Richie's Short Visit

Today my cousin Richie was in town for a few hours in the morning. He is moving up to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska and taking the ferry all the way up so that he can enjoy the scenery along the way. So I went to meet him at the ferry terminal and take him to see a few things in town before he had to get back on to continue on his way north. Sadly we only had about 4 hours and as such I didn't get a chance to show him much but it was still good to see him as it has been a few years.

His trip on the ferry, despite an unfortunate round of seasickness last night, has been awesome so far. The ferry is always fun to ride on and you get a chance to meet and talk with so many awesome people. He introduced me to a few guys he had been hanging out with on the ferry (all of whom were new to Alaska) and it was fun for me to listen to them talk about how amazing it is up here. They all had quite a few stories they wanted to share with me about how friendly and awesome they found all the locals on the ferry to be. Needless to say Richie and his friends on the ferry seemed to be very excited by the culture that exists up here.

Since we had such little time I just took Richie out for a short trip to the Shrine of St. Therese and over to the Mendenhall Glacier, which Richie was quite impressed by. He seemed genuinely excited to see a glacier ("this is like something you read about in school but never see") and to hear about some of my adventures taking hikes out to the glacier and climbing around in the ice caves.  I took him on a short walk out to the waterfall and tried to let him just soak in the beauty of it all. Sadly by that time it was time for Richie to get back on the ferry and continue on his way. I had a fun time chatting with him and hearing about how much he already loves Alaska and sincerely hope that he will come back to Juneau to spend a few days with me like he promised so I can take him on some amazing hikes. Good Luck on the rest of your travels Richie and I hope to see you in Juneau again sometime soon!!

Instagram

Today thanks to my little brother Sean I discovered that Instagram was now available on the Android market. I downloaded it and I must admit I am kind of obsessed...

Sadly about four days ago I transferred all my pictures over to my computer : (  This means that I have far less pictures than I would like on my phone but I did have fun with a few. This picture is one I shot a few days ago while enjoying a fire on the beach which happens to be one of my all time favorite activities in the world.

Naturally I had to mess around with some of the awesome photo's I took of the Deathly Hallows Quilt I made for baby bj....

I can already tell that I am going to have way too much fun with this app in the future and I realized that I now have the perfect thing to do with one blank wall in my room, fill it up with awesome Instagram photos...

I am not sure why I am so in love with this photo of Jamie and Karl, but it has long been one of my favorites...
















Eeekk! I love, love, love what I was able to do with my favorite photo!!!

If you want to follow me on Instagram please feel free to do so my username is _twim_ because they won't allow periods....

Deathly Hallows Quilt

    To explain the idea for this quilt I have to go back a few years. See I have this amazing friend Rachelle, I love her to pieces as does the rest of my family, she is part of our family now. When she needed a place to live in college we shared a room in an apartment, when she needed a job after college my Dad helped her get an interview where he works, when she needs someone to laugh with my sister Sarah is always there. So when she got pregnant my Mother and sister worked on throwing a baby shower for her. I cannot be there and am oh so sad about that, so I decided that I had to make the best gift she will get at that shower (or maybe just after depending on how fast I sew).

Ben, Rachelle and I relaxing in my bed when they came up to Alaska last summer, my only friends from down south who have made the trek up to Alaska and visited me. Yes it was where they eloped and a dream place for Ben to visit, but I maintain they came up solely because I live up here : )

    See Rachelle, Ben (her equally awesome husband) and I love Harry Potter. We take this love to a whole new level, all three of us listen to part of one of the audiobooks every single day. I am not kidding, we cannot sleep without a Harry Potter audio book. Ben and Rachelle are afraid that their child (whom I call baby BJ because it's a Barck-Johnson baby) will think Jim Dale is it's father because we listen to so much Harry Potter. This all started when Rachelle and I shared a room in college and had to put it on at night, Ben was often there too and as such a legacy began. Rachelle and I are going to take a vacation in a few years where we are going to get in a car and just drive taking whatever roads we like with no destination in mind. The main part of this vacation is that we are going to drive as we listen to all seven books. It will be amazing and fun, because we are those geeks.

     I knew that this quilt had to have a Harry Potter theme. I have some amazing Harry Potter flannel leftover from Jamie and Karl's quilt that I knew I wanted to use for the back, but I wanted a cool Harry Potter theme in the front too. A theme that would not immediately tell you this was a Harry Potter quilt if you were not an avid fan, but you could still love. I wasn't sure how to do that, especially knowing that the quilt needs to be gender neutral because they are not sharing baby BJ's sex.

      After a lot of careful thought and deliberation, I came to the conclusion that making a Deathly Hallows quilt would be the best way to go. I could make a cute quilt front with just one Harry Potter element: the Deathly Hallows symbol. This way, to those of us who know and love Harry Potter we recognize and love it as such immediately, but those who are not such avid Harry Potter fans can still appreciate a very nice baby quilt. I decided that the color scheme I would use for the quilt top was going to be yellow and grey because I have a lot of yellow receiving blankets that I want to use (like in Elin's quilt) and I am a huge fan of a yellow and grey combination.

     Figuring out how to frame up the quilt front was my next dilemma. I thought about how to best use the three different yellow baby blankets I had and decided to do yellow squares with grey boarders in the front. Then I could put a big square in the middle with the Deathly Hallows symbol. I am SO excited to get started on this quilt!!! It is going to be AMAZING!! Here is a sketch of what I am thinking of doing....

I set to work immediately. First off I had to get all my cutting done, then I could work on sewing it together, which is the fun part. I do not enjoy the cutting part, I wish all quilts could be made with pre-cut fabrics. My biggest issue is finding a way to cut out a Deathly Hallows shape to applique onto the quilt. Ideally I would have some sort of projection system that I could project a picture onto fabric to then cut out but this would be hard to do. I may just have to hand draw it and cut it that way. We shall see what I end up doing, but in the meantime here is an awesome shot of all my fabric squares all cut up and ready to be sewn...

 I got all the squares laid out and cut, and it took some time because I am a freak and don't want any of the two same pieces touching each other, which takes a bit of coordination and effort. It took me most of my day today to cut out all these squares, lay them out and sew them up. I did do quite a few other things as I always have to do when cutting fabric. I get too sick of cutting to just sit down and bang it out all at once. So I cut some then go to the gym, cut some, then run to the post office, cut some, then do the dishes; you get the idea. I am really excited to get most of the front of the quilt finished tomorrow. I am hoping to get it all finished, but that may be asking a bit too much...

 Today (after a nice long hike) I set to work on cutting the grey boarders and sewing them on. It took a bit of time to finish the top piece but not as much time as I thought. Luckily I felt I had enough time to work on quilting it together before the day was over. The back part took a bit of sewing as well because I did not have as big of a portion of fabric as I thought I did, so I had to cut up some of it to sew together. This was the biggest bit of fabric I had remaining from Jamie and Karl's quilt...

So I cut this up and sewed it together in a very fast careful manner. It may not look awesome, but it's all Harry Potter which I love. Then I taped it down and got ready to sandwich all the fabrics together...

This was a little harder than I expected only because I had to move around furniture and had very little space around the quilt in which to work. This quilt takes up almost all the free space on the floor of my bedroom making it hard to tape down. But I finally got it done and was able to sandwich the fabrics together. I used fusible batting for this quilt as it was all that I had available. It made basting the layers together a bit easier. Instead of using numerous safety pins, I just had to carefully run a hot iron with steam over it, and the heat and steam activate the glue which holds the fabrics together...

Here it is before I started quilting it all together. I think it makes an amazing baby quilt. I cannot wait to see what it will look like once I have figured out how to cut out and applique on the deathly hallows symbol. I was able to finish most of the quilting process tonight after dinner, but I ran out of thread so I will have to wait till after work tomorrow to finish the last bit of quilting. To keep with the yellow and grey theme on the front of the quilt I used grey thread when quilting it together. I decided to do straight lines on the yellow squares and use free motion quilting for the grey boarders. The applique will take care of some of the quilting process for the square in the middle, and I will likely free-motion quilt the remaining areas.

It's not a great photo, but this is what I have finished as of today, tomorrow after work I will finish free motion quilting the remaining portions of the grey boarders. Then hopefully on Sunday before Easter dinner I can applique the Deathly Hallows symbol on. I will square it up and bind it on Monday morning before running to the post office to ship it back to Minnesota. I have to get it finished and in the mail by Monday so that it will get to Minnesota in time for Baby BJ's shower on Saturday. Hopefully I can make that deadline!!

  

A picture of the back and a close up of the front corner that shows how I am quilting it together.

 I had to work all day on Thursday but as soon as I got home I went right to work on finishing the free-motion quilting. I needed to finish around the edges and in the middle. I got so excited by how the quilt was coming together that after I finished I decided to draw and applique the Deathly Hallows symbol on the front because I really wanted to see what it would look like. I decided the only way to do the symbol was to free draw it and then use my rotary cutter to cut it out very carefully. This took a lot of time because it needed to be absolutely perfect and I am not good at free drawing things. Luckily I could use my ruler to draw the triangle and lines, but the circle was difficult because getting a perfect looking circle is not easy. I finally ending up using a thread and pencil like a compass to get a circle that I was happy with.

      I took my time carefully cutting out the symbol with my rotary cutter which was no easy task with a shape that was only a half an inch wide. I was so scared that I was going to go too far and cut right through an area I shouldn't. Luckily that did not happen and I was able to get it cut out and pinned onto my quilt so that I could work on appliqueing it. After another hour of work I finishing appliqueing it to the front!!!

         It was now about 12:30am and I had to be at work at 8am that morning, but I couldn't sleep because I was too excited about the quilt and how good the applique of the Deathly Hallows looked, so instead I took a few pictures of what I had finished so far....

I deliberately waited until I had all three layers sandwiched together to applique on the symbol. I wanted the symbol to be visible from the back, which it is if you look closely. It's hard to see from this photo but if you could see it, the grey thread around the symbol is quite visible on the back of the quilt...

Needless to say, I didn't sleep much Thursday night on account of being so excited about the quilt. I jumped up and down with excitement till I got too tired. Then I tried to go to sleep but ended up just taking short naps before waking up again to admire the quilt. When it was time for me to leave for work in the morning I packed up the quilt and take it to work with me. I wanted to square it up to get ready to bind it when I got off on Saturday, and I wanted to show it to my co-workers to see if they liked it, and it they knew that it was a Deathly Hallows quilt.

My co-workers really liked the quilt which I was glad about. I was slightly afraid that people who didn't know what the symbol on the front was wouldn't like the quilt, but they liked it anyway. They really seemed to like the Deathly Hallows symbol that I appliqued on the front even thought they did not know what it was. Yay!! It seems I had achieved success of making a Harry Potter quilt that had mass appeal, those who know Harry Potter will love it because it's a Harry Potter quilt, and those who don't know Harry Potter still really liked it!!

The next day was beautiful in Juneau, a bright blue sunny sky without a cloud in sight and I decided there was no way I could not get out an enjoy this beautiful sunny afternoon, so I took my client out to Eagle Beach for a picnic in the sunshine. Naturally, I took the quilt with me to get a bit of a photo shoot in...

The final quilt is a four foot by four foot square, quite big for a small infant yes but I wanted something that baby BJ could love for years and years to come. The size makes a perfect lap quilt for an adult, as you can see in this beautiful picture of me enjoying the quilt I made...

When I got home on Saturday night I got the fabric cut for binding the quilt, but ended up spending most of the night with my good friend Izzy making food and Easter Egg Jello Shots for Easter the next day. We made some awesome Easter Egg Jello Shots for everyone to enjoy after an Easter Egg hunt on Sunday. There is something about watching all my friends run around the yard looking for Easter Eggs like little kids that I really enjoy :)

After a great dinner with my Juneau Family I returned home to finish my quilt so that I could get it in the mail right away on Monday morning. I decided to bind it in more of the yellow flannel after a lot of discussion with Izzy about what would look best. We both wished I could have bound it in the same polka dot fabric from the center, but I didn't have enough of that left, so we decided that the yellow would be best. I got it bound and in the wash before I went to bed Sunday night.

I woke up to another amazing summer day in Juneau this morning (Monday). It was so warm and sunny that I knew I had to go for a nice long hike and take the quilt along for a photo shoot before bringing it to the post office. Yes I am a bit of a dork, but the quilt is so cool it really does deserve it's own photo shoot. After a quick hike up part of Mt. Roberts, I took it downtown for a photo shoot on my way to the post office.

     I am not sure which photo is my favorite, but there it is: my magnum opus. I am so sad that I don't have the quilt here anymore!! I know it will be loved and cherished by Ben, Rachelle and baby BJ forever but I want it back because it is so awesome!! I don't think I could ever design and make a quilt that will be as awesome as this quilt is, but I will try. If you like it please let me know, I want to know if others find it as awesome as I do. I also welcome any and all criticism of it. I know for a fact that it will be forever loved by Ben and Rachelle and there is no other quilt I could have possibly dreamed up that they would like more. To all my other friends and family members who live down south: this is what you get for making a trip up to Juneau to see me. A quilt designed especially by me for you and your family to love forever, that's right Therese and Eric, I am talking to you :) And no, Sean, Mom and Dad I will not be making an awesome quilt for you guys for coming up to visit me, you fly for free so if I can afford tickets down south twice a year, you sure as heck can take some time off work once a year to come see me ;)

    I hope people think it is as awesome as I do, if you like it please share it and let me know!! I can't wait to see what it looks like after a few years of love, the wonderful puckering you get from quilting has just started and will only get better as time goes on. Congratulations Ben and Rachelle I love you both very much and I am SUPER excited to meet baby BJ next time I am in Minnesota - or next time you come up to Alaska (which I highly recommend)...

Elin's Quilt

Since making the quilt for Jamie and Karl, I have learned a few things. One is that I really like to quilt, so I will use any excuse I have to make another quilt. I learned just over 9 months ago that one of my favorite cousins Aaron and his wife Kristin were going to have another baby, so naturally I had to make a quilt for this little bundle of joy.

As a child I always looked forward to going to big family events because I knew Aaron would be there, and although I had no idea what we would end up doing, I knew it would be fun. Aaron is actually my father's cousin, he is the youngest grandchild and I am the oldest great-grandchild, I think there is like a 5 year age difference. Anyway I spent many fun times being harassed by Aaron, being locked outside in the cold Minnesota winter, and one memorable evening he hooked up sleds behind my grandfather's four wheeler and spent quite a few hours pulling us along behind him trying to make us fly off the sleds. Naturally, I have to repay this kindness by making a quilt for his newest family addition.

I had a bunch of old receiving blankets that I had picked up from a garage sale a few years ago with the idea that cut up, they would make the most amazing baby quilts. So I got out my stash and went to work. When I started working on the quilt, they still did not know the sex of the baby so I tried to find something that would be somewhat gender neutral. Sadly my stash of baby blankets did not like this idea, most of the baby blankets I had were varying shades of blue. However, I did have one blanket in this blue stash that had both blue and pink balloons, and I came up with an idea. I would use all of these blue blankets to make a quilt with a lovely flannel front, but I would bind the quilt with pink, use pink thread and once the baby was born, embroider their name on it in pink. So I set about cutting and sewing together my fabric...

I liked the quilt so far, but many people thought it was a bit boring (it hung on my living room wall for many months while I waited for the baby to be born). I explained to everyone that I was waiting for the baby to be born so that I could put her name on the quilt. Fast forward a few months to March. I had a very busy month as I had a trip out of town for work, about 160 hours of work in 10 days, and I had to find a new place to live, pack and move into that place. Of course baby Elin arrived smack dab in the middle of my crazy work week on March 17, 2012. Needless to say, although I now knew her name and wanted to get the quilt to her as soon as possible, I just didn't have the time to work on it yet. So it waited another 2 weeks or so before I was able to quickly finish it about a week ago.

Here is the quilt for baby Elin, I hope she loves it!! The backing on this quilt was given to me by my grandmother from a stash of long forgotten fabric that she had laying around and the flannel squares were all from receiving blankets that were ready to be loved by another child. I also successfully appliqued on her name to the front of the blanket. I wish I would have done something like this with Jamie and Karl's quilt as it was much easier than what I did for their quilt.

I put my tag on the back of the quilt and used some yarn from my great-grandmothers (Aaron's Grandmother) stash to add a bit of a girlie twist. Now Elin can have a little piece of her Great-Grandmother who was an amazing crafter. I am just happy that I have bits of her stuff that I can include in quilts for the great-grandchildren who will never get to meet her.

Because I am a nerd and like the idea of pretending like this quilt was purchased from some sort of business for them, I typed up a care card to include when I sent the quilt. If I ever get enough stuff made to open an etsy shop or if I feel like selling my stuff in town I can use this template which I rather like :)

Hehe I know I am a nerd but it was fun to create a fake business for her quilt. Maybe one day I can get around to making it a real business, but for now it's fun to pretend...

Magnum Opus Unvieling

I have been hard at work this last week working on what has become my Magnum Opus. It is, without a doubt, the best thing I have ever made. I know that I get excited about gift giving, but I don't know if I can give this one away, it is so awesome I want to keep it. Nothing I make can ever again top this thing. I thought Jamie and Karl's quilt was my magnum opus but I was wrong, this is way more awesome (and appealing to many more people, Jamie and Karl's quilt is still likely to be the most amazing thing I have ever made in their eyes because of all the work from all the people that went into it). I am so excited!!! I am hoping to unveil it next Saturday at about 4pm Alaska Daylight Time, the recipient should unwrap it sometime before that. If I can figure out how to do it from here, I will record the unveiling and post it here on my blog. It will be amazing and you will want to see it....

Work Woes

        I went into work today after a week off to find total choas; two of my coworkers had quit and taken new jobs and my boss informed me that all DSP's would be taking a pay cut. There have been rumors of a pay cut for a few months now so I was not all that surprised to find that there would be pay cuts. What I was surprised to learn is the amount of pay cuts they were asking all us DSP's to take.

        Let me explain a bit about what I do. I am a Direct Service Professional for a company here in town. For me, this means I work at a group home for adults with Developmental Delays, and I work in a position that provides direct services to these clients. I (and my co-workers) work a three day on, four day off shift. This means that we are at work from 9am on Monday till 5pm on Wednesday (for example). During this time we sleep at work getting paid nothing in case one of our clients needs us overnight. Each assisted living home has five clients, with one staff member morning and evenings and 2 to 4 staff members during the day.

         Being a DSP can mean many things, and usually every day is quite different. Generally I have to cook three meals a day for all my clients, transport them to work and other activities, help them with bathing and brushing their teeth and take them out for Day Hab, which means taking them out to do fun or necessary things in the community (go for a hike, visit the library, go shopping, etc..). We also have to work on goals that each of them have in their Plan of Care. Two weeks ago, I went to Sitka with a client who wanted to take a vacation to visit her family. It can also mean that I sometimes have to deal with incontinence and behavioral issues. I also do a lot of laundry and cleaning for the house and apparently my company has decided that my work will be worth a lot less money next month than it is now.

       I am not getting unduly upset. I realize that due to a number of different issues with clients the company I work for did not come close to making enough money to cover our expenses this year. I realize that we have opened two new assisted living homes and that for most of the year, they were operating at a huge loss because they didn't have stable clients or staff. I also understand that a few clients have passed away and encountered major medical issues that also cost the company a great deal. Furthermore, I am fully aware of the burden Medicaid is forcing on the company by not raising the amount of money they give for services, while the cost of living and other things skyrocket, especially up here in Alaska. I know there are real financial issues that we as a company must face, however, I consider it only fair that we as a company face these burdens together.

        Oh yes, did I not mention that the company I work for is only asking the DSP's to take a pay cut? It is true, believe it or not. All managers and middle and upper management are taking no pay cuts whatsoever, while I am being asked to take a 12% pay cut. They are asking me to take a pay cut of more than two dollars an hour, which is insane.  Could this pay cut not be more effective if they asked the whole company to take a 5% pay cut, rather than severely cutting the wages of the people providing the services that make the company money? If we DSP's didn't work there would be no company whatsoever, the DSP's are the people who are providing the services that we bill Medicaid for.

      I, many of my co-workers, and even many of our middle management employees consider this to be unfair and extremely disrespectful to those of us who provide services for the many AMAZING clients that this company serves. Maybe I am wrong, and would love to here from you if you think so, but I feel we should have earned a bit more respect than the company is giving us...

Walk to town

As some of you may know I have recently moved and am now living in the flats downtown. It's a very convenient location, and I love that I only have to use my car for work or adventures out the road now. Today I needed to get some grey thread for a project I am working on (more to follow on that once I finish it) and I thought it would be better to walk to Ben Franklin rather than to drive all the way out to the valley to get it at Joanne's. When I stepped outside, however, I discovered to my surprise that it was quite warm out!! As such, I decided that I needed to pull out my hiking boots and take an adventurous route to get to Ben Franklin.

I started my 'walk' by going up the street from my house to Cope Park. There is an awesome trail you can take through Cope Park, across the river and up to the Flume Trail, so I struck out in that direction.

I love this little pool in Cope Park, in the spring and summer the river and pool swell with snow melt runoff and the pool turns a lovely shade of green while remaining crystal clear. Now, however, the water is still quite low and the color is not as intense.

Over the river and up the hill to the Flume Trail I went, the snow has melted a great deal around here in the last month or so, which makes me happy because the trails are much easier to walk meaning I can take this route every time I go downtown from now on!! Once I got up to the Flume Trail I decided to take a short run out to the the avalanche and see how much that area had changed since I was last up there.

As you can see there was still a great deal of snow, but it was quite passable now, and I had a bit of fun climbing around on the run while listening to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.

I then ran back along the Flume Trail and down the road to the Mount Roberts trail head, which is a good amount of running for me. I was done running and quite happy to start walking again even though I was passed by a few runners on the way up the Mount Roberts trail. I decided that since it was so nice out (it was barely raining) and I was enjoying catching up on my podcasts, I would go up the Mount Roberts trail till the snow got bothersome. I was surprised and happy at how high I was able to hike before reaching the snow level. Summer really is coming and the snow is melting. I then turned around and went down the trail to the sixth street trail head (Basin Road being closed for bridge repairs).

From there I walked down to Ben Franklin to get my thread passing my good friend Heather on Gastineau Avenue (Hi Heather, glad you made it back from Sitka!!). After that I walked up to the Capitol Building, around to the Governors Mansion and down to my house (for those of you who don't live around Juneau). It took me about 2 hours to do my errand, but I much preferred this to walking down the street to go to the gym. Plus, when I got home I was able to get started right away on Baby BJ's quilt!!