Tag Archives: moving

Still here!

So, we did get the house!  I know you were all waiting on pins and needles.  It just took a couple of weeks longer, but now we’re in and making it new and ours. 🙂

Home Sweet Home!

Home Sweet Home!

We’ve spent almost one whole week in the house now, and it’s been a week of pulling up carpet, deep cleaning, questioning the dirt levels some people will live with, and buying basically everything.  Lucky for me the devil has provided me with some easy tips on how to get some things clean easier than elbow grease.  I am running low on elbow grease, and my slight carpal tunnel syndrome likes to act up at the worst possible times. “Oh, you need to scrub a tub?  Here let me make your hand feel like it’s falling off!” #thanksobama (lol)

Luckily all this waiting is really starting to pay off.  The floors will be completely finished Saturday (because golf course green is a bad color for carpet) and the painting starts today.  Our washer and dryer came on Tuesday, which…okay I’ve only ever had “traditional” washers.  We now have a Maytag that doesn’t have an agitator (fine) and uses low water (okay) and it senses the load size (alien technology) and it’s a little weird.  It needs the middle to be uncovered when you load it…but won’t it get recovered once the load starts going?  What was the point of me digging out the middle?  I digress.  It works plenty fine and if it makes my water bill lower that’s great.  I am going to get started on my sewing room once the floors are done and I get it painted (pepto bismal pink is a bad color for walls.  One accent wall, okay, all 4 walls?  AND ROSES BORDER WALLPAPER? no thank you.) and get a rug in there.  I’m very excited to get that going.  I really need to sew.  Real bad.

Green Carpet...Pink Walls....rose wallpaper border O_O

Green Carpet…Pink Walls….rose wallpaper border O_O

Al was very pleased with this floor choice. He doesn't blend in now!

Al was very pleased with this floor choice. He doesn’t blend in now!

While I’m at it, lime green and Thomas Kinkaid little houses border wallpaper don’t go well together either.  Just a little word of advice.  Funny house happenings so far:  I’ve locked myself in the backyard at least three times so far.  The back is fenced in and the gate is strange…it latches from the outside?  and there’s some kind of pole to keep it closed?  The door that goes out back will turn on the inside if it’s locked or not, and yea…I’ve fallen victim to it.  Also there is a creepy ball that was left in the back yard that keeps reappearing.  I have thrown it away three or four times, and it kept showing back up in the yard.  I’ve now cinched the bag that it was thrown away in and it has moved its way to the top of the bag.  I’m pretty sure it’s haunted.

In other news, my quilt guild’s Christmas party is this Saturday!!!  Pretty excited about that!!!  Secret Santa?!  Dirty Santa?!?!  ALL THE SANTAS!!!  I thought I was going to have my kitchen situated enough to make something for it, but looks like I’m going to be picking up something :O

I’ll post more before and after pictures soon, I don’t want to give it all away yet!

Until next time!  Happy sewing!  I’ll be able to join in soon! 😀

Turkeys and Eagles

I think it would be more than fair to say that the way I think about things is a little different from most people.  It’s funny, even in middle school math classes I would get the same answer, solve it a completely different way than the teacher explained…which resulted in me doing them over the “right” way.  Maybe that’s why I don’t understand everyone’s stink about this common core math.  Anyhow, this has carried over into my adult life, and it’s often very hard for me to explain things to others in a way that makes sense to them.  Nine times out of ten I have to draw a picture.  Literally.  One of my bosses picked up on how frustrated I get while trying to explain things to others and told me “it’s hard to fly with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.”

This is the most genius thing I’ve ever heard.  It is completely accurate!  I’m over here, trying to pull people to see things from my perspective, but they’re down there, gobbling around, doing turkey things.  Okay, that just sounds silly but I think you get what I’m saying.  It isn’t so much that I think my opinion or viewpoint is always right, but I more want people to understand why I think the way that I do.

So since I like this saying so much, I want to cross stitch it.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with it once I’m done with it, but I’m going to make it anyway.  I found an eagle that I liked, but I couldn’t find its pattern, so I eyeballed it and made my own pattern in excel.  I started a little practice turkey, and I think he’s going to turn out great.  I don’t know the placement of these birds, but I have a turkey facing either way, and my one little eagle.  Maybe do the turkeys going back and forth at the bottom?  The eagle flying in the middle?  I don’t know.  We will see.  I’ve started a little practice turkey, and somehow have yet to take a picture.  What is wrong with me?!

I saved him backwards, but here's my turkey I like.

I saved him backwards, but here’s my turkey I like.

http://instagram.com/p/vRJbNuD9cu/?modal=true

In shop news, I thought about it and decided that I’m going to keep my shop closed until the new year.  I can use this time to stock up my shop (okay at least a little bit) and get some projects started.  I mean, I do have a list to work on!

Please keep your fingers crossed that we actually close on our new house this Friday. 🙂

Until next time, happy sewing!

Update!

Okay, sorry Internets.  I have been a bad blogger, but honestly nothing really blog worthy has been going on. :/

I went to last month’s quilt guild meeting, which is always fun!  We decided that this year we are going to have committees again, and I’m on the communications committee.  oh yea!  So the first order of business was to try to spread the word about a community sewing event we’re having to make these NICU smocks for Vanderbilt Hospital.  It’s going to be fun, there are foods and giveaways, so if you happen to be in the Nashville/Franklin TN area and want to know more either leave a comment below or email our guild at musiccitymodernquilters@yahoo.com

Besides that, it’s just been house business.  After the first house deal fell through we got right back in the saddle and we found a home that’s actually got a few more perks going for it.  It doesn’t have the land we were looking for, but it’s closer to both of our jobs, in a pretty quiet neighborhood, and it’s still out of the hustle and bustle of Nashville.  If all goes well we’re looking to close before Thanksgiving (yes, just a couple of weeks from now holy cow) then get it ready, paint, floors etc, then hopefully be moved in completely before Christmas! 😀  There will still need to be trips made “to town”, and I’m thinking I’m going to start strictly buying fabric online (much to my husband’s dismay) because the closest JoAnn’s is about 30-40 minutes away and..there is a Hobby Lobby maybe a little closer…but…anyway.

I really want to sew again, so I’m hoping the fixing up of the house goes really quickly and smoothly.  Not going to lie, I also really have a ton of TV to catch up on.  Also…Netflix.  I am also looking forward to fixing up the house for Christmas, making everything look nice, the whole 9 yards.  Right now we’re just waiting for everything to be processed and the bank tell us what day we can close.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this picture of the goats:

wpid-20141102_151929.jpg

can you see them? They are near that tree kind of in the middle. If they hear anyone near the fence they come in a hurry!

 

Until next time, happy sewing!

 

B&E

Well we’re still here! 😀

The husband and I have been talking about moving, obviously, because what else are we going to do?  We talked about the best way to approach moving, and realistically planning as well.  If all goes according to plan (when does it ever?), we should be closing at the end of this month/start of next month.  So we talked about moving, the best way to get moved, painting (because I can’t live in a pepto bismol house, sorry not sorry!) and things we’ll need to take care of before we can officially live in the new house.  If our calculations are correct, we still have about 4 more weeks in the attic.  Honestly, the time has been going by very fast because we’re spending about 3 hours a day driving, then 8 hours working, and then we’re home and we pass out after dinner.  Then it all starts over at 5:20am.  Also, my sister-in-law making dinner basically every night, those cute little nephews, and seeing Al run like a crazy dog all over the yard (he seriously sprints around and it’s hilarious) are all little kudos that make things very easy.

Enough about that!  I’ve been cross stitching to keep my crafty levels up.  I found the cutest little bacon and egg cross stitch, and since these two are staples at our house on the weekends I’m making this for our kitchen in the new house.  I’m also going to work on one for a giveaway to celebrate the reopening of my shop…eventually!  AND!!!  A third one!  (Which…will actually be the one I’m working on right now.) for one of my nieces who thought it was so cute!  I’ve started on the bacon, but I’ll hopefully get this finished up at the next guild meeting!  Which is tomorrow!!!! 😀

I have been running into something odd.  (odd to me anyways)  At least 4 people have asked me if I could do this or that for them, sewing things, which I’m more than grateful for, but I’m like okay, well, I’ve got to get moved, then my sewing room is going to be booming with projects!!! :O  Which reminds me…I need to start writing things down.  Not to mention the wallet project I got started before I had to pack everything up…AAAHH!!!  Over all I’m pretty pumped about being able to sew again within a months time.  I really want to get all these little projects up and moving at least, and it’s kind of making me crazy not being able to start them.  The new house is out in the country, and it’s not very close to fabric stores, or even a Walmart, so I’m going to have to start taking advantage of taking “trips to town.”  It’ll be good though; it’ll -hopefully- make me more exact about what I need and how much of what I need for what project.  Then again, there is always the internet. 😉

Until next time!  Happy sewing!

Returning to Normalcy (well almost)

Hey everybody!  We’re getting accustomed to our new routine a little easier now.  We’ve gotten to a point that we can now comfortably carpool to work, which is a huge savings in gas.  Sure, I have to wake up at about 5:20am (I don’t take a whole lot of time to get ready…because just like Beyonce…I woke up like this.  Oh yea.) and Al has finally gotten to where he’ll sleep through a whole night without every little bump bothering him, so things are really looking up over here.  We’ve gotten to spend a lot more time with our little nephews which has been great.  They’re such great little boys. 🙂

The view :)

The view in the afternoon!

Al's doing pretty well :)

Al’s doing pretty well 🙂

I will tell you one creepy thing; when Al does wake up in the middle of the night and needs to go out, it’s really dark so I take my phone and use my flashlight app.  Because who uses a real flashlight anymore?!  Am I right?!  Anyway, so we’re out there and its super dark and I point the light over to the fenced area where the goats are…and all you see are big white goat bodies and glowing eyes!  It’s so creepy.  They’re just standing there!  I don’t know if they’re asleep, I have no idea what is going on over there.  I have to keep Al distracted, because he’s not so sure about these big creatures with their goat eyes and horns and stuff. *Note*  I tried to take a picture this morning around 1am, bad idea.  The goats got a little startled and their watch dog didn’t like it. :O

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched?

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

I FINALLY finished my husband’s cross stitch for his office.  It was going to be an anniversary present, but now it’s his birthday present..Which is Friday! 🙂  I’m pretty proud of it, and mostly the pencil.  I printed off the quote online so that I had a guide on where to stitch.  I made up the pencil totally on my own.  YEA.  It’s so cute.  I wish I had a gray or silvery color then I could have made the little metal part, but somehow in my rainbow pack of colored embroidery floss, there is no gray.  Four or so browns, no gray.  Now I just need to finish it up and frame it…somehow.

wpid-img_20140930_212831.jpg

Just..look at that little pencil!!! Completely on the fly! ❤

In other news, we’ve found a house!  We’re hoping to be closed and moved in by Novemberish.  It might be too early to tell if we could have Thanksgiving at our house, but there might be a chance.  I’m hoping to plan a housewarming party, but I’m worried that by the time we get the house situated it’ll be really cold, maybe snow and ice and people won’t come.  Plus, holidays.  Would it be completely crazy to plan a housewarming party for early next year once it starts to warm up?  Like, once we make it through the winter?  I tried looking to the devil for some pinsperation but everything looks so…Spring-y.  Let me know what you guys think.

Until next time!  Happy sewing everyone!

All Packed Away

Well, everything has been packed away.  We’re getting our boxes moved out slowly, this weekend was a lot of moving and then shuffling around and last minute purging.  This morning was the first drive from Columbia to South East Nashville.  It only took about an hour and a half… :O  I’ll take it if it means we’re done with our first house.  While it was a little, noisy house, it was our home, it served it’s purpose, and now we’re moving on to bigger better places.  Also this made this weekend…”fun” and was part of the big slow down this morning.  I’m lucky to have a family willing to let us stay with them while we’re trying to find “the one” house worthy of our future little(s). (NOTE: That is not some sneaky pregnancy announcement.  no babies.  I REPEAT! NO. BABIES….for now.)

image

As ready as it can be to go to storage! (the pillow ended up not going to storage, I couldn’t part with it!)

image

my sewing table…I didn’t realize until we got it out that the wood pattern on it is crooked!  I’m going to end up painting the whole thing when we get moved.

I got all my sewing things packed up and away, with only one casualty (Rest in peace, hand me down cutting board, you were a good cutting board!) and my shop was put into vacation mode last week.  I did keep my cross stitching handy, I mean, I need SOME sort of crafty thing to do, right?!  Plus I was supposed to have finished this cross stitch a while ago…oops.  I can only say I’ve been busier than a cat covering poop over here; I was lucky to get my tag renewed in time!  I didn’t even get to go to my guild meeting this month! ;_;

image

*pop* me: WHAT JUST BROKE? :O husband: nothing! I’ll buy you a new one!

Anyhow, that’s what’s been going on over here!  Until next time, happy sewing! (for everyone else anyway 😀 )

P.S. Wish us luck, we’re already anticipating a month in our temporary home.  We do have cute little nephew neighbors though, so it’s not so bad. 😀

I’m still around!

Since I last wrote, I’ve been on a nonstop little rollercoaster that doesn’t seem to want to slow down.

It started off great!  We went on our yearly vacation, and we went to Panama City Beach.  It was great!  We snorkeled, we went to a ridiculously cute museum, beaches, the whole 9 yards.  The whole time people are coming to look at our house which has been on the market, and we’re just over there “yep, go on in!” We had a great -and much needed- vacation.

So we come home, and we got an offer on our house!  Very excited!  Then we didn’t get it in writing for over a week….but we also got 2 more offers!  Omg!  Everything was going great.  So we took an offer, the only “downside” to this…we have to be out by Sept. 24.  Yes, that is 9 days from today.

My thoughts exactly, Fran.

My thoughts exactly, Fran.

So now we’ve been trying to up our house search, which has been difficult because it’s been a busy time for my husband’s job…and also it’s football season.  We’re trying to hit up a few houses on each free day we have, but we already know we’re not going to be able to find a house and move into it in less than 2 weeks time.  We have a backup plan, but it’s going to be a little challenging.  It also means no sewing, no DVR, (Hi my name is Ashley and I’m addicted to TV) hopefully it will just encourage us to find our next home really fast.  It’s just tricky because so many homes are being listed and coming off almost as quickly as they are listed.  Out of about 40 or so homes we sent to a realtor only about 20 of them are still available.  Craaazyyyy!

I have been able to do at least SOME sewing.  I made a cute little yellow and white chevron (Wait.  Can we talk about how it used to be zigzag, and now everyone’s calling it chevron?  I know I do it too, but why?  ^ that is a chevron. Anyway…) wallet and I’m starting up a little project that, once I get moved, I think will really kick off nicely.  My friend has been in a tough situation for quite some time now, and I had thought “I want to do some sort of charity thing to help her out with her crazy bills” but I wasn’t sure how to do it.  Well we both kind of talked about it and I am going to make my profits partially go to her to help her out, and to raise awareness for leukodystrophy.  I’m going to make more wallets that are going to have a little blue ribbon as well as anchors and chevrons…(zigzags).

I’m really looking forward to getting this project up and going, it’s just not very easy to find sewing time right now.  I may have to skip football Saturday (omg blasphemy!) to get some sewing in before I can’t for a while.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to lately!  That’s why I haven’t been blogging, lol.

Until next time, happy sewing!

When it rains…

So, if you follow me on Instagram (@sewfluffincute) I posted that I am not ignoring my blog, but that I’m not going to post until I finish these bags that I’ve been working on.  Well between fixing the house before we put it on the market (yippee finally happening very soon!) and still trying to get in a little gym time, and you know, that whole JOB thing (working, it’s for the birds. seriously!) I have had little snippets of sewing time.  Last night would have been a great time to get a big chunk of sewing done, probably even finish the last bag, but no.

I woke up yesterday with a weird foot pain, and it’s my sewing foot!  Okay that sounded funny…it’s my right foot and the foot I press my…step? what is that thing called?  The pedal for my machine…with.  It just kept getting worse all day and by the time I got home I was hobbling around looking downright pitiful.  Needless to say, I did not make it to zumba last night, either.  I have no idea what is going on, it feels like a bruise, but I am not quite sure where it has come from, and it looks fine.  It probably is just my foot trying to get me to sit still or something.

So I’ve taken advantage of this “down time” by finally starting on this little project for my husband.  I have been wanting to make him something for his office for a while now, and he said you could make a quote I could put in there.  ‘Alright, sounds easy enough, I’ll just embroider it’ well that turned out just awful.  Just terrible.  Then I thought ‘maybe I can try and use my sewing machine’ okay that was a big ole no.  Just a heaping pile of nope.  Then it hit me, ‘cross stitching, I don’t think I can mess that up…too terribly’.  The only problem I saw was that hand work typically doesn’t mix well with my tiny sweaty hands.  I don’t know why my hands sweat as much as they do but they do and it’s gross.  A few of the ladies in my guild do cross stitch and it just looks so clean and neat, and I thought okay, I can do that.  So I picked up some adia, grabbed my seemingly abandoned embroidery thread, and got to work.

image

What even is this…I saw a video that suggested starting in the middle? nope.

I first thought “I should try a little practice piece” which turned out to be a good idea because that first letter was an e and it looked like I wrote it with my non-dominant hand.  After I got the hang of it, this has turned out to be so much fun.  It’s so clean and precise; I absolutely love it.  I at least have something that I can play with after my sewing room gets packed up and away…which I’m still not entirely looking forward to.

image

Much better. And it looks so 8-bit. So cute. ❤

Anyhow, I hope you’re all having a nice week!  Sorry to not post last week, but I am down to the last bag and it’s over halfway finished, so soon enough I’ll be back to regularly posting!  Until moving gets in the way…again… 😀

image

Al is already fed up with talks of moving.

Until next time!  Happy sewing!

P.S.  This quote is:

“Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

-Thomas Edison

I have another quote to work on as well:

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

-Winston Churchill

Class of 2004 and Winning at life

Yep, there we were, ten years ago, jamming out to “Yeah”, “I like the way you move” and a whole gambit of songs that were so great…at the time! (looking back I think 2004 could be classified as the year of Usher) 😀 Well it came time for us to all meet again this summer. I’m not going to lie, I have been having anxiety over this. Not because I was afraid to meet up with the rude people I went to school with or run into an old boyfriend (I didn’t date anyone in my grade at my school!); but because this was a 2 part event that cost me $60 a person to go and I had a feeling it was not going to live up to my expectations of what a $60 a head party should be.* I believe the planning for this all started earlier this year, and from the way things kept changing and the communication seemed to be less and less clear, my anxiety was only getting worse…and it was actually a little worse than I expected. The only saving graces were that I saw a couple of my friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, (Facebook really doesn’t make up for being miles away) I got to laugh with my friends about silly high school things that I didn’t even realize happened, (If any of you are reading….OMG IT’S TAN TAN!!) and of course people that I didn’t like that were always so well put together were no longer so put together and I felt like I was winning at life. 😉 So that’s that!

image

Please Note: in 2004 they had not invented a flat iron!

So not only am I winning at life (at least in my head anyway!) I won a giveaway on Instagram! Okay, just about any time I see some sort of giveaway I try to get in on it. I don’t even care what it’s for, I just want to win. A fat quarter bundle? Maybe a cute crochet bee and some other bee things? How about a rug mug? I WANT IT! So you can only imagine how excited I was to actually win something. The best part is I didn’t even realize I entered!

image

WHO WOULDN’T WANT THAT LITTLE BE?!?! Oh and there were other things too…but that BEE!!!! Didn’t win. 😦

image

uhm HELLO?! Look at those beautiful bundles!!!! Again…didn’t win 😦

image

woah what!? Look at that!!! Didn’t win…again… 😥

A few months back Kate & Birdie Paper Company posted that if you were making things with their fabric to use the hashtag #kateandbirdiehandmade so they’d all kind of be in the same “spot” instead of #kateandbirdie #winterslane #bluebirdpark etc. So…since I absolutely love everything I have seen by Kate & Birdie, I had all kinds of things to tag in my instagram! I didn’t really think anything else of it, and bam! Two weeks ago they post on their instagram that me and 3 others had won a bundle of their new fabric line, Autumn Woods! So I waited patiently for my package to come in, and Monday it got here!!! It’s so beautiful!

image

I am such a softy, this little note seriously almost made me cry.

As far as sewing goes, I am STILL (omg) working on these three bags.  Very little sewing has been done between cleaning and packing up our house.  I think most people would think we’re going about this all backwards, but I think it will be so much easier to get moved since over half our stuff is already packed.  I do know that when I finish up these three bags that my sewing room is going to have to be packed away, too.  So then I won’t really be able to sew for a while… 😦  The bright side to this is that when I do get to really sew again it will be in my new home in my sewing room that is not also a guest room. 😀  Hopefully I can get a big bulk of these bags done tomorrow at my guild meeting.  We’re having an open sew and sharing out Michael Miller Fabric Challenge entries.  I’m pretty excited to show off my pillow…it’s just so comfy!

Are any of you doing the Fabric Challenge?  I’d love to see your entries!  Tag me on instagram! @sewfluffincute I’ve seen some entries that blow my pillow out of the water!  But…for a years worth of free Michael Miller fabric?  It’s just another giveaway for me to enter! 😀

Until next time, happy sewing everyone!

*Just a little note: This event was planned in such a way that a lot of people got upset over it, there is an alternate reunion being planned that I think is only $10, so it wasn’t just me.  I will not be going to the alternate reunion because it’s 4 hours away from me, I have to plan my trips down there and it’s not going to work with how busy we are right now, and because of one of the people that is involved in planning it, and when I asked other people they said they wouldn’t go for the same reasons.