Wallpaper is not fun..

to scrape off your walls. When we bought this house 13 years ago it had hideous wallpaper in several rooms. The first room I tackled was the upstairs room with bright pink, yellow, orange, and lime green parasol ladies. We kindly refer to it still as the ugliest wallpaper known to man. It was put up with about three buckets of wallpaper paste, so I spent days and days scrubbing the paste off. Then I spent a day painting it a nice clean white and stenciling ivy around the top. It was lovely, but it totally killed my ambition of dealing with the wallpaper in the front room. Fortunately for me, my husband covered the walls of this room with his music collection and other goodies, so it was a good excuse not to have to do anything about the ugliness of it. Well, now that he has officially gained his own room to have his stuff in, this room is empty and needs to be spruced up before we refurnish it. This week has been filled with buckets of water, scrapers and deciding on paint colors. I have to fill some holes this morning, and hopefully this afternoon I will transform the first room people see when they come into my house into a thing of beauty. I hope! Before and after pictures will happen next week.

Needless to say, not a lot of quilting happened this week, but I did get borders on two of my tops, prepared the backs, and best of all made the binding! I discovered last week what a lovely thing it is to do the binding when you finish the top, instead of waiting until you finish the quilting. When I finish quilting a quilt I am always bummed out because I have to get the binding made before I can finish. If you do the binding before you do the quilting it makes it great, all you have to do is trim the edges of the top and sew it on. I highly recommend doing it this way! Plus that it makes me plan ahead. Often I don't even think about the binding until after I quilt, then I am scrambling for the right fabric. This way you have to actually pick it out and have it on hand so you are less likely to have to "make do" on the binding, which is the frame for your quilt. Not really the time to use whatever you can find.

This is the quilt I put borders on yesterday. Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of the pattern I used. I made it for a shop sample, so I don't have the patten anymore, and the shop isn't carrying it (which is why I got the sample back). Hopefully I can remember so I can give credit to the designer when it is quilted. The pattern didn't include the border, but I really think it needed the border to frame it. I got a nice blue green color to put on the back. I am thinking about quilting it with a pastel variegated thread I have, but I'm not too sure what I am going to quilt on it yet. Still in the thinking mode!

This is the sunrise I saw last week. It was absolutely spectacular! What followed it up was an equally spectacular rainstorm - so I guess there is truth to the saying, Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. This beauty makes me think of the Glory of God - as awesome as the beauty of this sunrise is, it is nothing compared to the beauty of our Creator! And with that thought I will exit and start working on the transformation of my now unwallpapered room.