sarcastic. I just love her. She's a Cajun girl and has the great accent to prove it. Her little tag is in the saucer. I'd like for her to be my other sister. :)

She was telling us about her very comfy relationship with her hubby. How they are soooo casual and that they don't even bother to take their socks off anymore when they ... you know, have sex! Well, we had more fun with that! And then she told us she wears dark socks! AND, they have no curtains, the bedroom faces the bayou. So we're ribbing her about her sock-clad feet waving around in the air and how fishermen in the bayou are probably laughing their butts off while watching this from the snake-infested swamp. So the back of her mug rug is red with a hot tub on it, 2 sock-clad legs sticking up in the air and a tiny bit of a head with a snorkel sticking out of the water. They just bought a hot tub and I thought that would make it easier to explain the legs than if I had made a bed! SEE how nice I am?

But what's REALLY funny is- her mother was visiting when she received the mug rug in the mail. Her hubby carried it in and she opened it in front of them both and then had to explain the back. ROFLMAO

Lisa and Jennifer. This was last year when we went on a girls-only road trip to FL, had the best time ever! If I had known about mug rugs then, there's no telling what I could have blackmailed them with!

New swaps to sneak a peek at, kitter cats and poached eggs, too!

I haven't shown you too much of Gravey, she's not as photogenic as Nosey Parker and I never seem to have a camera handy when she's doing something cute. ! They are getting along really well, though, playing, sleeping, exploring, all together but separately sometimes, too.

I love these kind of shots, where she's puzzling over something, it's such a cute look!

We are very pleased at how NP has accepted her. They sleep slammed up against me and try to cook me every night. It's great when I'm first in bed and cold, but dang, they're hot little heaters! I wake up around 2 AM just melting.

I'm in the Mini QT swap again and this time the theme is "houses". I have a really fun partner, Fun and Comfort Quilts, a really talented lady named Karen, and she and I like the same kind of whimsical, fun stuff, fortunately! I can't show you much, but here is a peek at part of what will be in it. The whole thing is only 12" square, max. This is just a tiny part of that.

And I'm in the last placemat swap that Sarah is going to run. I did the last one, too, remember the beach houses on stilts? Well, this time, my partner, Julie, and I are doing liberated (wonky) placemats using Kaffe Fassett fabrics, which are the colored fabrics in this photo.

This is just a sneak of one side, I'm making the other side today.

It's going to be appliqued, I think.

I've done a few other things this last week, too, but I can't show you just yet. Mysterious, huh? Not a really big deal, though, it's nothing major, just a couple of surprises in the mail.

And I don't think I showed my new egg poachers- little silicon cups that float in boiling water, you cover it so they steam from the top, too and then you pop them out and voila! Poached eggs, aren't they cute?

Blurry shot, sorry, it's not your eyes! I like the little dome of egg that you get. I found the cups at Bed, Bath and Beyond, on sale for $6 for the set of 2. What a great price! We love poached eggs.

I received the most wonderful mug rug in our swap!

I am so lucky! I received the most beautiful, involved, detailed mug rug from my friend Angela, Tweedledee Designs, the other day! Not only did she send me an outstanding mug rug, she also sent a stack of beautiful Hawaiian fabrics, 2 drink recipe cards trimmed with cute lime ribbon (I love limes, how did she know?) and a very sweet note. The girl has wonderful handwriting too, something no one will ever accuse me of. lol

Looks great, doesn't it? BUT WAIT, there's more to show you! See the orange striped towel on the left side? It has a secret! I love secrets!

There's a person in shorts, laying half under a multi-colored umbrella, with flip flops and abook, on a cute towel. Star fish and frothy bubbles at the beautiful waters edge. Another umbrella to his right and then one to his left. If you lift up the towel.....

...you'll see NOSEY PARKER!!!!! She would LOOOOOVE the beach! Biggest litter box in the whole world, if you asked her! Easy to dig in, pirate treasure to be exposed and brought home to Mommy, etc.... Seriously cute, isn't it?

And here it is with my new coffee mug- it says SUNSHINE all over it! How perfect is that for the beach? Angela did such a good job on this. Not just in the construction of it, but in the "what would she like, really like, that says I took the time to find out about you and then went that extra mile to make it for you so that you would feel really special?" THAT is what Angela did! And by so doing, she touched my heart and I'll never forget it! Thank you, sweetie, for making this first mug rug swap a HUGE success for me!

Adding my cat to it- sheer genius, if you ask me! I've gotten 3 things now that have NP included or featured and I will treasure them all forEVER!

I can't get over what nice friends I have. I am so lucky.

Pincushion Swap- what I made and sent....

Here is the whole package that I sent to my friend Ruth in the Scrappy Pincushion Swap. I was so lucky to get her as my partner to make for because as soon I saw that I got her, I knew I was going to make something that had a Wizard of Oz theme to it. She is a big fan of Wizard of Oz and that made it so easy for me! The problem was in the sneak peeks- I could only show small bits of the house, I couldn't show the yellow brick road, or the legs or the witch's hat pin (it's on the back) or any of that dead-giveaway stuff! If Ruth had seen any of that, she's have KNOWN it was for her, as it was she seemed very confidant that she was getting it. (Of course, Ruth sparted darn near every quilt in the DQS9 round, too, so maybe she just likes everything!) LOL

Because I wanted to show it off a bit and also because it is so much fun teasing certain people, I enlisted the help of her "twin", QuiltinKimmie in a prank. Kimmie is a huge Oz fan, too, so this could work! I pretended to send the pincushion to Kimmie and I emailed her photos to post to her Flickrstream as if she had gotten it in the mail. Because Ruthie was a swap mama in that swap, I knew that she had access to info that would show that Kimmie and I shouldn't have been partnered up, so we had to get 2 of the swap mamas involved in our cover up and a few friends were in on the prank, too.

(Ruth took the following outstanding photos, after she actually got it.)


Ruthie fell for it- hook, line and sinker! Yay! While she didn't get as crabby as I had hoped, Kimmie assured me that that is just because Ruth is a fine, kind lady, not a big crybaby like me. lol




You can make out the top of the hat pin in this one....



Kimmie posted photos like this bad one below- decoy photos to make Ruth think that she wasn't getting this pincushion and we hoped that she would be jealous and pouty. :) I even wrote a card to Kimmie, so it would look really authentic and on the up-and-up. *snork* The black and red fabrics weren't actually part of the swap, they just look like something Kimmie would have gotten from a real partner. So, on Saturday Kimmie posted that she rec'd all this. On Monday, it actually showed up at Ruth's house, 2 days before her birthday, she was 29. Again. :) So Ruth really only "suffered" for 48 hours.


The pincushion sits in a green oatmeal glass custard cup and all the felt is wool. The yellow brick road is embroidered and everything is handstitched. I made the witch's legs by taking skinny chenille stems and wrapping them with embroidery floss, red for the shoes and black/white for the stockings. Then I dipped the shoes in white glue and red glitter, let that dry and then varnished them so the glitter wouldn't ever come off. By indenting the base of the pincushion with a needle and thread in the middle, it made the perfect place for the legs to nestle in. The pins were made with plastic beads and I thought they added a bit of Munchkinland weirdness to it. The little bushes are unraveled perle cotton and fray check, on a pin. For a size reference, the posts holding up the porch are toothpicks, cut way down.

I also made her a Dorothy faerie and sent her a pink chair pincushion that I had made a long time ago. Ruth was making something similar and I wanted her to see this style, too.

This was a fun pincushion to make because I knew my partner would appreciate it and love it, it's just so HER. And big thanks to Kimmie for all her help in pranking Ruth, she sold the story like a professional actress!