WIP Wednesday and other news

Things have been moving slowly but surely around here. After finishing the denim rag quilt, I spent a few days going through my stash. You know, it's a small stash, especially compared to most of the people who have posted pictures of theirs online, but I do seem to have most of what I need when I need it, LOL! I started working on my snowman blocks for the snowman swap I'm in with the Ohio Quilters group. I've got 3 sets of 5 blocks to do, I've got 3 done of the first set and I'm still waffling on which blocks I'm going to do for the other 2 sets. The first set is paper pieced, my first foray into paper piecing and it's going pretty well if I do say so myself. I found the pattern online, it's actually small blocks put together to make one and it is really cute! I'm doing a different color set for each block (I hope that won't be a problem!!) and so far they are so cute I'm gonna have a hard time sending them away! Here are pics of my first 3:
I still have to embroider the eyes and mouth on them, but aren't they sweet?!



I got the free pattern for these cuties at Wendy's Quilting Place

One of the other two blocks I may be doing is also paper pieced and the other is appliqued. Then I'll have to decide if I want to hand applique them or machine applique. So many decisions!!! LOL! I guess the decision on the applique will depend on how much time I have left to get them done.
I would just like to get these finished in the next week or two, they aren't due until September 1st, but I would like to finish them early so I can get a start on the leaf block swap I am in for the Stashbuilders group. I'd like to join another snowman swap that is happening in another group but I am worried about getting involved in something else when we could be moving soon. Oh well, there will be other swaps!

As far as the moving goes, things are going well on the financing end so far. We've got everything taken care of on our end, we're just waiting, waiting, waiting for things to start moving on the other end. The realtor for the house has not put it back online, which is a good sign, so hopefully we'll have something good to tell them by the end of the week!

I've decided to start exercising again. I've gained a bunch of weight after the baby was born (silly me, I though a person LOST weight after having a baby---someone forgot to tell my body that fact!!!) I found an exercise bike on freecycle so DH went and got it for me and I've been trying to get 30 minutes a day on it. The baby is obsessed with it, of course. After watching me ride it from his crib, he climbed up onto it and figured out that he can move the handles and make it move like mom does, so now as long as he is near the bike, he can't stay off of it! Here are some pics of him exercising:





He's always trying to do what mom is doing. We spend all day getting him off the computer upstairs too! One of the kids blew out one of the keyboards so now it belongs to Seamus and he is thrilled to have his own, he takes it over to the computer and thinks he's doing something, LOL!
Poor kid fell today, just tripped over his own feet and met the corner of the wall with his forehead. Got a bump the size of an egg and a nice cut to go with it. It sure scared the heck out of me, I very nearly took him to the hospital but once he settled down he was back to his old self. You'd think after 6 kids I'd figure out that wounds on the head always look worse than they are, they bleed a whole lot and they swell up big---but they are usually just bumps and scrapes. Jeremy once fell off the monkey bar on our old swingset---headfirst---had no mark of any injury but he did happen to fracture his forehead. We ended up taking him to the hospital because he was obviously woosey and seemed to have a concussion---which he did. He was probably 4 years old at the time and the docs told us to keep him quiet for 3 weeks. I wasn't so worried about keeping him quiet as I was worried about keeping Stephen away from him! He healed fast and easy, so it all worked out. Seamus' bump ended going down by over half after a while so it doesn't look as bad as it did at first. He spent the rest of the day climbing and jumping and running as usual. KIDS! If I had fallen like that, I'd have a migraine for days!!!

Today was baking day so I took the day off from sewing---I spent almost the entire day in the kitchen, except when the baby got hurt and then I had to run Jessica up to TJ Maxx. I baked 2 loaves of bread, a batch of chocolate chip cookies, a batch of peanut butter cookies, a batch of snickerdoodles, I made an herb crusted roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy, garlic breadsticks and dirt cake for dessert. It's actually less than I usually bake, I stopped baking after Seamus got hurt so I'll have to do more tomorrow. I'm going to try and get up early and make 2 more loaves of bread and a few batches of onion bagels. Then I'll spend the rest of the day sewing---well, when I can, anyway.

That's it for today! Hopefully I'll have some really good news soon (I know, I've been saying that for weeks, I'm getting sick of hearing it too, LOL!)