A Nice Little Goodbye Gift

I mentioned a few posts ago that one of our art quilt bee members was leaving the USA to return home to Melbourne, Australia.  I missed that last meeting that Marion attended, but she sent me a lovely card the next week.  In fact, it was the very first mail that we received at our new home!

Marion has been trying out different ways of weaving fibers together on different types of supports.  This piece is woven with fabrics and fibers and a little bit of metal.  Very cool!

She also made me an ATC (Artist Trading Card) and even used some of the fabric that I painted for her during our Fabric Embellishment Challenge.

Sure will miss that talented lady!

As far as my other bee, the Whacky Ladies, I am not sure how active I can be in that group.  They meet at night, and now I am forty-five minutes away from Wake Forest.  I would hate to drop out after being a Whacky for about seventeen years.  

So, we are still unpacking and trying to find things.  No luck yet on the silverware or knife set. but our bedroom and closet is about done.  We have not hung any pictures yet.  We have too much furniture for this house, and need to donate or sell some of it.  We should have done this before hiring people to move it!

As for the sewing room/studio, don't hold your breath!  The stuff is all piled up in there and I have to get the bathrooms and spare bedroom organized first.  One good thing...The Container Store is only about four minutes away.  I love that place!  I will probably head over there tomorrow.

Sold, Closed, Moved!

It has been an exhausting week, but a very good one.  We got the keys to our rental home one week ago.  The only thing I did not like about it was that the driveway was in very poor condition, full of potholes.  I found out that it will be repaved soon.  While we were at the house, we looked out the window and saw some of our new neighbors!  There were two little speckled fawns with their mama lurking behind them in the woods.

That weekend, both of our sons and their wives and children spent the weekend with us in Wake Forest one more time.  They took load after load of boxes and stuff from our old house to the new one.  The three older grands had a ball playing in the woods and along the edge of the pond.  And, they were the first ones to try out the hot tub!

We had a moving truck come on Wednesday to get the furniture.  Everything did not fit in the truck, so Charlie and I made two more trips on Thursday to get the last of it and clean out the old house.  We put the dog in the kennel during the move.  I just don't think she would understand that we were letting these men take all our belongings!  She is acting anxious and clingy, but I think she will enjoy it here once she gets used to it.

Since then we have been unpacking and trying to find things.  Today I finished the kitchen and pantry, but still have not found our silverware (the stainless variety) or our knife set.  We got the TV and Internet set up today, so we are starting to enjoy the comforts of home.  Not to mention soaking in the hot tub at the end of the day.  

At our closing, the new owners said that they would take good care of our home.  Well, it is their home now.

And we are getting familiar with this one, and I think we will enjoy the woodsy yard and pond and privacy.  This was the view out of the sliding glass doors in our bedroom this morning.  We feel very lucky.

Elizabeth Barton Quilts

Everything on our To-Do List has been completed, as far as our home inspection goes.  Great feeling!  Today we met the buyer of our house, an Englishman who is thrilled to be moving in with his family.  It is nice to know our beloved home is going to someone who loves it, too.

I have almost the whole house packed.  This weekend, all our kids and grandkids will be here to help us finish packing and get ready for the movers.  We will take the first pick-up load of stuff to our new home tomorrow!

Since I don't have any new projects to show you, perhaps I can share a link to some beautiful art quilts by Elizabeth Barton.  These are her cityscapes.  Such beautiful glowing colors!

http://ebarton.myweb.uga.edu/cityscapequilts.htm

Lots Going On

We have had the joy of babysitting for our 7-month old granddaughter since Friday night.  Her daddy picked up his baby and his dog this morning.  It's going to be kind of quiet around here.  One less dog and no baby.  :(

It was delightful having this sweet-natured grandbaby with us.  She is very flexible...I can see a future ballerina or gymnast!

She even does splits in her sleep!

She also still shows a lot of interest in quilts!  Here is one that I made thirteen years ago.  She likes the side with the cherries better than the back!

Actually, it has not been quieter around here today at all.  We had seventeen replacement windows installed today.  Lots of banging, things flying out the windows, men going in and out and upstairs and downstairs and making the dog a nervous wreck.  Yesterday it was the surveyors in the yard.  What next?

Don't you hate it when you put up with something you don't like about your house, and as soon as you get it perfect you have to move out?  I have always dislikes our wooden windows, which are hard to open, especially after they have been painted.  The wooden windowsills that were not protected by the front or back porches developed wood rot.  The new inhabitants will be very lucky to have these new windows that we ordered before we even sold the house.

Tomorrow a carpenter is coming to fix a few things on the inspection list.  Then, we start moving things into our new house on Friday!  We will have a week to make the move, although the movers are coming with the van on Wednesday next week.  Busy, busy!

New Digs

I was a little worried about selling our home and having an early closing without a new place to live lined up.  We were lucky to find a nice home for rent in northwest Raleigh that I think we will enjoy very much.

From the front, it looks like a ranch-style home.  Yes, that's concrete, no grass in the front to mow.  But it is surrounded by garden beds with hundreds of azaleas and an irrigation system.

The back of the house is what caught our interest.

Look at that lanai!  It is 54 feet long!  And it overlooks a hot tub and pond!

We are just renting this house for a year, so I am not too worried about all those steps in my old age. 

There is also a very nice kitchen, although I admit to not being much of a cook any more.

The kitchen, dining room, and living room all open to the lanai with sliding glass doors.

So, I now have good motivation for all the packing and preparations for the move.  

Now...which room will be my sewing room?  There is a room on the main floor with built-in shelves that will probably be the one.

But there is also a guest room downstairs that might fit the bill.

I think we will need to use the closets in the guest room in addition to the closets in the master bedroom, so that narrows down the choice.  All of the rooms are large enough for my twelve-foot longarm table, but I'm not sure we can get it in.  It might end up being in the garage.

Back to work...pack, pack, pack!  Oh, and baby Charlotte and her dog Roo will be with us until Tuesday while their parents are at a wedding in Colorado.  We pick her up tonight from her other grandma's house.  Hope she finds it amusing to watch us pack!

We're on the Move!

A lot has happened in the past few weeks- enough to make my head spin!  After months of showing our house and getting no offers, we finally sold it in July.  And they want to move in ASAP!  We agreed to close on August 23.

We were in the mountains when we accepted the offer.  This time our son Bryson, wife Melissa, and the three older grandchildren were with us.  Lots of fun and some good times at the creek.  They are still having lots of heavy rain up there, so the creek is still kind of muddy, but we had a sunny afternoon.

We also bought a new John Deere Gator while we were there.  This one has a canopy roof and a lot more power than the other one.  Ours is the one in the middle.

When we got home we had to endure the house inspection, appraisal, and radon inspection.  We have to make some minor repairs, but the major problem was that our wooden window frames were getting soft in spots.  We had already contracted to replace them.  

Next was to find a place to live!  We want to rent a house in Raleigh that will be closer to my husband's office, to our son's family in Cary, and to our mountain cabin.  We have looked at a few places, fell in love with one, and have submitted our application for the lease.  We should hear in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, we babysat for our grandbaby Charlie the weekend of the twenty-sixth.  She was an angel baby, sleeping all night and just being so cute.

 Before she got there, I spent some time making repairs on her father's baby quilt, which was the first quilt I ever made.  I used raw edge applique finished with zigzag stitching for some of the squares.  They were getting pretty frayed, so I just applied new shapes over the frayed ones and quilted right through all three layers with a blanket stitch to attach them.  It worked pretty well.  I also added some painted highlights with Tsukineko inks to brighten up some of the faded fabrics.

                                      

Frayed strawberry

New strawberry hull and painted berry

Frayed turtle shell made from my old kitchen curtains

Turtle with new shell

Anyway, the baby seemed to enjoy sitting on her Daddy's quilt both inside



and outside, where she did a little "reading"




and experimented with the feel of playing in the grass, protected by her babysitting dogs Kasey and Roo.

The Whacky Ladies Quilt Bee met last Thursday.  As always, there was some great Show-and-Tell.  

Marilyn got her quilt for the new grandbaby back from Donna, who quilted it for her.

Mary finished her batik squares scrappy quilt.

Mary also had a scrappy quilt that was finished.

Lori had quilted both of her charity quilts to be raffled for Multiple Sclerosis.  She quilted both with a panto.

Carolyn stole the show with her finished blocks from a class at Thimble Pleasures in Carrboro, NC.

That about catches me up.  I have been packing boxes downstairs and will start on the upstairs soon.  I dread packing up all my quilting, sewing, and painting supplies!