What I'll do for $100

We bought a new car tonight. Yay for new car. Boo for new car payment. I am sure none of you could care less about that though. The good part of the story is after we test drove it and looked at several other cars, we were walking with the salesman back to the dealership. There was a big puddle we were all walking around. The salesman turns to me and says, "I'll give you $100 off right now if you go jump in that puddle." and then he laughed. So I jumped with both feet into the puddle and made a big splash like a little kid would. He looked at me like I was nuts and then busted up laughing. When he brought out the paperwork, the first discount on the list was $100 for jumping in a puddle. It made me really happy. It's the little things, isn't it?

Ghastlies quilt

Remember the Alexander Henry "The Ghastlies" fabric that I wrote about in the My First Quilt post? I bought 8 pieces of 5 different patterns from the line and have started my quilt! I only bought 1 yard of each pattern so I barely have enough to make the quilt. This lead me to be very nervous about cutting it all out, especially the 4 main pieces (above fabric in white, gray, pink and green).

I wanted to be able to get the best 9 squares out of each yard possible, but I wasn't sure how to go about doing that. I found a roll of semi-transparent parchment paper and cut out 9 11" square pieces. Then I could lay them on the fabric and rearrange to my heart's content until I had it perfect. Then pin and cut. It worked fantastic.

I designed the blocks to be super simple, as this is my first attempt at quilting and I don't have a very long attention span for very detailed sewing. Each block only has 5 pieces. I am making 36 blocks, so that was 180 pieces to cut out. It went really fast and I had just enough of each fabric to get the pieces I need. Here they are all cut out:

I started sewing the individual blocks together today and have 8 done. They are going really quickly and I think I'll be done much sooner than I thought! Plenty of time before Halloween.

The final quilt will be 6 blocks by 6 blocks, so 84" square. I love huge quilts. It should look a little something like this (except each center piece will be different instead of repeating the same thing over and over):

What do you think?

I'm back!

Wow. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Three out-of-state trips in less than 20 days, many birthdays, out-of-state visitors to our house, a near car wreck resulting in a broken out back window and a multitude of other madness have kept me off the computer a lot lately.

I actually don't have time to go over all of it but I will have posts and pictures of Ghastly quilt progress, shopping sprees including new clothes and dishes and more coming soon. I did want to let you know that Staci over at Reyn on Fashion cleaned out my closet for me and wrote about it on her blog. If that doesn't sound like that exciting of a topic to you, you should check it out anyway because Staci did a great job of giving tips she used on my closet (including making a "to buy" list of key garments) that you can definitely use to bring an editorial eye to your own closet. Read the post here.