New Guest Room and Wall Hanging

I finished my guest room (which WAS my knitting room) and a wall hanging to hang in it, just in time for a visit from my daughter who lives in Tacoma.  Yaaay!   Got the wall hanging done just before I went to airport to pick her up. Here's a picture of the hanging

The room turned out nice I thought.  I went to the local Comfort Center and bought a futon and the guy threw in a "better" mattress for it than the cheapie that was on it.   I love it.   Naturally, the color meant I needed to sew the wall hanging onto a red background.   Here's the finished room with the hanging  and a second picture to show a little more of the room.  The lady who lived here before me had a carpenter husband and grandson and apparently they built the nice inset with shelves beside the window.  Its perfect for some of my knickknacks, which include a couple of the bunnies that prompted me to knit the bunny that I posted the pattern for in my last post.  Lucky enough, one of the bunnies is wearing a red plaid dress so she goes with the room :-)

I can still put my knitting machine back in that room, its legs are on sliders so its easy to slide to different rooms, it is presently in MY bedroom but I don't like it there because I tend to put clothes and "things" on it and even though its covered, that's not a good practice.   Besides, my bedroom isn't as bright as this room and I don't have a lot of company so its a better place all around for my knitting machine.

I learned a lot with the wall hanging, mostly about stabilizers, I used some of my fabric stash because I had a lot of the blue cotton that I sewed the squares on. The cotton was fairly thin and I used a medium tearaway on it but should have either used 2 layers of the tearaway or better yet, a fusible.  Reason:  The pattern shifted on a couple of the squares.  Actually, one of the squares came out larger than the others and didn't quite fit...naturally it was a center square so I had to do a lot of fudging.  If I had more fabric I would have done that square over but already had to do 2 over again so ran out of fabric.   Lesson learned!    But in the end it turned out ok and I like where its living although originally I was going to hang it out on my front porch.   NO WAY!  It has to live in the guest/knitting room.

Spring has arrived in the Northern Lower Peninsula

Well, last week it looked like spring, today it looks like almost-spring but the daffodils are up and it was actually hot out Friday. Today we are expecting rain but that's OK.
I spent Friday planting bushes along the wall next to my house. There was one lonely rose bush living there and that's it! So I moved the rose bush and planted 6 spreading yews. Also had a patio in the back of my courtyard that was pretty sad. It was brick and the bricks were all askew from the winters over the past few years so I had the bricks taken up and a wooden deck built. Unfortunately either the guy building the deck didn't buy enough wood or was trying to leave a place for water to drain between the deck and the brick wall behind it and left left about 18 inches. I hated how that looked and a friend suggested we take the bricks and lay them in that 18 inches. Mike (my son) came over and laid the bricks for me. NOW I have a nice deck, I won't fall off the back end of it thanks to the bricks and I'm a happy camper. There's more work to be done with the yard but at least it has a start.
The first picture is a view of my courtyard from the front, my house is on the right and is bordered by the brick wall on the back and neighbor's house on the left.


The second picture shows courtyard from the back (view from the patio).


I still have work to do on this side of the yard but not sure what I want to do with it. All it takes is money and time.

Living Room Painting is Done

TG, my DIL is ambitious. She came over to paint a little 8 x 8 wall that is between kitchen and living room, right next to the entry way. When I moved here she mentioned that she wants to try one of the "faux" techniques that are so popular now. Suede was the one she liked. Well, of course that piqued my interest so I went to several of the paint stores and looked at the faux stuff. I ended up liking "color wash" so when she emailed me that Sherwin Williams was having a weekend sale, I went to get my paint. I already had the samples that I've been looking at often so I pretty much knew the exact colors I wanted. I ended up with "Biscuit" for the majority of the living room, its sort of an off-white with a creamy base, not beige but very light beige. I should mention that the color when I moved in is pale green. I've never had a green wall and although its ok, its dingy and obviously been green for a very long time.

For The WALL , I wanted a darker reddish/berry color, more toward the berry than the red. So Saturday we started. She was planning on doing the red wall on Saturday so all I got was the berry colorwash stuff. I taped and she painted. That wall took longer to tape than to paint so when she was nearly finished she mentioned she really could do more if there were more to do so off I went to the paint store for the Biscuit paint. (no I didn't buy that color because of the dog--it just happened to be the color I picked). She ended up painting all but the wall that starts in the living room and ends all the way down the hall..so that still has to be done but it looks great.

Sunday she came back over and did the "faux colorwash" treatment...which we totally hated so we decided to just paint that color over the first color and be done with it. Its not quite as berry as I'd like but its done and some day I may give it another coat of a darker berry color but right now, ITS DONE!!!

Here's Biscuit...the off-white-creamy color


And here's the wall, on the left is the first coat, on the right is the finished coat but it looks very red in these 2 photos.

Yesterday my son came over and finished up by hanging my huge mirror that's been sitting on the floor since I moved in. Love the mirror but its so heavy I was afraid it would actually tear the doggone sheetrock down. So far, its fine. I changed the lighting on this to try to show the real color, it just comes out way too red in the pictures and its really a reddish berry color, this shows it better....

All I have left to do is hem the dining room curtains. For some reason the person who lived here before me had the draps but apparently made new ones and took the hems out of the others. The others match the living room drapes and I absolutely love those living room drapes so want them back up in the dining room. So today's job is to embroider a Thanksgiving Tweet flag and then the drapes. NO---Focus Roz! I want to make covers for those red cushions on the wicker chair...its way too red as it is now and I bought upholstery fabric for it so I'll do that today. Guess I'd better get off computer and get busy....

Autumn Tweets make Garden Flag

I bought myself a little garden flag holder because of a brainstorm I had that I could embroider designs on flag fabric. After I bought the fabric I wasn't so sure it was a good idea because embroidery has to be hooped really tight to keep it from puckering around the stitches and the designs I wanted to use were from Embroidery Library. Some of Embroidery Library's designs are a bit dense which was my concern. Anyway today I decided to tackle the project. I had bought Sport Nylon from Jo-Ann's which was recommended by the Babylock on-line projects. They happened to have a garden flag as a project. They recommended doing a 4-thread overlock around all 4 edges of the flat to keep the fabric from fraying so I did that, even though I haven't used my serger in a very long time. What the heck, its good to use these things if you have them, isn't it?

I must say it turned out pretty cute. I decided to put a cute dog under the birds just because everyone who walks by my house knows I have the little white dog behind my gate. I wish I had offset him a little but it was a matter of being able to hoop the flag farther down after I finished the Tweets, there wasn't room to hoop it tight if I had moved the dog over much farther so next time I think I'll do the embroidering first and then hem the flag,

Next flag will be Thanksgiving. I want to get some little hooks of some kind to attach the flag to the flag holder. Right now in case you can't tell, I'm using red paper clips, a bit ugly but one has to do what one has to do in a pinch. Besides, since the flag has to be inside my courtyard (nothing allowed outside the courtyard after October 30 because of snow plowing right up to the garage doors...so no one can tell from the road how I hooked that sucker up to the holder anyway. I'm really happy with the whole idea of the Tweets being using for the flag. Good Grief, I think I have a Tweet for every season...so glad I thought of it.