Cleaning, sewing and books

It has been SOOOOO hot and humid that we don't go out much and I feel just sweaty and yucky.  And for all that Tetsu decides that we need to clean the upstairs room!  There is NO air-conditioning there and it is another good place to collapse from heat stroke!  We are having guests next week and we do want the rooms to be presentable and thus the major cleaning. 

I just get in the way when Tetsu and I work together (he is so much better at cleaning than I am) but I didn't feel I could let him suffer alone and thus I cleaned my sewing room, making more space in the closet for the overflow from the room Tetsu was working on.  I have made a few resolutions.

Make more scrap quilts as the room is overflowing with scrap bins.

Do not, in any way or form, use cardboard boxes for storage!

So much of what came out of the closet and from under the bookshelf were hidden remnants of fabric and cuts that I'd put away for someday use...  But if I forget they are there and can't see them... well, out of sight out of mind....  I discovered treasures...  In my own sewing room!

So that is what we've been doing...  My sewing room looks great and I wish I could sew!  But it is way too hot to be up there for any length of time and using a fan means that blocks on the design board blow away...  I will have to wait for cooler days to get some sewing done.

I did finish up the baby quilt that I'd been machine quilting..  This was a very nice panel with even the quilting lines marked out on it and so I didn't have to do any thinking at all.  Is this for a boy baby or a girl baby?  I think it is a boy's baby quilt (and I sort of need a girl baby quilt) but there are some flowers on this...  I don't really need to give the baby's mother anything but as I've got this quilt... better than nothing?

On a completely different line of thought, Mrs. Furui gave me this book a few weeks ago as her sister had helped with the translation.  It is the story of the Tsunami disaster at the elementary school which lost most of their students that tragic day.  Not light reading but it was very good and insightful. 

Not published books, but books I had made for myself.  Leiya's wedding album that I had made through Mixbook. 

We are so happy to have this beautiful book which I had made with heavy stock-board and personal touches (like scattered leaves and lettering etc.)  It was a rather expensive album for 20 pages but so worth it!  I love taking it with me to show people and looking through it myself... 

Another book I had made was through Blog2Print which was the only website I could find for slurping blogs into books.  In the past I had used a different website but for some reason they've stopped offering blog "slurping".  Our two weeks in Michigan in May were so wonderful and I had written so much detail on my blog that I decided I really wouldn't go back to look at the blog posts even though they were there...  and I really wanted to be able to relive those days... 

This was a hefty book too (in price also) because there are 158 pages of blog posts!  The cover is paper, the photos are all one size, but the quality of the pictures is excellent and I am so thrilled with this book too!  My only "complaint" is that I really didn't need my blog signature (which is considered a photo) after every post but I couldn't figure out if it was possible to remove all the signatures...  So there they are. 

 Okay...  back to working in the heat!  John is rather heat exhausted also!