pretty pink suit stuff

I've been working on posing suits, and I have pictures!

This first one is Stephaney's two-piece. It's a slinky glittery fabric with a gross of crystals added...although it's pretty blingy without the extra stones. I was nervous about this fabric, but it worked great and looks AWESOME on Steph!This is a hot pink that we are going to use for Stephaney's one piece. It's a little on the neon side, but the alternatives were cotton candy or plum...which I have all together on Phyllis there, below:

This is a partially blinged suit for another client, Laura: I'm only about a fourth of the way done with this one, but since I had the camera out, I thought I'd let her have an update!

And the following suits are currently homeless! I made them for a couple of people who changed their minds... so if anyone needs suits...

for a client in the #120 range:

for a client about 5'4" and #120-130?for a client about 5'2" and #110...so many of these suits are flexible depending on torso length and stuff. I don't know how those internet vendors can nail a suit without a couple of fittings...but maybe one of these days I'll figure it out...or I'll get an adjustable Phyllis!

Long lost blogger discovered in lab!

wow, it's been a while since I posted!

We are back in full driving season, not that I am sure we were ever out of driving season. The boys are both running cross country, Dan is playing soccer, too (which is mercifully almost over!) and then there is all that school stuff, Karen's scouts, etc.

We've had a great time this fall going to soccer and cross country, and are looking forward to Karen's basketball season beginning this winter. The poor kid has been dragged around unmercifully (or left behind, which she secretly prefers, since she gets to watch TV uninterupted), so it's totally her turn to be the carpool focus.

I'm working on more posing suits right now and hope to get some new pictures uploaded here soon. I have some really nice girls getting ready to do the Monster Mash in Middletown on October 25th. I hope I can find time to get stones glued on here in the next couple of weeks!

I am also getting ready to start a secret project for a friend who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Oh, and there's that Scout troop I sort of lead, the PSR (parish school of religion) class and something else...oh, a JOB!

My boss broke her leg a few weeks ago and has been homebound ever since. I have been trying to keep up my end of things here in the lab, but my slide staining hasn't been working well. This is really frustrating, since my ego says I should be able to do lots of science WELL in addition to the rest of the stuff I do (like blog on lab time?). Okay, back to the bench.

The Life I Always Wanted

I had a somewhat blissed out weekend, in which I decided that I probably have the life I always wanted...except that I don't know that I ever really had a specific life in mind. I guess the point is that I have a bit of serenity at the moment (this, too, shall pass!). I am grateful for the people in my life and stuff I get to do fairly regularly, and nothing too major to whine about.

I have healthy, smart, fun kids.

My husband loves me and I love him.

I have two dogs who also love me...of course, I am also the one who remembers to fill their water bowl, but I'll take it!

I have a home AND a tacky little trailer by the water

I have plenty of art supplies for just about anything I want to do (that doesn't mean I have ENOUGH, just that I recognize that I do have alot)

I have friends and family within a moment's notice

I got to take a nap in a hammock the other day

I am creative and clever and I am almost never bored

How is that for a gratitude list? I little corny, maybe, but it's still good to make a list now and then. I try to remember to make a list of at least five things at night before I fall asleep, but alot of the time I fall asleep before I get very far. Which is something to be grateful for in itself...the ability to fall asleep relatively easily most nights!

Now today my rat allergies are cranked up to about 11 on a scale of 1-10, we are in the middle of a big old experiment at work and I am just an itchy, sneezy mess. I look like hell, and I can't put on any makeup to hide that fact because it would just run off with the eyes and the nose...but I am working at being grateful for a job that I like (with the obvious exception of our research animal!), and grateful that the guy who invented benadryl. Nothing else works quite as well. I a bit foggy, but I'm functioning!

I also have a "be careful what you ask for" item: One of the Goodyear Guys is also a shepherd...and I told him that I am a spinner so he brought Tom three big bags stuffed full of raw fleece--woo hoo! so I dumped one of the bags in the driveway last week and started to 'skirt' it...which means pulling out anything icky, like "dung tags" which might also be referred to as 'dingleberries' or simply 'poo' and burrs and stuff...there were LOTS AND LOTS OF BURRS! What the heck were these sheep doing all last fall? My goodness! I tore my hands up and make a big mess in the driveway, but I managed to get a laundry basket full of de-burred fleece to wash...there is alot of lanolin in that fleece, too! three trips into hot water and the spin cycle in the washer...and I now have a laundry basket full of hay and fleece...I have been carding the wool so that I can spin it, but it's still pretty nasy stuff...I think I might have to learn to weave rugs or something.

THEN, I took the next bag down to camp to dump it, and bought some gardening gloves to protect me from the burrs...and SURPRISE! No burrs! Not a one! This bag had a good bit of poo to pull off, but I think this must me lambs wool, because it's got a much shorter staple length and lots of hay, but very few burrs. It's much finer stuff. I washed it a bunch down at camp and it was nice and sunny on saturday so it dried out pretty well. I haven't started to try to card it because I am still working on the first batch...but I'm learning that maybe I don't want to retire to the side of a mountain and raise sheep after all!

Norris Lake

Sam, getting his comeuppance from Luke. Sam has been regularly beating the tar out of Grandma Mary, so it was refreshing for the rest of us when Luke won. Sam is still smarting, but I think he needs that!


We have been back from vacation for over a week, so I really think it's time to get those pics uploaded!



We had a great time at the lake. Our house, named "Bullwinkle" for reasons I am not privy to, was very nice. Ninety three stair steps from the house to the dock, so we all came home with serious glutes! The weather was beautiful, too. It only rained on the last day, so we got lots and lots of sun and fun.

Getting ready to go boating. The water was so clear and green there!

I have to practice relaxing. I am so used to being needed somewhere that I was a little nervous with all of the free time I had...I kept feeling like I needed to be doing something somewhere else. This was probably the first vacation we've been on where we didn't have to pay attention to the kids 100% of the time. The cousins were there, so our kids hung out with them alot and didn't really talk to us very much!
Mark, Nancy and the kid from the house next door relaxing on the mega station floaty thing


I did wind up needing to go to Walmart to buy fabric while we were there because even though I took a quilt to work on, it wasn't 'getting it' for me, so I had to buy something and start a new project. I'll post pictures of it one of these days.
Niece-in-law Danean with great nephews Mason and Johnny.


On the way home we stopped for dinner at the Sander's Cafe--across the street from the location of the first place that the colonel made fried chicken. It was a KFC and a museum in one. Interesting. It made me want to take one of those road trips across the country to see all of the obscure monuments and such...you know, like the world's largest ball of twine.



Peace!

Pre-Vacation Anxiety

Here is Karen, week before last at the twilight camp overnight. The girls made rain sticks. Now, look below:

That is Karen minus about 9 inches of hair! She donated her locks to Lock of Love through Great Clips. I think she looks awesome! If it wasn't for that thumb in her mouth half the time, I might think she was almost 11 or even 12 (she really is almost 11...I just have to harp on the thumb thing as often as possible.

Now, here are some interesting people that I just met last week: my friend Carolyn's parents. Okay, not really. I've known them for about fifteen years, but at Carolyn's birthday party I was introduced to her dad about three or four times. It was really nice to meet him each and every time!
This is a picture of our lot at Camp Turn A Bout the same weekend--pretty, isn't it? As you can see, we were a little under water there! Poor Tom has had to move the trailer out three times this spring, which is a little more often than usual--usually once we move in in May, we are good for the season. A couple of times we've had to move out in May, but never in June! Next thing, the four horsemen will be galloping through!

It's not like I don't have enough to do to stay busy right now, but I am finding that I am worried about which craft project I am going to take with me on vacation. I have half a dozen UFO quilts that need quilting, but I really don't feel like taking the machine and all the crap--batting and such--to put those together. But on the other hand, I do want to take my machine and start a new quilt of some sort. Or start a new hand-piecing project. Or a new knitting project. I have plenty of knitting UFO's that I can do, so maybe I'll just take those with me and quit whining about wanting the perfect project to do while I sit and do nothing else!

only two weeks behind schedule!

Okay, I took these pictures week before last at Camp Michaels during our ill fated stormy evening of twilight camp. I was playing around with when to use flash and when not to. I like the colors that I get without the flash, but I can't get the clarity. I am sure there is some sort of manual shutter speed thing that I could do and then lighten the pictures up in photoshop, but I am not that sophisticated at the moment.

This one, above, is a rotten stump, very fuzzy, without the flash. The shot below is the same thing with the flash...more sharpness, but I think I lost a good bit of the contrast...the dark icky rotten parts of the wood are all washed out.

Down here is a little creek. I love to take pictures of water and get the motion. There is just something cool about a mossy creek. It makes me think of King Arthur and Robin Hood stories for some reason...that middle ages fantasy thing. I expect to see little fairies flitting around.

Moving Week

The Pixley Lab is moving down a floor this week. I have been in a bit of denial, I think, not getting too worked up about things. This really is a big job...or maybe I'm just getting sucked into the chaos in other people's minds...I am trying to be laid back and "in the moment" if I can be all recovery-ish about it. But now that the moving guys are coming in the morning, I realize I'm not all that organized about things. Well, I will be or I won't. Sitting here updating my blog might be a tiny bit of a procrastinating mechanism, but hey...at this point, fifteen minutes isn't going to make things much different!

here are more pictures...Dan got a haircut last week in preparation for his new job at Goodyear Tire and Auto Service...he looks really good! I loved the long haired rock and roll look thing he had going on, but I think I like clean Dan even better. Poor baby got braces put on yesterday, so his next picture probably isn't going to be so smiley...he's pretty miserable right now.

Karen is planning to get her mane removed next and donate the ponytail to Locks of Love...we'll do pics of that next!