number 1 today on ravelry.. Happy 4th of July

number 1 today on ravelry, originally uploaded by sunshine's creations.

This was a fun thing to wake up to the cord being number 1 and the necklace at 36 this morning thank you everyone and I hope you have a lovely 4th of July mine was great just seeing this.

Be safe today with your fireworks.

Colonial Days and the 4th of July

To celebrate the birth of our country we have been participating in colonial days July 1,2, and 4 and have had so much fun in the sun so hot in those costumes.

husband and daughter lighting celebration cup cake

Took a lot of prep-work for a few weeks to get everything the way we wanted it. We have taught rug making woven and braided how to make dolls, Betsy Ross stars, English paper piecing, bobbin lace, yoyos and so on.

Middle daughter making yarn dolls to sell and Me I am making braided rugs you can see the braid in the bottom right of photo that I was working on when I took this photo.

Youngest daughter with her basket ready to teach Betsy Ross stars.

Oldest daughter teaching demonstrating  twining ( a type of rug weaving)

Lots of nice people stop by and visit with us.  The girls have had fun got over whelmed sometimes by the interest in the class they were teaching but fun all the same today is the last day stop by and say hi.  My children have also been helping a spinner there she was teaching them to card wool for her which is good as two days prior I was given 1/2 fleece which I still need to wash a little more and pick clean then they can card it for me to try spinning with ( drop spindle spinning that is)

Youngest learning to card from Juanita another artisan there demonstrating you can see her in the background spinning wool.

A few more photos from the event are here.

Where were you...

I was at the doctors office in the waiting room when I saw it on a little tv. Then I went to see the doctor to be told I had to be on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy. What have you done to make the world better because of this. I have become more God centered and more patriotic much more than I ever thought I would be from the point of view I had as a teenager.

School Play

My oldest daughter played Martha Washington in the school play last week. I think she did great she memorized her part all on her own. You know the scary thing about these photos is I just realized how tall my oldest daughter is getting. She is almost up to my chin and is up to her Pai's neck. Make her stop growing; I am not ready for this!Here she is doing her mono-logue. She is pretending to read a letter from George Washington, but the paper is actually blank; this is all memorized. Not a very good video, but the idea is there for family who are far away from us.

Substitute teaching & back roads

I get to teach one of the one of three 1st Grade classes at my kids' school today. Just happens to be one of the two without my daughter in it, probably a good thing.

Yesterday on Presidents' Day my husband wanted to go on some back roads just to see what we could see on the old snow covered trails. We saw quiet a few pretty sights.

My oldest daughter likes horses and wanted a picture of this one with its winter coat.

My second daughter is born near the 4th of July and likes all things patriotic and she found this flag and wanted a picture of it.

The last daughter likes deer (well, we all do) and wanted a picture of these mule deer.

Also in honor of Presidents' Day, I also am working on a patriotic jacket for a baby. I will put it in the store when done. It would be cute to wear to a 4th of July event or some other patriotic event or holiday.

Happy President's Day

Handmade suit and a Flintlock

So I got off work a little early today (due to lack of business; I hope this changes soon or I am going to be out a job). Anyway, I went to my kids' school early to pick them up and figured I would just work on some crochet in the car while I waited. To my surprise about 5 minutes after I got there out came my daughter's class.

The 5th graders are learning about the revolutionary war this year and are even putting on a school play about it; my oldest is playing Martha Washington. So one of their lessons was hands- on, so to speak.

The suit Mr. Cornell is wearing, a revolutionary- type suit, is all hand stitched. How cool is that and all his weapons and other stuff are handmade, too. He demonstrated to the class how to load and fire a flintlock (no ball, of course, just black power and wad). He showed them how the ram rod works and how to bite the bullet. Those sayings have almost no meaning any more, but the kids learned the original meanings and from where they came. He also explained that the gun weighs about 10 pounds and that it is roughly 5 feet 4 inches tall, about the height of some of the children in class. When this type of gun was originally in use, the average man was about the same height as the gun. This surprised the children because they couldn't believe that they are the height of an adult who lived 200 years ago.

There are a few more photos from this in my flickr photos.

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Quilt All done

So, this is a post I was going to do yesterday but ran out of time and energy (I was awake for about 41 hours straight to get this done in time). Deadline for sign up items into the auction was Tuesday, deadline to have them turned into school was Friday. I got up Thursday at 5 am, quilted all day and all night, didn't go to bed. Mother-in-law and daughter stayed up late quilting with me. My mother-in-law is just so great; she stayed 'till 3 in the morning helping me get this done for the auction. My daughter, who is 11, stayed up an hour past her bed time so she could quilt one block to help out. I put the binding on the quilt at 6:45 Friday morning. Still no sleep: still more quilting to do, but not around the edges, so the binding went on because that would be hard to do at work. Went to work, quilted at lunch time, and finished quilting.

Turned it in to the auction. Went to the fall harvest festival, stayed till about 9 p.m., got home around 10 and crashed. (There is more to this story than I am posting, but it would take way to long to post). Long story short, people don't understand the pricing of hand work. So I paid for my own quilt and brought it back home. I will enjoy it on my foyer wall and think of the wonderful 4th Grade children I taught, and my lovely mother-in-law, and my beautiful daughters for all their help in making such a wonderful memory for me (daughters: one helped quilt and another help cut, the last one watched and didn't touch) . From the start of the quilt to finish of the quilting, it was 7 days total; I don't usually make a quilt quite that fast. Thanks, everyone!

Now that the quilt is going to live at our house, I will sew on a hanging sleeve and, at a leisurely pace, I will add more quilting to it before it goes on the wall. There just wasn't enough time to put all the quilting I wanted to do into the quilt, so it will get a few more rows of echo quilting and call it good.

Three thimbles...Not normal

It is not normal for me to post on Sunday. But my oldest daughter took this picture while I was quilting, and I thought I would share it. I thought it was a good photo.

I think I am the only person I know who quilts with two, three, and four thimbles on one hand at a time; here I am wearing three. Sometimes when wearing three I have one or two on the other hand as well, but not today. My favorite is the leather one on my thumb; I have had it for about 15 1/2 years. Side note: my husband bought it for me (while we were engaged) when I was making his wedding gift. Yes, it was a quilt and I had lost my thimble; this is what he found. I wish I had about 4 more of them, but I have never found another like it. If anyone has one they don't want, I will gladly trade you some hand-made crochet lace, made by me, for it. It is adjustable (thus it fits every finger), and my fingers don't get sweaty in it. The stitches are purposely uneven in this quilt because I want it to look like the 4th Graders drawings: rough around the edges, so to speak. I don't know if other people think it works that way, but it does for me. I usually quilt with a quilters between needle; this is definitely not that. This is massive on purpose to hold the size of the thread and to cause my stitches to be more uneven because I usually have very regular stitches. This forces me to be a little more sporadic. I decided to do a mixture of quilting and tying. I am using size 20 omega crochet thread in a variegated red to white thread.

The reason I say a mixture is, this is definitely not quilting thread or small stitched, but it isn't truly tying a quilt, either. It is a toss up between the two.

(Bottom of quilt looking up: this has a cotton bat, I was afraid to bring any more wool into my home right now.)

Progress on auction quilt for 4th grade

progress , originally uploaded by sunshine's creations.

The stars are now on the quilt. I have the quilting or tying left to do, I haven't decided which yet, and the binding. Sorry, it was about 7 pm when I took this photo, and the lighting was bad; I will take a better photo later. Still have two days left of the fall break to get this done. I hope I can do it. Each star has a drawing on it; it's hard to see in the bad lighting.

A quilt in a weekend

This is one of the projects I was doing with the 4th Grade art class. They cut out Betsy Ross stars (5 pointed stars) by folding and, with one snip of the scissors, you have a five pointed star. Pretty cool technique. After that they drew on their paper stars. Then, after they had their designs figured out on paper, I handed them fabric stars that I cut using the same technique. They transferred their images and returned them to me. Now I have 'till Tuesday to turn them into a quilt.

The top is pieced, 50 squares for 50 states in the Union. This is meant to be a sofa quilt, long and skinny so that you can pull it over you while laying on the sofa, but not have it drag on the ground. This will be for the kids' Fall Harvest Party at school; they have an auction every year to raise money for field trips and playground equipment. So, I explained to the kids, not only are they helping to raise money for their school and get neat things to play on, they are also selling their art like other artists do.

There are 45 stars spread evenly over the top; all but 12 are now sewn on.

I have to finish sewing on the 12, quilt or tie and bind it still by Tuesday. I will let you know how it goes. The kids are on fall break from school; I only had yesterday off of work (at the flower shop), so I tried to get as much done in one day as possible. I think I did pretty well.

I may not be their teacher any more, but I made a promise and plan to keep it. It is very hard to think I am going to give this away because it was all the kids' and my work together. Maybe I will place a bid on my own quilt to get it back.

Patriot Day

Happy 4th of July

Blogiversary: win an apron

So, July 5th is my blog's anniversary (blogiversary). I can't believe it has been two years since my first post. I decided I wanted to give away a reproduction copy of one of GGH aprons (which apron reproduction that can be won is still a surprise that will be posted the day before the winner is announced). You haven't even seen all of the aprons yet, so it is a big surprise (over 30 of them); way more to come. All are welcome to enter; just leave a comment on this post about either something you learned from my blog in the last 2 years, or something you just liked that I posted, or something you would like to see more of on my blog (no profanity or anything of that sort), or all of the above is fine, too, and please leave a way for me to contact you. A winner will be drawn on July 19th; that gives you a few weeks to leave a comment. Tell all your friends. This should be fun. I will close entries at 5 p.m. on the 19th, Utah time. Plus I should have all of Great Grandma Harbaugh's aprons posted by then, too, for your viewing pleasure.

Thanks, sunshine

Memorial Day

Back from our family picnic. Wow, a lot of people sure looked at that cobbler recipe; over 1100 thus far. My husband's family liked it, too, because it is all gone! Hope you had a lovely day with friends and family.

Happy Presidents' Day

I hope you are all enjoying this day with your kids since they are all out of school in most of the USA. Me, I am hanging curtains and making curtains; nothing fancy, just trying to cover up some really big windows in my family room. It has been like living in a fish bowl for the last 6 months, and I just can't take it too much longer.

Patriotic Quilt Top/ Happy Veterans Day

This quilt is a collection of two 4th of July swaps and three different embroidery/signature block swaps. One swap for quilt blocks was over 6 years ago for all star blocks in a patriotic fabrics. They are six-inch blocks to which I had to add a boarder to make them work with the other blocks. The next swap was what felt like the never ending signature swap; it ended after the second signature swap did and after the second block swap ended. The last signature block I got about two weeks ago from an on-going block swap over on MJF. The last five blank blocks are for my family members: one for each kid, husband and self. I will embroider on them later after they each have picked a picture. I am sure it will be a butterfly, lady bug, fairy for the kids; a peace dove for me; and haven't got a clue what my husband will pick for me to embroider. Even though these blocks where not originally intended to make one quilt, I think they came out fine together. This is a twin size quilt. I probably won't get this quilted in the near future, but at least it is out of block stage. The spacer blocks have writing on them; I am sure you cannot read it, but it is the pledge of allegiance written over and over again.

What you cannot see in this photo is me and my 6-year-old daughter standing on the stairs trying to hold this up while my husband takes the photo. Those little hands on the top left of the photo are hers. It was funny because as she was standing on her tip toes trying to hold it as high as she could without falling over, she was wobbling all over the place.

last day to sign up / Small Apron Collection

Today is the last day to sign up for the give away on my blog tomorrow: please go here and leave a comment to be entered.

I also thought it might be fun to show some aprons that I own. With the holidays coming up I am wearing these more and more. Just sort of makes things a little more festive.

1. I decorated this apron with hi-straw flowers. The apron itself is store bought about 10 years ago.
2. This apron was a gift from Bemoosie last year.
3. Purchased vintage apron from Vintage chic.
4. These aprons are all made by Aunt George as gifts for my children and myself.
5. Vintage apron that my cousin Colleen bought for me at a antique sale in the park.
6. Apron I found at a thrift store last month.
7. This is actually an apron I bought at our local grocery store. I liked it because of it's color, red, but also figured it was one my husband could wear too and not look girlie. Not that it is possible for him to look girlie in the slightest bit.
8. Reversible apron made by smoothiejuice given to me by Judyblueeyes.
9. Apron, a gift from suzyhomemaker.
10. Apron I crocheted and gave away.
11. Aprons I made and gave away for mini-apron swap.