Bobby Socks News

I didn't quite make it for the 1st, but the 4th isn't bad!
Check out the free redwork page for the new 2010 January pattern!
And don't forget to check out the news on the blog.

Hello out there! I know it's been a while - a long while...
Before I go into things, I just want to apologize for going off the radar for the past year without any explanation. Believe me, I've felt nothing but guilty about it.

Last fall, I found myself unexpectedly going from teaching 80% to 100%.
The impact it made on my life outside of school was greater than I'd expected...
I barely got the redwork alphabet completed and was strongly feeling
like I needed to take a year's break from the site and offereing a free pattern series.
But I didn't want to take a year off.

So I kept telling myself, I'd get started later in the year, but later never came.

Not only was I teaching 100%, but I ended up filling in as vice-principal for several weeks.
This added more hours to my school days.
Even the holidays were busy. My husband and I accompanied our youngest two daughters
on a trip to Paris, the French Riviera, and Rome at Easter.
This summer we spent time in Washington, DC and some of the Eastern seaboard states
as well as Minneapolis.

To add to this, we spent a lot of time getting our house ready to sell
and we've been working on plans to build a new house.

We have been back at school for five weeks already. I am teaching 90% this year.
So I have a little more time for quilting this year, I hope!

I've decided to do my news updates on a blog this year.
So for further news, please go to:
www.bobbysocksqc.com/blog/

I've obviously been on another writing hiatus! So I went through some of the photos we've taken over the past several months (to jog my failing memory!).

April: my friend Julie threw an Audrey Hepburn themed birthday party for me and my friends Penny and Cathy (all April birthdays...) Check the tea party link on my home page for some pictures. We all dressed up!

May: had the house on our local quilt shop's Home Tour (featuring homes with sewing rooms). It was a fund raiser for the Relay for Life (cancer fund raiser). I will be updating the virtual home tour on this site with pictures taken that day - as all of the photos currently posted are out of date (you'll see...).

Shea turned sweet 16. She decided she wanted to go horseback riding with her friends. We saw lots of cattle, a few deer, and even a fox!

June: my favourite (and only) son, Sam, graduated from high school. He was valedictorian and did an awesome job on his speech (not just his mother thought so...!) He has moved 2 hours away to attend the same university his parents did. He is an engineering student and doing great so far!

Summer: I was going to write that we didn't do too much or go too far this summer. Then, I started looking through the pictures and realized it was a pretty great summer! We did spend some time - and money :( - on our house. We are newly shingled and have a brand spanking new boiler (good-bye 100-year-old clunker)! We are still working on the kitchen. I'll post some pictures when we're done. But we also managed to find some time to do a little relaxing and a little travelling.

Our oldest daughter, Meredith, and her husband Kurt were home from Toronto for a couple of weeks. Meredith put on a concert at our museum theatre to raise money to return for her fourth year of college. It was a great evening! If you click here:
www.meredithjordan.ca, you can check out her website and even listen to her concert.

We also met my husband's sisters (and husbands) and his dad in Minneapolis for a few days together.

Here are Reni, Brenda and I in front of the Mary Tyler Moore statue in Minneapolis.

While our middle daughter Shea was on a mission trip in Northern Ireland, we took a quick trip to Calgary and Banff, Alberta with Martha, Sam and a couple of Sam's friends. This trip was for the boys, so they chose most of the activties: shooting at a shooting range, seeing "Dark Knight" at an Imax theater, and visiting the Olympic Park in Calgary, which involved activities like trying the luge and flying down a zipline from the top of the ski jump!

This may not look so high from the photo, but believe me, it was.
I still can't believe I actually went down it. Even Martha went down!
It was a great ride, but I must admit that the "landing" is pretty jarring...

Oh, almost forgot, my site was listed in "Quilter's Home" as one of the "Fun, Fabulous, Freebies". That was kind of exciting.

October: We had a crazy snowstorm (a foot of snow!) the first week of October. Play the video clip below. By the way, the reason why I'm in such a hurry cleaning off the car, is because I totally forgot to meet my friends for coffee (even though they called me an hour before!) and I was hurrying to meet them. (Unbeknownst to me, my husband was recording my efforts...)

We made these "sleepover" cupcakes
with marshmallow body and pillow, vanilla wafer head, jelly belly feet, teddy grahams bear, and icing. The blankets are made from StarBurst candies (heat candy in microwave for 2 or 3 seconds, then flatten with rolling pin and cut into a square).
(Martha found these in a book - didn't make it up myself!)

Here are the girls with their cupcakes
They used slightly more icing than I did!

My two youngest daughters performed in their school musical "Annie". Shea was "Lily" (Rooster's girlfriend) and a Boylen sister. Martha was "Kate", one of the orphans. They did an awesome job and had a lot of fun. It was Martha's first school musical.

I'm back. 2008 has been a little crazy. I hope to do some catch-up on the website this month, including a revamped home tour. I'm going to go way back to the beginning of the year - January! Well, the end of January. My oldest daughter Meredith was performing her "final concert" at Humber College. It's the biggest performance in the four year degree program. And I was going to be there. I was able to get a few days off from school and had my flight to Toronto booked. I drove to the airport...and that's when the fun kind of stopped.

A nasty blizzard hit and I was stuck in the Regina airport (and hotels) for two days and nights. I finally was able to fly out and arrived in Toronto about 3 hours after her concert was over. I'll admit to shedding a few tears. The concert went very well, and I hope to see a DVD of it some day!

It happened that Meredith and Kurt were moving to a new apartment the day after I arrived, so I was happy to be able to help with that. They moved into a nice little apartment with a view of Lake Ontario, just a few blocks from Meredith's school. Here's the view out the window the day they moved in:

That's right - blizzards were following me! We had tickets for "The Steven and Chris Show" the morning of theToronto blizzard. We almost didn't go - not wanting to risk our lives - but decided to give the roads downtown a try. And we made it. It was very fun. They even did the audience members' makeup, which we thought was pretty funny.

Steven and Chris answer design questions at the end of the show, so I had emailed in a question about replacing the wallpaper in my living room. It's a new show and I'd only seen it once. The episode I saw, they answered an email question. What I didn't know was that if you're actually at the show, you have to ask your question on camera. I had a stomach ache through the entire show...Steven and Chris were very nice, though, and while scarey, we had a good laugh.

If you'd like to see "my segment", just click on the link below. Then when you're on Steven and Chris's site, click on the arrow on the little tv screen - and there I'll be:
My Wallpaper Question on "Steven and Chris"

Happy New Year! Made any resolutions? I think, perhaps, that one of mine should be to get each pattern up on the first of each month...! I had drawn the M pattern a couple of weeks before Christmas, figuring I'd have lots of time between Christmas and New Year's to stitch it. However, the pattern went missing - I think it might have become fire-starter in the den! So it was back to square one, and I ended up drawing a totally different block. What started off as a moose with a mink collar and mittens hanging from the antlers, ended up being a mannequin with marabou, mittens, a mirror and Mary Jane shoes! I like the second one much better!! I must admit, I'm not in love with the L block. Who knows, maybe I'll come up with a better version down the road...

So I promised some Christmas pictures that never did quite appear in December. Below is a slide show of some of my Christmas decorating. It's a quite a bit different from last year since I've redecorated the living room and bought a white tree. I also redecorated the den just before Christmas - no more plaid and golf wallpaper - yea! Another new thing I tried this year was wrapping some of my light fixtures in garland and then hanging lots of ornaments from them. I loved how they looked! In the slide show, you'll see a picture of my dad taking my youngest daughter on their annual trek to cut down a real tree (at a tree farm, of course!). There is also another picture of Martha with my mom and the fairy quilt my mom made for her. The group of ladies you see are my quilting friends. The picture was taken at our annual progressive supper - and yes, the husbands were invited too. It's the best meal we eat all year!!

I changed my webspace provider in December. I was sorry to have to do this, but I was having too much trouble with the previous provider. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. As some of you discovered, old bookmarks would no longer work. You had to type in www.bobbysocksqc.com and then re-bookmark it. Hopefully everyone will find me again! And hopefully this will be the last move I have to make.