finds at the show on Saturday.....

I emptied my bag of goodies and took a picture.....I had one rule, no Christmas patterns or fabric this year. I broke that rule when I bought Santa & Rudolf in the Photo Booth. It was too funny. The swirly stencil can be used in scrapbooking or quilts, a double duty thing. I saw Tanya make a landscape quilt on her blog using the book Accidental Landscapes. She made it look so easy.... it would be her fault that when I saw the book, I bought it. The tiger was only because we are losing our high school and they are the tigers! There is a scrap bag of dyed fabric, a  huge cut of hand dyed fabric and some batiks that said buy me when I touched them in a booth. Two other patterns that captured my attention. The blocks are small and the samples looked so sweet in the booth. Then there is the rope. Sigh. We watched a demo on wrapping fabric around it then sewing the rope in a circle using the zigzag stitch. It looked like a braided rug. Both Karen and I bought it. If we never make a place mat or even a coaster....we have some mighty fine clothes line ready to go!

A cache right outside the Iowa Events Center.....
When we walked out, I turned the GPS on, the cache I wanted to find was only about 300 feet away! We had to go for it!!
As we approached, it looked like the cache was hidden near this pair of hands. I knocked on them to see if they were hollow and they are. So I got down to look up inside. BINGO, an ice cream bucket full of goodies! It was no urban micro. It was a nice sized, "you can't miss it" kind of cache.

You can see my feet sticking out on the bottom as I signed the log book. It was really quiet on this end of the building...so I am pretty sure that no one saw us and wondered what we were doing.
It was a great day.

geocaching October 10th, 2010

Yesterday was 10/10/10. To celebrate 10 years of geocaching, we were to go out and cache, then make it the biggest logging day yet at geocaching.comThat is exactly what we did.

We went up to Lakota to do Tour of the Town a multi-cache. When I logged it, I got this "souvenir button" thing for my profile. The cache we went to was 10 mile away. It just seemed so perfect!

I don't know what tractor joe does, but so many of his pictures are off....crooked, slanted, distorted. When he snapped the first one, I said right away...."do another, just in case." So one looks shorter and wider than I am, in my opinion anyway. The other looks taller and thinner than I am, the way I think I should look.  If he could make all my pictures look like the second one, I don't think I would complain at all.

These are what we were looking for...small green containers with black caps. See it, at the top and middle of the picture?  They held the coordinates and one line of a poem that I wrote down. Tractor joe laid the twigs so that they were "X marks the spot"

Here I am logging at the final stage. The cache container is huge! It was hard to miss this one. I liked that.

Billion dollar satellites

Sure do us some good

When it comes down to finding

All that tupperware in the woods.

Beautiful day, my pics so far.....

Before we could head south to Des Moines, we had to head east. It was still early. The sun hadn't been up to long. It was the start of a glorious day here in Iowa.

Karen had a list of names and numbers of different brands of machines...we looked at all of them. We played with all of them. Doing some free-motion quilting didn't seem so hard.

This is the machine that really captured Karen's heart. Miss Melody....she sat here the longest playing with it and talking to the gals in the booth about. Karen was falling in love.

Meanwhile, I was a few chairs down sewing these pre-cut fleece squares together on a serger. The gals said to sew all I wanted....(they wanted me occupied, then they could concentrate on Karen and Miss Melody, they could see she was so close to saying yes, "I want this machine!")  The small blankets were going to be donated to the Methodist Hospital for the preemies. It was rather addicting doing this and so easy!! I still don't know why I would want a serger though. What does one do with a serger anyway??? (the yellow was more lime green)

 Even though we were "just looking"....Karen said yes to the machine! As luck would have it, we didn't have to haul the box ourselves! One of the gals in the booth said, "Dad will carry it out to your car." But we parked way up on the north end of the building. We were told that was nothing to walk. OK! Off we went......

He walked rather fast. But, Karen never left his side. She was staying close to Melody the whole time. I on the other hand was side tracked....I had to stop for one more picture.

They have windows that over look the area where the vendors are. I had to grab a picture of that....
These are pictures I have so far. I need to go empty my bag and show what fun stuff I found at the show.  But first, it is 10-10-10 today. I am going geocaching to help make today the biggest log day, EVAR. 
I will keep posting things as I get pictures. Karen still has the pictures of yesterday's cache right outside building!!

Roadtrip....

Tomorrow is the big day!
I will be going to Des Moines for the Quilt Show with  Karen, the small town quilter
We went last year with my Mom, but she is away on holiday.
So right now it is just the two of us.
Last year, we pretty much ignored sewing machines. But this year, Karen wants
to check them out. She swears we will not be lugging one out to the car....
she just wants to look....
What can that hurt???
I don't have anything in particular that I want....I just want to look and soak it all up!!!

bouncing around with different projects....

I have been bouncing around on different projects.  I unearthed the penguin blocks. They are getting a simple straight layout. Going wonky with them seemed a little complicated....and I want it done sooner, rather than later. 
The two wall quilts only need their binding put on...and since binding is my LEAST favorite part, they sit. They will be a surprise gift for someone....and it isn't any of my sister's, so they don't need to get their hopes up....and in case my Mom is reading....they aren't for her either.

This is my oops picture. When I was sewing my rows together I ended up with something that just didn't look right. Out came the seam ripper. I am planning on quilting this soon too. A quilt came back from the quilters recently, and there is lots of extra batting on it. I haven't checked, but I hope it is wide enough to use with this small quilt.

auction deal.....

I forgot, a couple weeks ago when my sister was here, she and tractor joe went to an auction.

There was a piece of furniture that might work in the living room for storage of tractor joe's trucking and off season clothes. They sent a picture, should they bid???
I suppose, if it goes low enough.

Was I ever shocked when they said they got it...

for only...

you won't believe this....


they got it for $2.50.
That right two dollars and 50 cents.
I couldn't believe it.
Then the debate was.....do we paint it black, or leave it as is.
Where do we put it? Here or there?
Right now it is behind the recliner.
Waiting.

Odds are, it will be there a year from now, still waiting and wondering....
Will I get a new location and a coat of black paint??

I'm too busy making mistakes 2 B perfect!

I was doing my normal blog hopping this morning, finding new and different places to visit.

I found something interesting at this blog.....ordinarycourage

The whole concept spoke to me, perfection is so overrated.

I liked looking at the different links, seeing every one's signs. There are a ton there and I didn't hit them all.

It was this afternoon, when I looked out and saw our newest car....

and I remembered....

(my head hung low)

The poor thing is sporting a donut right now.

I drove on a flat tire recently, doing a fantastic job of wrecking the tire.

I wondered why the car was suddenly driving so rough.

How strange, why is it so shaky, what is wrong with it?

At first I wasn't even going to blog about it....being perfect and all, ya know. But I have changed my mind.

I do want you to know, if I were perfect, I would redo the picture, later, when the car was in the shade and you would be able read the sign better. I used the sign words in the title, there, problem solved. 

The new tire should be in on Tuesday. It isn't the same exact tire as the others, but it will be close enough.....So even though it will have mismatched tires, it will be perfect because I can drive it again.

Well, wait a minute, that is if tractor joe even lets me get close to it.