pictures might help...

Here are the photos of the Plain Spoken gone wild quilts...

An actual quilt

Okay, clearly I suck at this whole blogging thing. Apparently I'd rather read about what other people are doing. But I did finally make a quilt. Two of them, actually. I had it in my head that I was going to make the Plain Spoken quilt from the Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr. And I did. Sort of. I had so many great fabric scraps from making things for the daughters that I ended up taking that beautiful, subtle quilt and making it crazy busy. And since they were twin size quilts, I gave them to someone else to actually quilt. I didn't get off all that easy. There were still 390 rectangles to be sewn together, and I did do the binding. And then I took my extra rectangles and made doll size quilts that I quilted myself. And now I want to make more quilts and more quilts.

Quilting for a Cause

Okay, so I've never actually made a quilt before. That being said, a much nicer, more talented person than I is making quilts for the fire victims in Australia and all she asks is that people make some quilt squares and then send them to her. She and her quilting guild will do all the hard parts, like the actual quilting and binding. http://campfollowerbags.blogspot.com/ She is an army wife doing good deeds. What could be better than that? So, this is my first attempt at a quilt square. I followed the directions for the wonky star posted on the site. Leave it to me to be too anal to have my star come out wonky looking. I'm going to try to do a few more now that the kids are in bed. Because if quilting for a cause while watching Lost isn't a good excuse for not cleaning the house, I don't know what is.

Oh, and my lovely, just-turned-six daughter decided to empty her piggy bank and send all her money to an animal shelter that cares for the koalas, joeys and other displaced animals.

Some Dinner Party

I'm apparently too lazy to keep up with my published ramblings. To make up for my laziness, I'm offering up this example of my daughter's awesomeness.

CPSIA

I have been consumed by the new CPSIA law going into effect on February 10th. If you don't know, the Consumer Product Safety Information Act was intended to protect children from lead poisoning, but it is very poorly crafted and vastly overreaching. It threatens small businesses, libraries, booksellers, etc. I won't go into it any more than that, but offer up instead this link to smartmama's blog.

http://www.thesmartmama.com/bg/

Facebook

I succumbed to pressure from various family and friends to finally get on Facebook. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. A big part of me didn't really want to be found by anyone. Another part of me just thinks, "Who cares?" Someone I never talked to in high school wanted to add me as a friend. I know it wouldn't hurt to add him, but really, why should I? I don't care about what he's doing. I guess people just like to have a lot of friends. I'm secure enough not to add everyone I've ever met. I purge people like I purge old clothes. If I haven't talked to them in a year, they generally get deleted from my email and address book. That being said, there are some former really good post-high school friends with whom I have lost touch and this is really an easy way to catch up. In the real, off-line world it would seem like a big deal to make a phone call and talk about everything that has happened in my life in the last ten years. And I do have plenty of regrets about how many people I have let kind of slip away. So, there, I've talked it out and decided that I am pro-Facebook. But I want to go on record as saying the site is surprisingly nonintuitive. You would think with so many people using it they would figure out a more interesting user-interface.

And if anyone is reading this and is dying to know the outcome of the rain boot issue: they arrived today and it is raining. And it may rain most of the week. So there.

Christmas Trees

I was just reading some of my favorite blogs and aluminum Christmas trees seem to be a common theme. I love them, but they just seem to make too much of a statement for me. I'm going retro in a whole different way. We always buy a real tree, which my mother never did when I was growing up. I'm sure it's because she was convinced it would dry out and then the lights would start the whole thing afire. I swear you would think someone in my family died a horrible death. Among my mother's biggest fears were me living in an apartment with bars on the windows, a fire starting, and me burning to death because the firemen couldn't get in. Another was us kids wearing scarves while sledding because if they got caught on trees we would get strangled. She is still big on donating blood and coercing people into signing their organ donor cards. But, I digress. My retro Christmas tree came about inadvertently when we (and by "we" I really mean my husband) agreed to let the girls have colored lights on the tree. After that small step away from my notion of what constitutes good taste, I took a giant leap and bought that fat, fuzzy looking garland. The girls and I chose white, because of course it will look like tubes of snow resting on the branches. Indoors. In Southern California.