Disaster waiting to happen- with your iron!

 I don't usually give any cleaning advice, like I don't give cooking advice, since I don't feel qualified, LOL, but I had to pass this along- beware of what is lurking in your iron!

I was pressing something when this mark appeared out of nowhere, on the muslin that I have lying on the towel that is my current ironing board cover.  Feeble, I know, but it works.  

What the heck is that mark?  That is what it looked like after I touched it.  It's like soot, but it's not soot.  It's LINT!  Soft, fluffy lint and the only place it could have come from is ..... that iron!

 See all that, in between the sole and body?  Horrors!  It must come out!  

Obviously, I never look in there. 

 It's not real noticeable, unless you're looking down the crack.

 Here's what I used- paintbrush was a dud, the chenille stem worked great and the canned air finished it off nicely. 

I got more marks on the muslin while doing this, too, which made me mad because I was being really careful.  That stuff is sneaky, it spreads like crazy (don't sneeze!) and makes stains that are darn near impossible to get out.  A Tide pen is handy if you do have a disaster, though.

 

I strongly encourage all you quilters to check your iron because if it's happening in mine, it will happen in anyone's.  Good luck, be careful!  Oh, P.S.- this stuff accumulates inside your sewing machine, too and can and will fall out at THE most inopportune moments, while you are sewing on something white!  Another good reason to keep your machine maintained and cleaned and oiled.  :)

Power gli....gli....glitch..... Grrrrr.

We lost power on Thursday morning, about 5 minutes after I gave my husband an anniversary card that said "Come rain or come shine, we'll be doing fine...as long as we have each other! (And electricity!!)" Geez! We were laughing ourselves silly until it came back on and we discovered that we had lost a TV, a satellite receiver, a DVD/VCR combo and a clock and a $10 lightbulb, from 3 different rooms. And it's all the same stuff we lost 20 months ago when Ike came whipping through and wreaking havoc. We stopped laughing for a while, it wasn't funny any more. Well, he fixed the DVD/VCR combo. We bought a new clock. (It didn't work, we had to return it, another trip to WalMart, 20+ miles away.) We ran all over trying to find a part for the TV- the capacitor blew out- we had to order one online. The satellite receiver is being replaced no charge. We have had no TV since Wed night. We are missing the last 2 episodes of Survivor, which is just MEAN. A friend is recording it for me, though, thank you LIZ!!!!!

So, since we're leaving on vacation on Wed, we have to get as much of this stuff fixed before then AND clean the house and make sure everything is in order for our housesitter to stay here in comfort while we're gone. Sheesh, nothing is ever easy. The lawnmower broke, the parts place was closed, we're having monsoon rain storms, and the list goes on and on and time is of the essence!

To distract myself a little, I've played this week with the layouts for both sides of my hexagon quilt.

This side is mostly black. I arranged the mixed hexies to be somewhat orderly, by color, either greens or blues or reds, etc. I spent so much time on the floor getting up, squatting, bending, etc that I could barely move without moaning for 2 days afterward, man I'm out of shape!

This side is bright hexagons with mixed blacks and whites interspersed. I arranged this side so the warms are on one side and cools on the other, but not divided straight up and down, a little looser than that. I locked the cats out of the sewing area so I didn't have to worry about them scrambling up my layouts, this took HOURS and hours to perfect, believe it or not. Anyway, they're all stacked, numbered and put up safely until I can sew all 430 triangles together!

And here are 9 mini 3.5" quilt blocks for a swap I'm in. The challenge was black and white and one other color, I picked yellow. So I made wonky liberated stars and I think they look like nice little suns. I'll send 8 of them away and get back 8, each one black and white and one other color. Then we'll all assemble our mini blocks and make mini quilts!

I also made a mini quilt for a new friend in CA, I'll show you that in another entry, it came out pretty cute, I think.

I just can't have anything nice anymore!

About 25 years ago, my husband gave me the coolest birthday present- basket weaving lessons. I loved them, learned all the basics and all about different supplies and then I bought some books and branched out on my own. This basket was the hardest one I ever made. I had to mold the spokes to the handles and then let them dry in order to form the nice round, square shape. I think it's called a Margaret Basket, but I'm not positive anymore. It looked great, I dyed it green after it was all done and it served us well for over 20 years until some big doofus stuck his big fat foot thru it!

It was partially my fault, I left it on the floor and it was dark. I knew it was there, but I guess he didn't. It still worked, the holes were mostly on the sides, but it was bothering me and he felt awful about it. So I fixed it! I had a lot of twill tape in stock so I wove that thru the bad spots and voila! It's better. Not perfect, but better. And the poor thing is very brittle. Hopefully I bought it a few more years of gentle use.

Because our old dog is having a few problems and needs to wear a "bikini" with Poise pads in them, we have to keep the pads real handy. I got tired of them being out in plain sight all the time, so I broke into my Fassett materials and made this.

It holds both size pads that we use and hangs on the wall, up out of the way. And it goes well with the wall color and other things in the room.

A simple project, but quite needed and rewarding.

Directly behind you as you're looking at the new bag, is this-

I've been pretty busy upstairs this week- I'm making more of the coffee cup organizers that I sell in my shop, I am down to only 3 all of a sudden. I'm making some to match the sewing caddies for those people who like sets to match. People like me! lol

Home repairs and a finish....

First the pretty- I made a purse for a friend. Jennifer doesn't sew or quilt and HATES going into quilt shops because she says she feels like an imposter. (Probably feels like I did the day I had to go into a Junior League meeting to pick something up- 50 beautiful young women in power suits and I was in my work jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt.... lol, I wanted to crawl under a linen-draped table!) Anyway, Jennifer sucked it up and went to her LQS and picked out the fabrics and sent them to me. LOVED them, so pretty and spring/summery! This purse is from my original pattern, The Parker Purse, only it's a bit bigger than what I usually make. Jen hauls more stuff around than I do, but I'm starting to find my little ones just a bit too little, so I make myself one like this.

Anyhoo- a batik for the exterior and a Jane Sassaman pink and blue dot for the interior. I gave her a cool, iridescent glass button for the closure, too.

Then the home repair- all of a sudden our electric bill jumped up by about $40 a month! What the heck!? So we thought- maybe it was the water heater. We did an experiment by shutting it down for 22 hours to see what it did to our meter reading and it was a big difference. So that meant our water heater was running too much. Jim got all his big tools out and spent about 2 hours trying to get the element out of the bottom of the water heater, under the house in the crawl space. I'm really proud of him, I would have been screaming obscenities by this point but he had a smile for the camera.

Just behind him in the first photo, the ground drops away and there's a ditch about 4 feet deep. (That's where we're heading in case of a tornado!) The garage is on the other side of that wall. Anyway, not much room for him to work in.

He ended up having to cut a bigger hole so he could get the pipe wrench in there, that element did not want to come out. It was to the point where I was about to go shopping online for a water heater to replace this 20 year old one. He finally was able to unscrew it and pull the thing out, though and then the built up lime and calcium/hard water deposits started pouring out with the water. He got his little copper tool and started scraping, while I watched. Usually the scraping is my job, don't why I escaped this time, but I was happy to squat there and ooh and aah over the massive quantity of it all! We have really hard water here.

He scraped out about 10 pounds of this crap. No wonder the heater was working so hard, the element was buried in it! We're going to do this once a year, now, instead of waiting for an element to go bad. Well.... we SAY we'll do it, but it's such a crappy job and it's so hard to get the elements out, we'll probably wait as long as we can. Procrastinators Unite! So here's how we spent our Monday afternoon. I hope our next electric bill is much lower.