Sample making

Just a quick note about food. I know - you're probably tired of me yakking about it. I decided to get back on track and start tracking my food and water intake in MyFitnessPal which is a free app on your phone.

Logged in breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. My goal to maintain my weight at the top end of that range is in there (I'm currently right in the middle of my 5-pound range). The app is linked to FitBit so if you do exercise, it allows you extra calories to compensate for the exercise. My 10,000 steps yesterday added about 200 extra calories. Bottom line - after I logged in my dinner, I was short over 500 calories. Hmm - what to eat? what to eat? Why did I need to eat?

Well, if you consistently eat too little (even when you're trying to lose weight), your body goes into starvation mode and will start to shut down and I certainly don't want that. I had two apples and some almonds as my after dinner snack. Still short 300 calories for the day. I can live with that, but I've got to more conscious of what I eat throughout the day which is why the app is a good thing.

Let's face it, we tend to eat the same things most days. Once the foods are in MyFitnessPal (or you can scan or search) for foods, it's easy to keep track of everything. One more fun thing to do with your phone. It even has restaurant food calorie count in there. And it's fun to see how much fat, sugar, carbs and other nutrition facts for the day.

I went out to do errands in the morning and thought I was going to be really quick so I didn't take any snacks with me. I was getting hungry but did NOT cave and buy a bad snack when I was out. I waited until I got home and had lunch a bit earlier. It's all about making lifestyle choices.  Again - drinking lots of water and I'm talking full eight glasses a day will help to curb any cravings.

I was going to make soup for lunch and the night before when grocery shopping, I had forgotten a couple of key ingredients. But by the time I got home, there was no time to make the soup. That's for another day.

I also went magazine shopping. There's a couple of magazines on the newsstand with my quilts in them, but do you think I could find one of them???  Nope - it's the LAST issue of QUILTY and there's a super cool quilt of mine in the magazine. I couldn't find it here, nor in the US. Hmm - where to find it? A friend of mine bought it so I've asked her where she got it. I'm supposed to get copies of the magazines, but the editors been lax for the last bit. I'll e-mail them!

Then since I was out, I made my way to Value Village. I don't go that often, but from time to time, I like to check out what they have. After seeing what some of the other educators did for their samples, I wanted to get some inexpensive stuff to practise on and hopefully to become my samples.  (Check out some of the cool articles on envrionmental foot print on the Value Village website)

Do you know how hard it is to find a kids T-shirt with NO LOGO on it. I managed to find two. A pink one and a black one. I also picked up a small hand towel with nothing on it so that will be a good sample for working with towels. The plain T-shirts were .99 cents - anything with a logo on it cost more.

Two T-shirts and a hand towel to make samples for machine embroidery

We're going ahead with the Sit n Sew today, although I'm not sure how many will come since we've had snow, but not much, but it's very cold out this morning. So as I was tidying up, I placed these notebooks on the ironing board where I had just laid out those T-shirts. I think we have a very specific color theme happening here.

My notebooks match the T-shirts!

What a coincidence that was!

I was also looking for some jackets to upcycle. OK - I'm looking for a jean jacket. I'm sure that I have one here. I know that I bought one or two in the past. I'm just not sure that I still have them (or it). I may have decided that I no longer wanted to do that and gave it away. But I don't think so. The question now is to remember where I put it.

Some of the clothing samples that we saw this week were amazing. Not in your face embroidery, but subtle designs that dressed up an ordinary top. And the lady who had the most bought her stuff at Goodwill. She must have a great Goodwill!

I have a circuit when I hit Value Village. I check out the books - the craft books. I found a great and current book on making bags with something that I've been looking for for a long time. That was $4. They had tons of coloring books and while I have a few, I found a funky one and I bought that. I've got some great plans for that coloring book and it isn't coloring the pages! Then I'm off to the textile section where I look for hand made quilts - only ever found one and that had been scooped by a man just in front of me! I check the puzzles and games section. That's normally all I check, but yesterday, I scoured the women's section for jackets - shoot - I should have checked the men's section. And then to the kids section for shirts.

If you're into Value Village, there's a 50% off sale tomorrow - January 21.

Sale at Value Village on January 21

After lunch, it was time to get to work! I had this charity quilt to quilt. The quilt is made from solids, but I didn't have enough of any of the leftovers for the backing. I dug through my Northcott stash buckets and found a piece of Toscana that was the perfect color. It was JUST the right size. Now, how cool was that. I should have bought lottery tickets!

I made the backing and loaded the quilt on the long arm. It was easy to quilt and no issues with the machine.

West End Modern Quilt Guild charity quilt for QUILTCON

Here's the full view (or almost) of the quilt.

WEMQG charity quilt

I know it looks jumbly, that was the intention. The theme was small piecing and the easiest way to do that was in blocks. I hope to get the binding on later today. I had JUST enough of one of the solids to make the binding as well.

This is charity quilt numer two that I've quilted so far this year. It's so easy to keep track when you keep lists or pictures in the proper folders!


The next quilt is loaded and ready for quilting later today.

Next quilt is loaded

I did some machine embroidery, but it has to be cleaned up before I show you the blocks. I hope to get that done today as well.

Oh - I should say that yesterday when I went to walk the dogs, I bundled up. T-shirt tucked into pants. A pair of fleece lined jeans over my yoga pants. Hat, scarf, a small pair of gloves under my double fleece mittens and my BRIGHT ORANGE ski jacket that I bought a couple of years ago. I was toasty warm the entire walk and in fact, had to undo my jacket on the way home because I was a tad too toasty! A pair of light wool socks in my rain boots and my feet were good as well. It's all about knowing how to dress.

I guess that's it for today. I need to shovel the driveway before any of the brave souls come over today and it should be easier since there's only one car in the driveway!

Have a super day and stay warm if you're caught in this crazy weather. Thank goodness we don't live in the Maritimes where they going to get hit once again with a major storm.

Ciao!!!