"Wicked"

Can anyone remember the name of the character that Julia Roberts played in "Pretty Woman"? I've been trying to remember all evening and I just can't seem to remember. Must be getting old......

At any rate, I felt just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman tonight. Not when she was a hooker on the street corner, or when she was replacing the steaming divits on the polo field, or when she got to go shopping on Rodeo Drive, but when she was wearing that sparkly red dress and the beautiful diamond necklace that came in the blue velvet box. 

Remember when she was sitting up in the balcony seat

listening to the music at the opera?

Well I felt just like that tonight.

I didn't have a sparkly red gown, beautiful diamonds or a balcony seat,

but I was wearing a long sparkly necklace that I got on the clearance rack at Charming Charlies..........

My sweet husband took me to see the broadway show "Wicked" tonight. 

It was my birthday present.

I don't recall ever attending such an amazing show.

We sat in a dark room with 3000 of our closest friends

and when the music started playing and the actors started singing the music started at the tips of my toes and  swirled right up to the top of my head and transported me to another time and place.  The beauty and the talent of the voices blending together made my breath intake sharply and my eyes fill with tears, just like Julia at the opera.  There were high notes that resonated in my soul and low notes that pressed against my chest until I just held my breath.



I think I have a flying monkey on my head!

 In addition to the melodic voices that filled the air, there was a visual feast for the eyes with delightful dancing,

cleverly

crafted costumes and some pretty fantastic set designs.

And the story........

Such imagination!

It was the story of the Wizard of Oz, but told from the perspective of The Good Witch and Bad Witch.   It was their story....Dorothy and Toto just got a mention.

The orchestra played beautifully.  I kept hearing the run of notes on the clarinet (the instrument I played for 6 years), the high reedy sound of the oboe and the slide of the trombone.  Took me back to my high school days.

I was mesmerized.  Transported.  And it was FUNNY too! 

Would love to watch this over and over and over again.

I so appreciate all of the talent that went into the production of this musical play. 

Thanks to my thoughtful husband for a magical gift. 

I'm going to sleep now...........Hope I get to see the show again in my dreams!

Sweet Dreams,

tammy

Design Wall Monday

Happy Monday!

What a great weekend spent with my family!

We celebrated our DIL's birthday with

a homemade pizza party.

I just love rolling out that homemade dough and making

my own little pizza!

While it was a great weekend I was happy to

get back to my studio this morning and work on a

couple of projects that I have going.

Below you will see 2 t-shirt quilts that are in progress.

Yes, this one is a t-shirt quilt.

Since I do alot of t-shirt quilts and I really hate

to discard any useful fabric, I have alot of

large squares of t-shirt backs.

About a year ago I thought that I would try to do

some embroidery on those squares and

lo and behold they turned out great!

I framed those squares today with fabric

and now I'm stuck.

I'm not happy with the size and it

obviously needs something else.

Maybe another frame around each one?

And a border fabric?

Or should I embroider 3 more squares to make

it a rectangle instead of a square quilt?

Any comments would be appreciated..........

Another t-shirt quilt in progress is this one filled

with sports shirts. 

This one is for a customer who is having me make it for her son

out of his pre-high school shirts. 

This young man came over to choose the shirts he wanted included

and I was impressed with his thoughtful creative choices

and very polite manner.

Here is our littlest pizza maker.

She did a fantastic job working her dough

and was very serious about it!

I predict a love of cooking in her future.

Enjoy your week,

tammy

I had a Pinterest Party!

Okay, I didn't really have a ~Pinterest~ party.

It was really just my turn to have Bunko at my house,

but I've been pinning tons of interesting recipes and hosting

bunko gave me a great excuse to make up some of these very

tasty treats!

I've been seeing all sorts of wonderfully coordinated party themes online and most of them have made little labels for all of the food.

So the day before the event I made up little labels and taped them to a skewer.

OMG!  Besides being really cute at the party they were super helpful

while I was trying to organize all of the ingrediants the day of!

We started off with Flavored Water

found  Here on Nancy Creative's blog.

Truthfully, we all FINISHED with the

flavored water at the end of the night.........

We all STARTED with a little glass of Margarita.

I usually put together my own recipe for a margarita

pitcher.  I start with one can of Limeade, then fill that can with

water and fill the can again with tequila and mix together in the pitcher. 

Since that didn't fill my pitcher I filled the can again with one of those

margarita mixes, then topped off the pitcher with tequila.

Sheesh, they were good and the pitcher was bone dry at the

end of the evening.......and I kept refilling it til I ran out of ingredients! 

This picture shows the Cucumber Chicken bites found on

Sugar Free Mom's blog

The cucumber sandwiches were pretty yummy, but

I had some leftover chicken and had used up all the cucumber so

I decided to toast up

some sourdough bread rounds and make some little sandwiches with them.

(Well, actually JENNY toasted up the sourdough rounds,

but I had cut them out the day before!) 

Can you say TASTY?

These little Caprese bites came from Terri's Table

Fresh basil, grape tomatoes and little mozzerella pearls.

YUM.

When I do a party I like to have a theme.

The closest "holiday" is St. Patrick's day so that became my theme.

I had these little plastic shot glasses tucked away in my holiday box, so I used them to create "Pot of Gold Sticks" from green, red, yellow and orange peppers.

Inspiration for this dish came from  here .

Carmel apple bites came from here.

I loved the Pizza on a stick recipe that I found on

Artisan Bread in Five.

This little appetizer were very tasty, however they turned

out a little too big to fit on a stick.  Guess I'll need to try this recipe again and maybe I'll get them to look just as good as they taste!

These rainbow fruit kabobs started the whole theme for St. Patrick's day.

What a clever idea found on Pinterest. 

No link was found with the picture so I can't credit the pinner.

I LOVE this little appetizer found on

My Wedding reception blog.

There are tons of cute little sliders and shooters and snackies, OH MY!

I wanted to make them all!

These cute glasses that I found at Ross are filled with Butternut squash soup and topped with a toasted cheese triangle.

What St. Patty's day party is complete without some

Irish Spuds?

These tasty morsels were found at Sea Salt with Food.

We changed the spices up quite abit using only butter, olive oil

and some garlic powder in the cooking portion. 

Jenny creatively added a mozzerella pearl on top of each mini potato

and when they melted down...... ummmm, lip smacking good!

I forgot to take a picture of the dessert, but I'm pretty sure I'll be making it again soon, so I'll post about that at a later date.

I made a deconstructed Mini Key Lime pie in a cute little mason jar.

At the beginning of the evening I felt a little bad that I had gone so overboard with the amount of food I had prepared. 

Our bunko group used to have dinner before we played, then

decided we should cut back and just have snacks.

Appetizers are snacks, right?

I stopped feeling bad when I realized that at the end of the evening

the plates were mostly empty!

A fun night was had by all and I so love and appreciate my

bunko buddies.

I feel so honored to be friends

with such a unique and wonderful group of ladies.

til next time,

tammy

Pretty Irish Lass

What a day

Greetings! 

And Happy Saturday! 

hope you've had as wonderful of a day as I have!

Today I visited a Project Linus Blanket Bee

organized by my friend Eve Buck who is a Phoenix area

coordinator for the Project Linus organization.

Eve and I used to work together at Sunburst Elementary School

many years ago and recently met up again at a quilt store during a shop hop.

We exchanged cards and went our merry ways.

Last spring my friend Kathy and I put in motion a dream that we both had.....the desire to give back.  And to give back doing what we love and using the talents we possess.  The HeartString Quilts Charity Sew-In was born.  You can read about our very first sew-in Here.

We've had several very productive sew-in's since that first one and have made quite a few quilts.  The Sew days are so wonderful because first of all quilters love to get together, Love to piece and quilt and love to share the knowledge they have about quilting with other quilters. 

Today Kathy and I took 6 six of our little quilts to the Blanket Bee.
Here they are sitting on the table ready to be processed.  The donated quilts are checked over to see if they are acceptable, (clean, no animal hair, well put together, happy colors) a label is sewn on, the quilt is "wanded" to see if there are any stray pins left in, then packaged up in bags to be donated to various hospitals, shelters, police and fire stations around the west valley.  All quilts are given to children.  We learned that around 400 quilts are given out each month. 

We arrived about 2 hours after the bee had begun so many of the ladies had already left, but we were amazed by all of the work stations.  There was a station for cutting fleece so it could be passed on to ladies who were adding a crochet border.  There were ladies sewing labels, ladies crocheting, ladies processing and bagging.  Amazing.

And drum roll please:

414 blankets were donated today!

Amazing!

Here's Eve in one of the little store rooms

pictured with blankets all bagged up and ready to be distributed.

Pretty awesome.

Makes me happy to know that our quilts will be put to good use

and hopefully cheer up a sick child. 

Wrap them in love.

On another note I got to spend a bit of quality time with

my best girl.

We are planting strawberries and hopefully they will grow

and we'll have a fun experience together.

And then we will EAT the strawberries!

Say a little prayer for me.....

I have a notorious brown thumb.

It ~might~ have something to do with the fact that sometimes I

forget to water things...........And we live in the desert......

God Bless,

tammy

Design Wall Monday

It is never too early to start on a holiday quilt!

Don't ya think?

Maybe if I start this halloween quilt now I might

have it finished by October!

A few years back a group of friends did a swap with

pumpkin blocks and halloween print nine patches.

I still have some moving around to do on this design

and probably make it 3 x 5 with a couple of borders

instead of 4 x 4. 

Should be fun to work on.

My other "design wall" project this week is my February hanger.

January seems to be zooming by so very quickly I figured

that I really should at least get this cut out.

This morning I quilted a couple of little t-shirt quilts

and had a small area of backing left

so I put this scrap of minkee on the machine and let

my granddaughter Mia do a little quilting.

Now I just have to figure out what to make her out of

this scrap. 

Pillow?  beanbags?  Doll blanket?

Any ideas?

Mia loves to look at the buttons on my quilting machine.

Crafter in the making!

Want to see more Design Wall inspirations?

Go to Judy's place and prepare to be inspired.

God Bless,

tammy

Sunday Funday

A couple of days ago I woke up with this idea to

make  up a quilt sample out of all of those little

t-shirt emblems that are about 6 inches square.

I'm going to be teaching a t-shirt class at a local quilt shop and I needed to have a sample to hang. 

So I got up and sorted thru all those squares and came up with this little quilt.

I did sashing and a border on this one.

Oh and this one too....

and this one I just butted the squares together without using sashing.

I pieced the quilts pretty quickly on Friday morning

and this morning I got them both quilted and ready to hand sew the binding down.  This was a really fun little project!

When mia was born my sweet friend Jo gave me a baggie full of barrettes that her daughters had worn when they were little. 

As you can see in the photo Mia's hair is really long in the front and

requires something to pull it back out of her face. 

She loved looking thru all the barrettes and picking out just the right one.

When she gets a little older I think that this bag of barrettes will

be a really fun matching game!

Blackberries are on sale at Sprouts this week so Mia and I made up a blackberry cobbler today.

In this picture I had Mia practicing her mixing skills.

She thought that was pretty fun, but really wanted something in the

bowl to mix!

She enjoyed tasting as each ingrediant went in!

Flour was pretty interesting.

Mia also did a little quilting today on the longarm.

Pictures of that to come!

God Bless,

tammy

Design Wall Monday

Happy Monday!

Over at Judy's it is Design Wall Monday

and here at Tammy's these quilt squares are in the

process of being designed!

Yes, It's a t-shirt quilt

and I have 25 squares cut and ready to go,

and 5 more squares to go.

When you are doing a t-shirt quilt those shirts that are a full square are

just easy peasy to do.

Then you have those squares where the t-shirt emblem is not

quite big enough to fill a 15" square.

Or the emblem is TOO big to fill the  15" square.

Then you have some creative work to do to get the "odd" square

ready to fit in with the other squares. 

Kinda like making a round peg fit into a square hole!

Later today I plan on selecting the fabric to complete this quilt.

I am hoping I can find it in my stash, but I ~might have to visit

the fabric store............?

My sweet 18 month old Mia is modeling a rockin' red robe

that I made for her mother over 20 years ago!

How cool is that?

Makes me happy.

Til next time,

Piecefully yours,

tammy