Garbage Day

Every week our garbage is picked up by the local village municipality.  Each Wednesday evening, like clock-work, everyone in the neighborhood takes their trash out to the curb for it to be picked up the following morning.  Apparently there is some "rule" that the garbage MUST be out by 7am Thursday morning.  I've actually heard of people getting yelled at for putting their garbage out to the curb after 7am, but just before the garbage truck gets to their location.  If its out there before the truck and its not slowing the garbage guys down...who cares when it gets out there.

Anyway...invariably Thursdays are windy.  We have no idea what it is, but it seems like EVERY Thursday there isn't just a nice gentle breeze blowing.  We always have a gale force wind on Thursdays, which means that all the empty garbage cans are littered everywhere along the road.  Since we're at the bottom of the hill, we typically end up with everyone else's garbage cans.  Most of the time people come and retrieve them as soon as they get home from work.  However, there are some that just don't come to claim their bins, so we end up taking them into our garage so that they don't get blown around into the road.  Then when the wind does die down, we put them out for their owners to claim them.  It would be nice once in a while to NOT have a windy Thursday. :-)  Today in fact...they're forecasting wind gusts up to 50 mph!  That kind of wind will DEFINITELY move an empty garbage can.

On to a few "quilty" things....

I ordered a few new types of threads this week.  I usually do my piecing with Mettler's Metrosene thread.  The quilting store that I bought my Bernina from told me that the machine is designed around the Metrosene thread and if I want a really good 1/4" seam to use that thread.  To be honest...I haven't really found any difference in my seam allowances between using Metrosene or Connecting Thread's Essential threads.  That being said, I have heard lots of great things about Superior's Masterpiece threads and their BottomLine threads for quilting. 

For my birthday, my inlaws gave me three spools of Bottomline thread (in colors that I had requested) along with a color card and they also gave me one of the large cone thread holders so that I can get the larger spools of thread.  So earlier this week, I got myself my own birthday present of a large 6000 yard spool of Masterpiece thread in "Canvas" (can't wait to actually see the size of this thing) and two smaller 600 yard cones in a medium olive green and a peachy-pink. 

I have a quilt that I'm making that I posted a picture of a while ago.  Its a design that Judy L. has in her new book "Weekend Quilts" called Shine on Bayou Cane.  The dark background fabric I'm using is a deep, forest green and the lighter background fabric is soft of a yellow/olive green.  Then the focus fabrics that create the stars in the middle are a light pink, medium peachy-pink and a deep rose color.  Fabrics can be seen here and the pattern here.  So the olive green thread and the peachy-pink thread will be good for piecing these fabrics.  I've read that matching the piecing thread as close to your fabrics as you can make a big difference in how your quilt looks.  This happens a lot when you have light colored fabric and you use a medium or dark color thread.  I saw one quilt that had pale yellow fabric and it used a neutral grey thread for piecing, but because of the pale yellow fabric, you could see the grey thread all over the place.  Definitely don't want that happening to one of my quilts!

So the thread should arrive in the next few days and it will be kind of fun to receive something else in the mail...besides a jury questionnaire (more about that some other time).

I think that's it for my random thoughts for today...at least for the ones I feel like publishing. ;-)