What is Normal Anyway?

I saw this floating around on Facebook and it made me smile:

Working On It

Oddly enough this week has been productive.  I finished a quilt:

I also put together this quilt top:

(It's Kathy Mack's Line Dance Baby Quilt Design from Pink Chalk)

It's been a while, but here are my current stats:

Other projects
Skill Builder- need to do the 2 June blocks

do. Good Stitches-  up to date

Sisters BOM- up to date
Christmas quilt - nada nada limonada

Stats for the Week:
New projects - 1
Completed projects - 1
WIP- 4

Linking up to WIP Wednesday.  

Birdie Vines Finish

I had the chance to finish up this quilt over the weekend.  It's part of the 100 Quilts for Kids.  It's going to be given to one of my husband's terminal cancer patients at the Children's Hospital.  She's only a couple years old and has a special place in my husband's heart.  I wanted the quilt to be cozy and cuddly for her, so all the fabrics (including the binding) are flannel.

Keeping with the vines theme I quilted Mario Vines down the birdie sashing.  You can see it best from the back:

June Do.Good Stitches

Bijoux Block:

Building Skills

I quilted my 2 May Skill Builder blocks.  The first block was quick and simple:

The second one I wanted to try Leah's Inside the Sun design.  I loved it when I first saw it on her blog and have been wanting to try it ever since.  My machine decided it didn't want to cooperate though.  This was the back of my block for the center line:

I haven't had that major of a tension issue in quite some time.  Just adjusting the tension wasn't working, but gratefully after changing my needle and re-threading the machine I was back up and running.

I wasn't happy with my flames.  I noticed that I lost the pointiness of the flames about half way through the echoing and I don't think I made the original flames varied and curvy enough.  These are all things I'll fix the next time I do this design.  It's a Skill Builder quilt, right?  :)

The Back

Tasty Blondies

I happen to be a lover of Food Network.  The other day I was watching an old episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay.  He challenged the owners of SugarDaddy's in a Blondie throwdown.  SugarDaddy's beat Bobby pretty soundly.  (They've also been featured on the Ellen Degeneres Show and the Today show).  Anyway, I realized that SugarDaddy's is based out of Columbus.  What have I been doing all this time?!  Since my mom was here a couple days before I had the baby, Joel and I headed to the East-side of Columbus to try these famous blondies as our "last date."

Joel had the Cinnamon Blondie and this is the one I tried: The Tahiti Blondie

Go here for their website

 We got my mom a Carmel Brownie.  I tried a bite and it was also delicious.  All of their brownies are cut out into circles, because they say that nobody wants the corner piece.   All 3 we tried were really good, but the surprise favorite of ours was their ice cream.  It was their mint brownie in a vanilla bean ice cream and it was ridiculously good.  It was extremely creamy with the perfect amount of mint and brownie.  It's some of the best ice cream I've ever had and I'm not even normally a mint ice cream person.  They also make cheesecake that we'll definitely have to try the next time we go there (because there will definitely be a second time).

Meanwhile, if you don't live close to Columbus don't despair, because they even ship their blondies and brownies internationally. 

BOMs

May Skill Builder #2: Switz Block

Moving on to June...
Sisters' Modern BOM: Contrary Wife

I also never posted my lucky winnings from Fabricworm: Kokka Graphic Leaves
Gotta love the Japanese Imports!

Linkin' up to BOMs Away.

The Lesser Known Assassination

Source

If you're anything like me you probably know quite a bit about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, but not a whole lot about James A. Garfield.  Our book club read Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President this past month, and it was fabulous. 

I should point out that I tend to be a lover mostly of fiction, but this book was so good.  It practically reads as a novel even though it's nonfiction.  It's hands down one of the best biographies I've ever read, and it was absolutely fascinating from the very first page.  I highly recommend this book.

Here's a summary of the book:

"James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet."