Cuteness

The big Ralph Lauren shirt quilt is done!  Yippee!  The borders are "Ralph Lauren blue" and navy.  I think it looks great.  I have to put two more of these together in January, but for now I'm on my own time and I certainly have a few things I'd like to finish before the end of the year.  :-)

I asked the Evil Stepdaughter for a recent picture of Grand #3 and this is what I got.  Too cute!  I'm told he shared quite a bit of that jelly toast with the dog.  That would have been fun to see.  (Grandmothers can say that sort of thing!  LOL)

Our big excitement of the week (decidedly not cute) was a broken water pipe.  Our water bill showed that we were hemorrhaging water.  Ouch!  We found a leak in the crawl space and had it fixed.  I got a credit from the town and thought we were all done.  Heh.  I got the next water bill and it was still very high.  So we had the plumber come back and look everything over again.  I went back to the town and they showed me the readout from the new wireless water meter.  We were losing gallons and gallons.  Almost 80 gallons during the night alone!  Yikes!  We had a swamp developing on the downside of the yard and the neighbor's driveway was wet.  So the leak sniffer man came and painted an orange circle right in front of the foundation, next to the front stoop.  And back came the plumbers.  (They're loving us and our money.  Sigh.)

I'm glad I didn't have to dig that heavy wet clay!  Hard, dirty work.

It turns out the polybutylene water supply line had split.  We thought we might have damaged the pipe when we yanked out the big azaleas.  The plumber assured us it was way too deep for us to have done the damage.  (Whew!)  The house is 25 years old and was built in the heyday of polybutylene, which is no longer available in the US and Canada, after many lawsuits.  We will probably be fixing leaks for years to come as it has passed it's life expectancy.   (*&%$#@*!)

The plumber was not pleased to see that they ran the water supply in the same trench as the sewer line.  Worse, it was underneath the sewer pipe.  You can see it there.  The polybutylene had become stiff and brittle.  The split was where it bent to curve around to the other side of the sewer line. 

So until we decide to have a new trench dug and a whole new water line installed, this is our fix.  Up and over, which seems to be working just fine for now.

I have to go back to the town next week for hopefully another credit.  I was told that sometime next year we will be able to access our water meter readouts online.  That will be fabulous.  We'll be able to keep tabs on our sub-par plumbing without having to regularly visit the crawl space.  (Ick.)

Water issues taken care of for now, I went back to my sewing machine and finished up all the Holiday Blocks for the December guild meeting.  I realize I missed putting one of them up for the photo!  Oh well.  I would have been glad to win a set of any of them, but alas I didn't.

Kathie had fun at the guild meeting collecting all of "our" holiday blocks.  We made the kits up back in September using Bonnie Hunter's Happy Scrappy Houses pattern.

It was a fun meeting, with lots of tables so we could enjoy all the holiday food everyone brought.  We had a long parade of charity quilts and later on a wonderful show & tell.

There were endless door prizes too (which I also didn't win) and we also presented the Heritage Day raffle quilt that I didn't win to the actual winner.  Sigh.  It's a lovely scrap quilt and I wouldn't have minded lugging it home with me.  Really! :-)

My secret pal gifted me with some chocolates and the 2012 coupon book for a local quilt shop.  Cool!

As if I don't have any other sewing to do, I have allowed myself to get sucked into enthused about a new project.  Not a block-of-the-month....but a block-of-the-day!  Yep.  Send The Tramp a sympathy card now.  Well maybe not.  At least I'll be using up some of my mountain of scraps.  He's bound to like that part of it.  :-)  Jeanneke in The Netherlands has started a weblog called Building Houses from Scraps and challenged us to join her.  I took one look and I was a goner.  Cute little blocks.  And they are houses!  What's not to like??  LOL  And Jantine has generously created and shared a foundation piecing pattern for those of us who don't want to sew 366 house blocks by hand.  Yesssss!

Last night I played around making myself cute little templates for all the cute little pieces and today I made my first block.  Woot!  Ever so cute.  I love the idea of using novelty prints in the some of the windows and doorways.  Cool.  Something to hunt for.  Hee hee!

No less cute....to my eye anyway....are the dogs.  In this case, Ngaire.  I was sitting on the floor with her at Mom and Dad's house and she had her nose right under the chair rocker.

Yep Ngaire, I'm playing with the camera again.

Clearly I'm being very boring.

Going....

Going....

Gone.

Sweet dreams!