My comic book boards arrived, so I carved out an afternoon to pull all the yardage out of the drawers, and start wrapping.

For those that aren’t familiar, comic book boards are small, light pieces of cardboard, the stores and collectors place in behind their books to help keep them stiff for display and storage.

But quilters and crafters have caught on, and use them for storing fabric!

I ordered a stack of 200 and they came with a pile of little plastic clips to help keep the fabric secure. It’s a pretty simple process.

Lay your fabric out flat and place the board at the bottom:

fold in both sides

Then wrap the fabric until there’s no more to wrap and secure with the clip. (If you don’t have clips, bobby pins would work too)

The result is a nice, neat, stiff piece of fabric that’s perfect for organization and storage. What I like too is you can keep any scrap pieces wrapped up secure with them too, simply by tucking them in behind the cardboard before wrapping.

With the first one done, I set about doing the rest. It took much longer than I expected… alllllll afternoon AND most of the evening, with only a short break to grab a quick dinner.

It was a such a long project that all four of the snoopervisors took it in shifts.

But eventually, it was all wrapped and the only thing left to do was get it all in the file cupboard.

I am absolutely THRILLED with how it turned out, with the exception of one thing…

Notice how the bottom row looks a bit… squished??? Well it turns out that the bottom row is about 3/8″ shorter than the top row!!! Why??? I have no idea. So the cardboards are just a touch too tall. I got them all in… but…

Mom had a good idea… they boards can all be cut a little shorter… but that means unwrapping and re-wrapping all those bottom ones. So instead… I will trim the boards down as I use them.

And with all that fabric up here, I can not only see and use my yardage more easily, it freed up three of the drawers for other things. I ended up filling them full of backing yardage that was just piled up beside the dressers. It’s not all my backing yardage, as there’s still some in a bin, and a little on top of the bin. But I don’t have piles that fall over all over the place if you breath on them wrong!

Burton thinks it’s a job well done! And so do I!

I was online, ordering Miss Wren a birthday Squishmallow from Amazon, when something fun popped up in the suggestions, and I just had to get it…

I’m not quite sure if Burton agrees …

But look! They even have matching tails!

Whenever I have a chance, I’ve been out in the yard, stalking the birds with my new long lens.

Even with the advantage of the lens, the birds remain elusive and wary.

The sparrows are the easiest to capture. There’s alway an army of them in the HUGE trumpet vine that covers my neighbours backyard arbour. At any time, I can fine anywhere from 10probably 30 of these little guys up there.

But I noticed, they have a couple interlopers.

It’s a juvenile Brown-Headed Cowbird. You may not know, but cowbirds are a little sneaky – they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, and let those birds raise the babies. When they are old enough, the babies head back to their cowbird family… and start the whole thing over again… crazy eh?

But I don’t think it’s the same for Starlings…

But this starling is almost always hanging with the sparrows. Maybe he was an orphan, and they took him in?

Even though the sparrows are so common, I do think they are pretty darn cute.

But it’s really the colourful birds I love. The cardinals have NOT been cooperative, but this little Red-Headed House Finch did a little modeling for me.

I’ve seen a few Gold Finches too, but haven’t been able to get pics.

And though the Blue Jays LOVE to sit in the trees and scream at me, getting them on film has proved difficult. I get a lot of blurry shots and blue-jay butt…

They do love this peanut ring I got last year.

It should keep them coming around so I can get more pictures.

It is finally March!!!

The weirdest thing…. February was just flying by, but then all of a sudden, the last week and a half just started to drag. It felt like March was never going to happen.

But then it did… so it was time for a decor change

Out with the heart quilt, and in with the shamrocks!

About mid-way through February. I decide Burton’s March quilt would have to be centred around St. Patrick’s Day. But I didn’t have any St. Pat’s-themed fabric in the stash. And as much as I love my fluffbutt, I wasn’t about to order fabric to make him a quilt. His quilts are all supposed to be about using leftovers.

So I turned to the internets for inspiration and came across several shamrock/clover blocks, and sketched out my idea.

As you can see, the large shamrock is made up of a pile of green scraps. It was a little more time consuming that I planned. Usually I like Burton’s quilts to be quick, easy projects, but I think this was work it in the end. The border shamrocks are just dizzy daisies without their centres.

The whole thing was quilted with a 1/4″ line outside of each shamrock, then bound and put on his wee chaise.

And now Burton feels like the luckiest cat in the world!

It was a rather busy weekend, so there’s not much tiny needle progress to show you.

This sad bit of stitching is all I managed to accomplish. and as soon as I put that last stitch in, I promptly ripped it all out. I’m making the “butt nugget” sign on the right. And the designer has put the pattern over several pages. That’s fine… but she didn’t centre it over the pages. Stupid me, was starting late in the evening (when I should know I’m too tired to start a new project) and I centred from the centre of the pages, not the pattern! (There’s no actual pattern centre marked – you have to figure it out yourself). It took me all those stitches to realize I would be wasting a buttload of fabric if I kept going.

And let me say… ripping back knitting is one thing… cross stitching… it’s a whole other animal, and not a fun one! I’d rather tink back knit lace than pull out all those tight, tiny stitches.

But I did. And by next Tuesday, I hope to have a proper TNT post for you.

February is almost over, and while it certainly wasn’t frugal, as I planned, there were more fabulous finds!

A couple weekends ago, Mom brought me this – and old Singer treadle machine. It belonged to my Great Grandmother. Sort of… the cabinet was my Great Grandmother’s. But the machine that was originally in it was beyond repair – so a few years ago, Mom replaced it with one in better condition.

Mom’s had the cabinet for as long as can remember. I have very vivid memories of laying on the living room floor with my feet on the pedal, pushing it up and down

The veneer on the piece that folds over and covers the machine was badly damaged, so Dave’s been working on restoring it. But then we stopped into our favourite used store, and I saw this.

For those that aren’t familiar, it’s the coffin top from a similar Singer of the same era. It would have looked something like this.

It’s a different table, but that box would still fit over my machine head… so I grabbed it. When we got home, we moved the machine into it’s semi-permanent spot (it will get moved when we finish other rooms in the house), and I put the coffin top over the machine.

Other than not being attached (it would have been hinged on its original machine) it looks like it belongs there! Dave’s still going to refinish the proper lid for the cabinet, but I think this is a great solution for now. I can always turn the coffin top into something else later.

Here’s a closer look at all those pretty machine details.

The next fabulous find was found the same day and place we found the coffin top.

It’s actually made to go on it’s side, and many of you will recognize it as an open filing cupboard. It probably sat atop a large desk at home point. My first thought when I saw it was… I can put fabric in that!!!

When we got it home, Dave gave it a fresh coat of white paint to match my cutting table/dresser. Then we hefted it up on top (it’s darn heavy)

Naturally, someone had to come in and give it a thorough inspection

I’ve got a stack of comic book boards coming, and when they do, there will be an afternoon of going through the yardage to wrap them all up into mini-bolts of fabric. I’ll share pics of what it looks like when it’s full of a rainbow of fabric!

And last… a few days later, we came across this as another thrift store.

It’s something I’ve been pondering for a while. We mostly use the side door in the kitchen to come and go. But there’s no where to sit and put shoes on. I’ve been looking at them on FB market place, and most people want between $100 and $150. I don’t think that’s outrageous, but you can bet your bottom dollar I was over the moon when I saw this was priced at just $25 at the thrift store!!!

Dave was a little dubious about my vision of where it would go, until I explained that all my shoes that he’s normally kicking around the kitchen can go INSIDE. I’ve never seen a man agree to something so quick in my life.

I cleared out space for it, and immediately, it too was thoroughly inspected and claimed.

It sits just inside the dining room (which faces the kitchen). The side door is just to the left so it’s the perfect place to sit and put on shoes. And since the dining room and kitchen are open concept, the lovely warm pine will be the perfect match to Grandma’s table and hutch when we finally finish that room!

Now there’s only a couple days left in the month. I wonder if any more fabulous finds will find a way to cross my path?

With all the sewing I’ve done lately, I’ve blasted through another pile of scraps for my Leader/Ender project. And all those scraps turned into…

Ten measly blocks! Can you believe it. Each one of those blocks uses eight parallelograms. So there’s 80 parallelograms made from scraps… it feels like a lot until you get them all together into blocks.

Still. It’s 10 more added to my stash, which gives me 41 in total. Lemmy and I did some calculations, and we think 56 will give us a decent-sized lap quilt.

So that 15 more blocks to make! We’ve got more sewing to do!

When you last saw my gardens, everything was green and beautiful and I told you something bad was coming!

It hit Wednesday. It started out as wet snow

I think Burton’s face sums up how we felt about it.

After a few hours, it looked like this….

And the snow turned to ice pellets – then freezing rain. It continued overnight, and in the morning, we woke up to a crunchy icy wonderland. Happily, we didn’t lose power, which was my main concern when they announced the impending storm the day before.

All my poor little bulbs were buried, with barely a hint in sight

Only a few were above the snow. Happily, they weren’t so advanced that this little freeze will hurt them.

My pussywillows look a little sad with their little hats of ice (but I just love that pop of pink!!!)

There are just rows and rows of icicles on every eave and edge around.

I probably should have brought my solar lanterns in for the winter, but they look pretty with their little crowns of icicles

And everywhere everything is just encased in ice. It would have been prettier if the sun was shining, but though the storm had passed, the skies remained grey.

The weather is warming up again, so all this frostiness won’t last. But I’m sure Mother Nature has another round or two left in store for us

Everybody is kung fu fighting…

Those cats were fast as lightning…

It was a little bit frightening…

But they kept kung fu fighting**

** Not the lyrics, I know…

The other day, I decided to finally try out the long lens I’d gotten in that great camera score.

Unlike the townhouse, most of the squirrels here are still very wary of me. So they seemed like the perfect subject for this stealthy paparazzo and her fancy new lens.

I was not disappointed…

This beautiful grey girl was very excited about the fresh batch of peanuts I’d put in the feeder.

I spent a good half an hour or so snapping pictures of her as she ran back and forth grabbing one peanut at at time…

The lens is even better than I hoped.

I can get decent shots from almost clear across the yard.

Now… to try it on all the wonderful birds that come to the yard!