Busy Summer

Somehow this summer has gone flying by!  I don't know how it got to be September already!

I've been working on multiple projects... both inside and outside... that have been consuming a lot of time.  My running has also picked up during the summer and I'm running 45 minutes two days a week with a longer (~1.5 hr) run on the weekends.  I've gotten more fit, which I'm happy about.  I haven't quite broken the 30 minute barrier on a 5k, but I chalk up the last one to running when it was 77 degrees and 95% humidity.  Yuck!

Here's a few of the various projects that are on-going....

1. This is a quilt called Heat Wave by Judy Laquidara.  Its been stalled a bit due to working on other projects, but its in good shape.  I have to make a large pieced border yet in a snail's tail pattern, but I've made those blocks before and know how to get them to come out right.



2. The reason #1 is stalled.... a friend at work had a second child earlier this summer, so I've been working on a pair of quilts (one for child #1 and one for the new child).  Sadly, I'm WAY behind on this and I'm still not done with either quilt.  The baby was born in June, but the way I see it (or rationalize it) is that they won't need the blankets until it gets cold anyway.  :)




#3. In late May/early June, we went on a vacation to Myrtle Beach.  It was absolutely gorgeous and we had perfect weather.  The first photo is from the first morning there.  We had a tropical storm that was heading out from the prior day (hence the clouds), but the rest of the week was perfect.




#4.  I've gotten my groove back with needlepoint.  This is where it was earlier in the summer and the second photo is from the past few days.  I'm finally on to page 4... of 20+ pages.  A ways to go yet....




#5.  With the great weather we've had this summer, there's been a lot of work being done outside.  First and foremost is the stone wall that my husband has been building.  He picks out the rocks... I help him cement them all into place.  This is only one half of the wall.  There will be an arbor on the left of the picture before the second half of the wall starts up again.




All in all, its been a good summer.  It went by quickly, but hopefully we will still have several weeks of good weather before the true cold starts to set in.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Baby Quilt Progress

I know its been a while again since my last post.  Life has been busy around here.

I've been focusing a lot on work and my health lately.  On the health front, its no major issues...just trying to be more health conscious.  I picked up running over the summer and still try to get in two or three runs every week.  With cold weather and dark evenings on the horizon, I'm a little concerned that I won't be able to keep up my running routine.  I can easily run 3 miles outside in 30 minutes without much effort, but once I get on a treadmill.... good bye.  I feel like I'm dying after the first mile or so.

I don't know whether its boredom with being on a treadmill or if I just find it hard to run on a treadmill.  I know I will still look forward to my weekend running that I can do outside for as long as I can!  The good thing is that with running and paying attention to myself over the past year or so, I've gone from a size 8 or 10 down to a size 4 (sometimes a 6 if the style is really trim cut).  I'm now holding steady around 126 or 127 pounds, which is something I haven't been at for about 8 years, so I'm really pleased with that.

Anyway - on to the stuff you really want to see... the quilting!  :c)

A friend of ours is having a baby (boy) this fall, so I went about making a cute quilt for them a few weeks ago.  Here are the fabrics/squares all laid out in my OCD fashion.  LOL!


It was quick work to sew all the pieces together, especially since it just had to be random for the most part.  I did line up the larger squares as well as the 3-piece strip sets on my design wall to make sure there wasn't too much of one color family in any area of the quilt.


All the strips came together quickly and I think I got most of the top done in just a few hours.


When it came to sewing the longer strips, I sewed the strips first and then laid them out on the wall and moved things around as needed to try and minimize having the same colors next to each other.  The image below is missing some of the white sashing pieces, but it was only up there so I could see how the colored squares went together.


And here is the middle of the top... only one large border to add...


Ta-da!

One happy quilt top all put together.


I prepped the backing yesterday and hope to get it on the frame and quilted this weekend.  The backing material is a really cute polka dot that has similar colors as the front of the quilt.  I have a deep blue that I'm using for binding.  I wanted to use the green and the blue to give it a slightly more masculine feel since the baby is a boy.

I hope everyone is enjoying their fall.  I did see on one blog that Alaska is already receiving snow! September is a little early for snow...even for those of us who enjoy the snow!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Busy! Busy! Busy!

The past month has yet again absolutely flown by.  Its amazing how each year time seems to go by even faster than the last.  I'm not quite sure how that happens, but somehow we're into July already and I barely feel like summer started.

I've been keeping busy lately with a lot of things.  Work (as usual) keeps me busy during the week from about 7:30am until about 6pm.  However, over the past two months, I've taken up running three times a week.  Last fall, I kind of got kicked in the butt to do something about my weight (about 20-25 lbs over what I should have been).  I purchased a Fitbit Flex and have loved having it.  It seems silly, but it keeps me accountable for actually getting up and moving more.

The first few months, I paid attention to how much I was walking and changed my eating habits slightly (no more bagels for breakfast).  By November, I had lost the 20 lbs I wanted to lose.  I've continued with the exercise and become more fit.  I'm still trying to get the last 5 lbs or so (I would really like to be down to 125 lbs again), but I'll get there eventually.

I walked a 5k with my sister a few weeks ago and plan on running (or at least partially running) one in the next two weeks.  I'm definitely more fit than I was and am glad that I've lost the weight and can now run more easily.



My garden has also taken off in the past month.  My lupines were beautiful while they were blooming.  I now have orange coneflowers up as well as some lavender.  My phlox should be blooming shortly.



My clematis are also going like crazy.  I have purple, pink and white flowers all over the place.  I definitely need to get an updated picture of it.

Last but not least, I also had a client contact me for quilting her quilt last month.  I finished it up and sent it back to her and will share some pictures here, but that is for another post since I have some nice photos to show.  She did a great job with her embroidery and I made sure that my quilting didn't detract from the embroidered blocks at all.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Spring!

It is finally here!! :c)

We had our first truly nice weekend weather-wise this past weekend.  We had one day last week, but both Saturday and Sunday were nice here.  Much of the nice weather has been spent raking the yard to remove the dead grass....definitely not one of my favorite spring-time chores.  I'm sore from all the raking.  Half of the yard was done two weekends ago and the rest of it was done this past weekend.

However, my plants are starting to grow and its really nice to see some green! One of the "weaker" lupine plants below.  For some reason it is struggling a little in its current home, so I may decide to move it later this summer if it continues to struggle.


I have some silver mound that I split last fall and now have four plants.  They are all a bit smaller, but will definitely grow a bit this year.  You can keep trimming them all year to keep them nice and tidy, so they provide a nice accent to the garden.


My clematis are starting to show signs of life as well.


You do have to look closely to see some of the green...but its there.


I think these two plants are called columbine.  They were a bit over-crowded last year, so I did some re-arranging in the fall to try to give them some more space this year.  Hopefully it will help and make them happier.


These ones are campanula.  They produce very pretty purple flowers...and lots of them.  These were also moved last year as they were crowded in with the columbine.


These next two are my happiest lupines.  They have more stalks than I can count right now, so they are definitely in a happy place.  I can't wait to see how many flowers I get out of these guys this year.


So this next picture is a bit odd.  You all know that I do quilting (or at least attempt to do it when I can find the time to get into my sewing room).  Aside from taking care of the garden, I also help split the wood we use to heat the house in the winter.  I started splitting wood last fall when I was going through a stressful time at work and I've found that I absolutely love it.  It is a great workout and is amazing at stress relief.  Beating on a big hunk of wood is very satisfying!  :c)

Since my husband also splits the wood, there were times last fall that we would both want to split, but we only had one axe.  So one of us would have to find something else to do, or just stand there and pick up the wood pieces.  I decided to fix that this year and put a new axe on my birthday list.  Its the same length as the old one, but is a tad bit lighter and had great reviews on Amazon.


I didn't get a chance to test it out this weekend since we spent all of Sunday raking (Saturday was spent doing some family stuff).  I'm hoping to be able to test it out this coming weekend and see how it splits.  The reviews on Amazon said that it was really easy to split wood with the axe and has plenty of power to it such that you can actually get through the larger logs.

I do expect to get some quilting in this week as the next three days have nothing but rain in the forecast.  Hopefully I'll have something to share later this week.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Quilty Update

I finally got back into my sewing room this weekend.  It is the first time in about two or three months that I've spent any real time in there.  It felt good to be sewing again.  :c)

I made some progress on the Mariner's Compass quilt that I've been working on.  The quilting is slow-going as it is lots of little tiny pebbles.  However, so far it has been worth the effort.  I used wool batting on this quilt from Quilter's Dream, which gives a nice puffiness to the minimally quilted areas.  I'm also using Superior Threads' So Fine in the top and BottomLine in to the bobbin.  The denseness of the quilted portions really allows the points of the compass to pop-up


I'm really loving the texture that the pebble quilting is giving on this quilt.  The little circles really offset the straight lines of the rest of the quilt.


Can't help myself... another close-up picture.  :c)


So aside from stressing about work the past few months and not getting into my sewing room.... I have actually been exercising a bit more.  I realize during the summer that I just wasn't happy with where I was in terms of body size, weight, etc.  I finally decided to do something about it.  It may sound weird, but I went out and purchased a FitBit.  I got the Flex version as I wanted something that was easy to carry around with me.  I always had trouble with pedometers that either clipped on the waist or went in a pocket as I don't typically have pockets on my clothing for work and the waist option was just annoying.

The first week or so I simply wanted to track how much I was actually walking without changing any of my existing habits.  I was surprised to find that I wasn't walking nearly as much as I thought I was.  All my "running" around at work was really just going from meeting to meeting and then sitting for an hour or more.  Since then I've paid attention to how many steps I was getting in each day and forced myself to get up more frequently.  Instead of picking up the phone, I would walk to someone's desk.  Instead of parking close to the building, I parked further away.

I'm happy to say that with tracking my walking and a few small changes to my diet, I've been able to lose almost 20 pounds since September.  I'm routinely walking about 7,000 - 8,000 steps a day and when I go to the gym (2-3 times a week), I'm close to about 12,000 steps those days.  In the fall when the weather was nice, I was really walking a lot and most weekends had close to 20,000 steps on both Saturday and Sunday.  I'm looking forward to the spring weather in another few months and I hope I can increase my amount of walking again.

I saw that Karen posted about recently getting a FitBit.  I've had success with it and really like the features that the Apps have.  You can challenge friends during the week and on weekends to meet step goals for a day or for an entire week or just a weekend.  Sometimes its surprising how much a little thing like an easy way to track steps can help, but for me, it helped a lot.  It made me aware of the fact that I didn't walk nearly as much as I thought I did, which made me want to walk more.  I look forward to each day when I get that little buzz towards the end of the day signaling that I met my step goal.

So while you are sewing...don't forget to get up and walk every now and then!  :c)

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations