Crime Cover-up Fail

Taking Mom's sewing scissors without permission is forbidden. Using Mom's sewing scissors for anything other than fabric is forbidden and here we have a two-fer :-)

Long ago I stayed at some people's house and one evening they took me shopping with them. The Mom bought a nice new pair of scissors from a fabric store and we all heard her give a STERN lecture on what would happen to any of her children who touched the sewing scissors without permission or who used them to cut anything but fabric. Oh yes, her thirteen-year-old son was present!
The next morning I walked up their driveway and there in the dirt in front of the porch were the new sewing scissors and a roll of nylon rope with several shorter pieces that had been cut from it.
I remember standing there taking stock of my age and position. I was eighteen; did that put me on the side of the adults or the kids? If I was an adult, then I needed to go tell the mother about this right away, but I couldn't quite see my way clear to rat on a poor thirteen year old kid I'd been playing outside with all that week.
Hahaha, his younger sister came along right after me, took just one glimpse at that scene and it was "MAAAAWWWWMMMM!!!!"

Finding this on the stairs definitely reminded me of that and made me smile. Little boys really don't have much sense of self-preservation, do they?

What I fished out of the garbage

Karen's throwing her failures away again... 



THIS didn't make the grade, either! 

Free Bible Study Software

I did a bit of comparing and also tried several Bible study software suites.  This one's the best AND free. 

http://www.e-sword.net/

There's a mobile version for Pocket PC and it works GREAT.  I had free Olive Tree for mobile too, but ended up uninstalling it.  This just works better, and is really easy to navigate. 

String quilt done

I just folded over a bias strip and zigzagged through all the layers.  Only one short section came out lopsided enough to merit picking it out and straightening it.  And it's done!  Well, hey, it's that or lay there on the shelf for another few weeks!  

Dave gets this one and he loves it! 

Word for the day: WAIN

I read in Spurgeon this morning:
"The firstfruits were the pledge of the harvest. As soon as the Israelite had plucked the first handful of ripe ears, he looked forward with glad anticipation to the time when the wain should creak beneath the sheaves."

I've read of wainscoting and figured from the context that it was something on a wall, but hadn't ever looked it up, and hadn't ever heard of a "wain" before...


WAIN


a large and heavy vehicle for farm use : WAGON, CART *a hay wain on a meadow*


WAINSCOT
from Middle Dutch wagenschot, probably from wagen cart + schot shot, crossbar, wooden partition; akin to Old English shot


Britain: a fine grade of oak imported for woodwork
(1): a wooden lining of an interior wall usually paneled
(2): a lining of an interior wall irrespective of material *a tile wainscot*
c: the lower three or four feet of an interior wall when finished differently from the remainder of the wall (as with wood panels, tile, or marble slabs)


WAINSCOT
transitive verb


to line (as a wall) with or as if with boards or paneling
*wainscoted with looking glass*

So that's the proper term for the walls in the dinette of the house I grew up.  The lower half was paneling with wood patterns, and the upper half was wallpaper.

Cool.

Duct tape can't fix that

Nope! 
There is never a reason to say "Duct tape can't fix that!" 

I had to fish the two halves of the shattered pencil sharpener container out of the garbage to fix them.  One of my kids obviously lacked duct-tape imagination  :-) 

My box of scraps

I love my box of scraps. These are the strips too narrow to be cut into any of the collections of squares I've got going on.
I can't explain why I love this box so much.  I just do.  It's so frugal.  It's so nothing-into-something.

When I have five minutes to myself, I pull out that box and add a couple of strings to the latest block, then put it away. When I'm stressed out, sometimes I think about the box of scraps in there waiting for me, and just thinking about it makes me feel better! 

Maybe when I'm an old lady with nothing else to do, I'll make some of those magnificent, organized masterwork quilts.  For now, it's just so soothing to sew a seam here and there without needing to match up anything into any pattern. 

Here's that latest string quilt top, now layered and tied and just needs to be bound. 

There's the 4" squares.  I cut them out of the scraps first, then use the rest for the strings.  This is the style of quilt that I like the appearance of best-- just squares at random.  It looks so homelike and welcoming.  There's no thought to this except to make sure no two pieces of the same fabric end up right next to each other, and I can handle that level of stress  :-)