Unwanted guests..

Once again, the Monster (aka the family pc) and I need to become friends again.
Yesterday early morning  at 5 p.m. we found that our frontdoor was wide open. All the drawers of my fabric chest were open as well as some drawers and cabinet doors in the livingroom. My laptop, photocamera and the TomTom were missing..
My laptop was an oldie and can be replaced, but I truly mourn the loss of everything that was on it. I don't think that i need to explain that to other quilters with a 1000 sites bookmarked and even more patterns trusted to a harddrive. DH had just made a backup from the C partition, but not yet of the D on which all of my goodies were.
The type of camera I had (and absolutely loved) is no longer available, so we need to find another, just as great. The photos that were on it, are ofcourse lost as well. (I had them on the camera ánd on the laptop..)

Later the day i found my red and white polkadotted pc sleeve was also missing. I know, polkadots áre hard to resist.

Even with all new and extra locks installed, I didn't sleep very well. You can imagine that.
What 's there to do than whine on my blog, count my losses and start over?

Welcome!

...to my sewingroom! It is not always this neat and clean, I admit. I clean it frequently though; I cannot sit and enjoy my own space when it's a mess. That distracts and annoys me big time. Clutter is okay when sewing a quilt, but once a project is finished, all has to be in its place again.

My room is attatched to the livingroom. It used to be my former bedroom. When Quilting DD moved out, our bed moved upstairs and tadááá: I had my own space. Just slide the door open and step in!

On the slidingdoor there's a friendship star quilt, that Corrine made for my 50th birthday.

First the fabric treasure chest. I always have 3 small quilts on the wall there; they change according to the season..

Tins with thread, ribbons etc. on top, a glass vase with pincushioncollection and on the side a wooden quiltrack. Not for displaying quilts,but for quilting purposes. I use it mainly during summer, so you don't have to hold a quilt on your lap when handquilting. Corrine's DH made it for me for that same birthday.

Let's move to the left and there's my big table. I use it for sewing, drawing, cutting, the laptop is there often etc. I usually sit where the machine is, Corrine opposite of me. Oh I forgot: my room is for 2 (or 3 when Quilting DD comes to play along) C has no sewingroom and is a frequent guest in mine. She even has her own can of notions on her side of the table..
Where the white chair is, that's where other familymembers are allowed :) The family pc aka the Monster, pc stuff, cd's, printer/scanner. The monitor can used as a tv as well.  As you can see I have a window; not a spectacular view (the neighbours frontdoor) but it's nice to have daylight..

This is on the wall between table and pc desk: the embroidery I did 100 years ago for DH and the miniquilt in 2007. It's there for DH to make him believe it's his room too. (Dream on..) It prevents discussion about he wanting a room of his own too. Ah men, it can be so easy...

Okay, futher left: the desigwall! At this moment the Attitude Girls panel is on it, but almost empty when I took this pic. In the corner my manikin (is that the correct word?) showing an apron that I still didn't finish. Behid her back the part of the pc desk that holds my patterns (behind the door) and books. If you slide my door further open, you have acces to the rulers and quilt templates. Also the ironingarea..

..and that's it! (I'm happy to post more detailed pics for those who are very nosy)
Ranette showed her room, Myra VIDEOTAPED hers (if you haven't checked that out, please do so now!)
and I'm anxious to see other's . So..who's next?

What to say?

I was planning to invite you my to my sewingroom. I cleaned and de-cluttered, made pictures and even put them in a post in order to add text later on. I made coffee and Baking DD had delicious chocolate chipped muffins ready for you all to come and visit :)

Then the doorbell rang; the postman ...: "goodmorning, a package for you, have a nice day" and he handed me a rather bulky envelop.

Dianne, Melissa ánd ofcourse LuLu wanted to sent me something for my birthday in february, but when they read I wasn't doing all that well, they decided I needed it right now. In the envelop was a card saying they thought I needed an Attitude Adjustment. (They are só right!) These girls are not only very generous, they pay attention too.

Note the polkadot wrappingpaper for starters!

What was inside? (better to say: what was not..!) A complete Honeybun, lots of matching fabrics (ah..can you tell I love polkadots?) ánd a pair of soft, warm ,polkadotted (duh!) gloves!  All from Moda's "Attitude Girls", except for the gloves ofcourse, but wearing them just gives you an attitude *lol*          

To complete this absolute great, wonderfull, amazing gift: The Attitude Girls themselves..

ánd, as if things weren't overwhelming enough: another Mary Engelbreit panel

I am só thrilled that someone sent me ALL this, that I was without words for a while. Next project will be an Attitude quilt for sure. I already browsed the internet, looking for ideas and inspiration.

What more is there to say than THANK YOU and....

Sewing rooms..

Let me start by thanking you all for the uplifting and nice comments on the "I'm not doing so well" post. I'm doing a bit better, thank you. At least i'm not whining and crying all the time and that's a huge improvement :)

Secondly: Let's make 2011 a great year: health, love, creativity...

When I did some blogreading this afternoon, I came across Ranette, showing her tidy sewingroom. I enlarged and admired every picture on her blog and thought about my own spot where I keep my stuff.

I googled "sewingroom" and had a pleasant hour looking at all those different spaces  :)
People have small rooms, enormous ones, messy spots and very clean ones. Some even have their own fireplace!
Lots have different areas for sewing, cutting, ironing etc.
Some pics I randomly plucked from the internet:

Although I consider myself very lucky to háve a separate sewingroom, (only thing I had to do was to kick a child of mine out of the house and claim the space; easy!) I'd love to have different spots for every step of quiltmaking. (And ofcourse more storageroom!) My sewingroom has one huge table in the middle for sewing, cutting, eating, computer...and one fabric cabinet. Plastic fabric containers here and there... That's it.

No matter what sewingrooms there are and how big/small...one thing I don't get: why have so many people such small tables for their sewingmachine??? Even the lucky ones with a huge amount of space have tiny sewing tables. When I sew a quilt with my Husq. it's a huge mess on my table: piles of fabric, scissors, cutters, pincushion, tapemeasure, food.... You name it and it's there, somewhere..

Am I just messy and disorganised? (could well be!)

How does your sewingroom look like? Any great tips to get lots of stuff in a small room, organised?

Merry Christmas!

Me, myself and I

Kind of selfish post title, in the light of the time of year, I admit, but it's been a while since my last update and there was a reason for that. I was, am, not doing great. Tinnitus therapy triggered more than I bargained for and after a nasty conflict at work I gave in and called in sick. It became clear that i was pretty exhausted, both in body and soul and something had to be done to prevent a burn out.
I slept a lot, cried a lot, worried a lot and felt at the top of my nerves all the time.
I'm doing a bit better now and decided to pick up blogging again. Sorry for not answering comments and an occasional email. I needed the energy that was left, just to get through the day.
Enough said and on to happier things!

I did sew! Well , I quilted more . The Dutch quilt is done. Except for the binding ofcourse. As you know I hate doing bindings and this time I had the perfect excuse: I had no binding fabric! Hurray for online shopping; it arrived this week so I hope for a real finish  soon.

I also finished sewing the "White, not the average Christmasquilt" (work title..haha) and even did a lot of handquilting after this pic was taken..

The border HST's on the front ánd on the back were all "waste". The things that you're left with when then pattern says: "sew, fold and cut ... off". Well, my name is NOT Eleanor Burns and i didn't want to throw piles of HST away.....

Another update on how things are in my corner..It's cold and white. I'm not a fan of snow and don't care a bit about a white christmas. Sorry, but i can't enjoy piles of snow, slipping and sliding when driving etc. I'm just not a winter girl. Today I got stuck with my car and DS had to push. I first stepped out, slipped and landed on my butt in a huge pile of freshly fallen snow. A man passing by said how he (really) LOVED that we were going to have a white christmas. Grrrrr! I remembered the "peace on earth" thing just in time..
This is last week

This morning we had 9 inches of snow on the garden table and there's more on the way.

Anyway...I wish you all a very merry Chrismas!
(and now I'm blogging again, I hope I won't loose another follower...lol)

He's here!

Last saturday, St. Nicolaas arrived safely in our country. Along with him lots of his helpers, the "Zwarte Pieten"

He's here to celebrate his birthday on the 5th of december with gifts for everyone.
In our family we buy a gift for one familymember. Ofcourse i know whose name came out of the hat for me to buy a present for, but  do not know who drew MY name!

More and more people don't celebrate "Sint", for they say it's only for children and they give eachother presents at Christmas. I think we should cherish this very old Dutch (and Belgian)tradition. Therefor I pinned my button on my coat, saying: "Long live Sint!)

Last week I also got the best envelop there is in my mailbox

Even on a flipped-over picture "Fabric" is the best word in the English language. In Dutch we say "stof"; how boring is that!?
This is what was inside:

Christmasfabric for the backing of my machine pieced (still working on it..) Christmasquilt. I do like the Falala fabric and am humming that song all day long..(The only lyrics I know are "falala..")
The colour is slightly different than the right side of the quilt and so I was in desparate need of RED to bind it all together. I never have to persuade friend C to come along on a quiltshoptrip and there I got these

Ridiculous to run out of red if it's your fav colour!

The Beep as far as I know it...

I had some emails from people that suffer from Tinnitus and some of those are "new" to the problem and asked questions. It was also asked if "it was all in my head" by others.
So for those who want to know: info on the Beep
I went to a specialist in nose, ear and throat problems. I had a constant ring in my left ear and had some dizzy spells. Perhaps it was Meniere's: a inner ear problem with no known cure. It was not.
I had an E.N.G. to check if my balance was okay. It was. An M.R.I. to enclude any medical problems such as damaged nerves, obstructed bloodvains. All was fine.
I had an audiometric test and though normal, they found a little ditch in high tones, both left and right. The sound of my Beep is exactly the ditch they found. It could be, it is caused by noise-induced hearingloss years and years ago. The brain can react to such hearingloss by producing a sound, one can no longer hear through your ears. The brain doesn't know that the sound is no longer there. Like someone who still feels his toe itch after the leg is amputated.

So, no medical solution possible, but you could try to re-train your brain. I started with a tinnitus masker that produced a white noise. Plan was that is neutralized the Beep. It worked a bit but the thing itself (although tiny) hurts my inner ear ánd not unimportant is very expensive. Besides, I beep in both ears now.

Another part of retraining is the therapy. Wikipedia says: (ignore the highlighted words)
Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is a form of habituation therapy designed to help people who suffer from tinnitus (ringing ears). TRT uses counselling to explain to the patient how a combination of tinnitus retraining and sound enrichment can end their negative reaction to the tinnitus sound, and then reduce and eventually end their perception of it.Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is a form of habituation therapy designed to help people who suffer from tinnitus (ringing ears). TRT uses counselling to explain to the patient how a combination of tinnitus retraining and sound enrichment can end their negative reaction to the tinnitus sound, and then reduce and eventually end their perception of it.
...

My Beep bothers me the most when all is quiet e.g when you want to sleep. Sometimes it's so loud that I can't hear properly and then it is heard even over loud external sounds.
Depressing is that it'll never be quiet in my head again.
Mostly I handle it well, sometimes it makes me sad (when it's loud) and frustrated. I cried a bit on one occasion when it was really REALLY loud for a week on end.

For those who want to know what I hear: I downloaded the Beep from a cd with 150 (!) tinnitus sounds. Mine is slightly higher but just as annoying
pieptoon.wav

The nasty questions in the questionnaire came from psycho girl, who gives the therapy together with audio girl.

I guess she wants to determine the state of mind of the groupmembers, but if you ask me the questions are for people with other issues than Tinnitus! It can cause serieus depression but hearing voices??

Fellow tinnitus sufferers are welcome to email me: I try not to whine too much on my blog :)

Questionnaire..

I signed up for Tinnitus Retraining Therapy in order to coop with my Beep. For those who missed out on this one :Tinnitus is a constant sound in one or both ears, in my case a beep.
The therapy is meant to learn to deal with the given fact that the beep is here to stay.Information will be given about it and ways to relax and ignore your sound will be discussed. I choose grouptherapy. Individual sessions were given by a guy in his early twenties who attended the school where I'm working. No way I'm going to open up to him; I have more to teach him about life than he can teach me.
Groupsessions are given by an audiologist and a psychologist. They sent me questionaires..

Does the beep bother you in everyday life?
Have you trouble falling asleep?
Does noise bother you?
Do you avoid crowds?
                    ..open spaces?
                    ..silence?
Do you  think about death often?
Have you considered suicide more than once?
Do you hear voices in your head,other than your own?
Do these voices tell you to do things? (only in a quiltshop)
Are you afraid someone wil attack you in a crowd?
Does your Tinnitus drive you insane?
Do your muscles ache often? (they do after answering these questions)
Does your back ache often?  (yep, I worked bloody hard!)
 And so it went on..
You had to answer, with the past week in mind. It doesn't count apparently if one was suicidal 2 weeks earlier .

First "class" is 2 weeks from now. I'm so looking forward to it! It's probably best if I don't mention seeing faces (TWO!) in an old pair of pinking sheers...

Measure twice, cut once.....

Last week I decided it was time to sort out all of my quilting stuff. I have small wooden drawers on my table filled with craft stuff and need that space for sewing things. After I did those, I moved on to the big lower drawers of the fabric cabinet. Everything that is bigger than a treadspool I toss into those and it was a mess.

Turns out I have a lot more notions than I thought i had, e.g my collection scissors...

I also retrieved my pinking sheers. The big one belonged to my Mum and I think it was the very first pinking sheers that came onto the market. I remember how thrilled we were when she bought it. We couldn't stop cutting up scraps which was by no means an easy thing to do! Look at the size of the thing!!

All off my tapemeasures share a small drawer now too.

And last but not least I needed a new blade for the rotarycutter..When I came across this limited edition at the quiltshop, I couldn't resist. My fav flowers!

(..and with all this equipment I STILL make lots of mistakes whenever I cut up fabric.  I know: it's not the lack off tools but the absent mind of the one who uses them..)

Strange thing is that I knew where everything was, when it was a mess. Now all is organized I have to open every drawer 10 times before I find whatever I'm searching for.