Quilt Back for Tropical Waves Done

Okay this one has been done for a while, but the trouble with the camera downloading and then I was on vacation (more on that another time) and before I could make it home I started having awful fevers that are even now plaguing me, but I missed you all so thought I'd show you this.  I think this way holds true to the Tiffany look some fellow bloggers thought this piece was getting.  I took off the floral print and instead you can see the purple inserts I made.  As well as the additional borders around the outside.  It's pretty hard trying to always remember to make the back so much bigger for the frame.

Now where is that cat? I know you're looking for her. Oh Tiny?!?! There she is, guess that's all you were going to get.

Purple Charity Quilt All Done!

I took this off the frame a while ago but what with the camera issue...  There are so many different things that I quilted into it you could look at it several times and not see the same thing twice.  It says things like "Mom Dreams of Africa"  "Daddy dreams of Mom".  I tried my hand at meerkats and feathers.  As you know DD did quite a bit of quilting on it, in addition to hearts she made flowers and other fun things.  My DH ended up adjusting the tension and while he was at it made a couple of nice combinations.  I didn't photograph them because after he was done I liked them so much I added more and more outward layers so you can't tell what he did from what I did.

DH's quilting to the right flows into mine

A friend of mine and I will be headed up to Quilt 'Til You Wilt in August and they are my local chapter of Quilts for Kids so I think I'll just run this up there when we go.  That will keep it local as the local chapters give to their local hospitals.  What do you think of the quilt though?  Is it pretty enough?  As a practice piece I guess I'm concern some will judge DD and I that this isn't the most colorful contrasting beauty I've ever stitched...

Christmas Quilt-a-Long Year 2 July Day End

This morning I made some nice progress on the backing for Tropical Waves.  It's becoming a refreshing twist on the front.  Currently I have fixed the fabric I didn't like and replaced it with a pieced portion as well as reapplying the borders and adding another; all the rest - 2 more borders are all cut and ready to sew on.  But still no luck with the camera, why does something that always works suddenly get to say "Device not Recognized?"  After I stopped for lunch I confess I had a bit of a nap, so now I'm sleepy and I think I'm going to call it a day.


I hope everyone made beautiful progress!

Christmas Quilt-a-Long Year 2 July AM

Well we're here, but the camera isn't allowing me to upload and a stomach bug bit me shortly before 6 am.  So we'll just dig in and see how the day goes shall we?

Happy Sewing!

Mystery Quilter!

Happy belated fourth of July or an even more belated Canada Day.  How about this?  Happy July!  This is a great month.  The heat is sweltering the entire northern hemisphere and we can for once all agree on the weather.  This is the same month my darling daughter was born.  She came a week earlier than her due date the same as I myself did, which was truly wonderful because I was more than a little sick of being pregnant at that point.  All circumstances considered (such as my post pelvic trauma and current disability for those of you non-followers) my most favorite OB-GYN was on vacation through my due date and promised if DD hadn't been born by the time he got back we would have a c-section August 3.  Oh yes please let's plan a big major deal such as having a baby on my Anniversary!  NOT!

Instead I had the most amazing doctor in the history of doctors.  She was trained as a midwife first and then became a doctor - how cool is that!?  I'd seen her in my office visits before then, but didn't see her for the amazing woman she is.

So now that you've had way to much personal information about me.  How about some birthstone trivia July birthdays have Ruby as their birthstone, my second favorite, only to my own Sapphire - which are really the same exact thing.  The only difference is that Rubys are red sapphires.  Hadn't you ever noticed that Sapphire come in every color except true red?  So now it's time for my MYSTERY QUILTER!  Here is an example of her quilting.  Any guesses?

How about Now?

It's DD!

The new sewing machine is here!  It arrived in the clearly not a sewing machine box that you see Sunny smelling in the picture below.  I felt so lucky when I saw the delivery truck pull up.  Knowing it was heavy I even threw the door open wide and the delivery man was able to place it on our tile entry instead of the wet concrete.  I'm not sure he's allowed to do that, but I found it especially nice.

 Every time I look at it, I think if the Little Elna is little this is a beast!  If a standard mechanical sewing machine is 30% plastic this one is less than 5%.  As a special added bonus to it's 39 or so pounds is that the feet are suction cups.  I'm not talking about those crappy ones they stick on every cheap bathroom accessory, now these are hefty and when you pick up the machine there is an extra pop before they give way and allow you to take the full weight of the machine.  That makes for added fun getting the machine positioned but should really help it stay put in the frame.

Don't sew your leaders!  :-)

So here it is all loaded on the frame.  I plan to practice a bit with the machine unthreaded today so we'll see how that goes.  My DH is always delighted by new mechanical toys (clearly regardless of their nature) and stitched the first row of stitches claiming it was much much smoother on the carriage than he'd thought it would be, and that's after how many weeks of sliding the empty carriage.

So what do I have here?  The red thing on the black arm is the velcro for the stitch regulator, only time will tell if I like that more or less then the standard frame's controls.  Of course it's an Inspira Frame, with a Janome 1600P on it.  This is one of the three machines that will work seamlessly with the Inspira Frame.  I'm using purple fabric to practice on with pink serger thread because I heard the Janome 1600P likes that.  I think I'll be able to see my stitches easily this way and thought it would be prettier than plain muslin.

What else?  Oh yes when I put the machine into the frame, yes I weakling me did it, against even my own forethought and better judgement, but I was so excited; I had trouble with it hitting one of the bars, but of course when DH got home he automatically raised the entire bar system and leveled it so it's perfect now.

Stitchinpenny expressed some concern over the seemingly missing back for Tropical Waves, and I would actually like to say that I'm working on it, I seam ripped out all the Amy Butler fabric, and picked out all the loose little threads before the excitement really started happening here.

Time4Learning Review

DD and I took a summer test drive with Time4Learning.  I have admired the concept of this program and wanted to try it for a long time.  I was thrilled to find that they have a blogger review program.  Through this program I was able to try Time4Learning with DD for a month in return for this review.

DD missed her friends from her Kindergarten class as well as it's daily routine so much that we started her on Time4Learning right away.  I really liked the single sound letter reviews targeted for those starting 1st grade.  They include the review of 3 or 4 letters at a time and I was delighted by how much she already knew.  It's so hard to know the depth your child's progress in school.  After all what does Enthusiastic about Math really tell you about their knowledge?  Time4Learning offers the following subjects Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Language Arts Extensions.

Now I had a big misunderstanding about the way Time4Learning works.  I'd read it was self motivated and children can run the software program after the first day of you sitting with them.  I did not find this to be true.  DD needed me sitting with her for the entire first two weeks.  If I needed to leave the room she would make little to no progress while I was gone.  After those first two weeks it was better, but I still had to be in the room and directly help and motivate with certain skills.

In spite of my daughter's love of Math, she didn't delight in the math section of Time4Learning at in fact she preferred not to work in that section at all.  She did like their limited sciences and I think if I asked her, I'm certain she would still recall whom Jane Goodall is.  After it became obvious she would move through that quickly I bumped her into 2nd grade science.  This was a nice feature as your child can be in one level for one thing and another for a different subject.  What does that mean exactly?  Well in DD's case she was in 1st grade reading, but by selecting the corresponding grade at the beginning of each subject we could shift up to 2nd grade and down to Kindergarten as needed for review.

As DD was enrolled in 2nd grade science she could work on 1st grade science, 2nd grade, and 3rd, had we had the program longer I'm certain she would have made swift progress through those.  The default level you enter upon opening the subject the grade your child is enrolled in.

My goal for this as a summer program was to keep her skills sharp and allow her to gain a more steady footing in her reading.  I don't know about you, but I recall learning to read like turning on a light switch, I didn't know and then all the sudden I did and could read anything.  I doubt that is how it happened, but it is how I remembered.  I greatly wanted Jessica's light to come on.  In this respect Time4Learning showed me just how complicated reading is.  Letter sounds aren't simple, they are complicated and the English language has so many words that break the rules.  Their first grade "language arts" program is very good providing a single set of  lessons to explain "sh" and in another "ck".  What I found lacking was a short vowel sounds.  I went back to the Kindergarten level, but that is so different, in that it blends a bit of history with reading, science, and play that it didn't help DD, not even after I found the Kindergarten letter reviews.  The entire Kindergarten segment seemed like it was "teaching down" after the straightforward fun learning of the 1st grade program.

The Language Arts Extensions was the bane of my efforts.  This takes a story, and reads it to the child.  That seems fine and teaches a lesson with the story, but then the child has to read it alone, unlike the Language Arts review which uses words the student has learned to sound out and words they know and has the ability to click on any given word to hear it read.  Not so with Language Arts Extensions; after the child reads it through once by themselves (this should have been the time of the program "reading together" but our computer didn't do that) they then have to read it through two more times and answer questions about the story.  Shoot by the end of all those readings what is left to retain - I had it memorized!  These lessons do not have any bearing on letter sounds the child has already covered and it is a big struggle, these stories also lack the cadence you expect in beginning reader books.  I wouldn't even start those until the child has a solid reading foundation, and then I'd skip the repeated re-readings.  Twice alone is surely enough.  I found this in the Parents Forum so clearly I'm not the only one dealing with these issues.  Perhaps taking Extensions away and sticking them to the end of Language Arts would be helpful.

Time4Learning has a parent support forum, which sounds great and maybe it is for some people but I found it very odd that my question had to be moderated before they would allow it to post.  So instead of getting a answer as quickly as possible, my question couldn't even be seen until a moderator looked at it.  Eventually a reply came two days later, but it was directing me out of the program and off site to other places, which I found very odd for a paid program.  Perhaps a backdoor to the parent forum, which I had to register for separately from the parent login would help with this.

I also found it odd that to preview the lessons I had to work through them myself first.  If you do that and complete the lesson it flags it as completed and if you you merely start the lesson it shows you on your child's records.  I saw on DD's screens that lessons could be assigned but that is a feature designed only for classroom settings and isn't available at all to individual home families.

Did DD like the program?  Well that's a question I would like an answer to as well.  It was like pulling teeth to get her to sit down at the computer to do her school work.  At first I made it so she had to do that before she did anything else online and that was somewhat motivating for her.  As I felt her moving out of her depth with the compound consonants my desire to push her diminished in my own frustrations to review short vowel sounds with her to aid in her reading efforts.  Truthfully, and contrary to my efforts getting her there, as soon as she would start the program she seemed to delight in the familiar characters and the learning format.

Time4Learning has an educational playground for the students to use when they are done with their class time.  After DD figured out where the best games where she wanted to leave her class window small so she could watch the countdown timer.  I found that to be counter productive and insisted she maximize the classroom window during class time.  The program allows a up to 59 minutes of playground time after (0-59 minutes) of classroom time have been completed.  These amounts are controlled by the parent account and I found them annoying.  We did all of our class time and then DD could have playground time, I didn't care if she played it all afternoon.  After all it's educational, fun, and safe what more could you want in an online program?  But if she played for 59 minutes it would kick her out and I'd have to change it to lesson time required 0 so it would open the playground time back up.

We did most of our lessons in the morning, leaving the afternoon open for lunch and then play.  But the timers don't like that and will log you out if you leave them for lunch, which is fine, but when DD would return for her playground time guess what?  The countdown timer for her schooling requirement was insisting it was time for work again.

Above I mentioned the program was moving faster that my daughter's retention and ability to learn and I truly believe that.  They say you can repeat the lessons as many times as you want, but I ask you:  If they didn't want to do it in the first place, what makes anyone think a child would do it a second time?

This program is not a stand alone teaching tool and they tell you that - sort of by calling it a foundation.  I thought it would be okay as a stand alone program for the summer months but it really doesn't work as a stand alone at all.  Without a complete program some things slip, such as handwriting at the lower levels.  They do have a handwriting program and a spelling program, but each one is it's own website with it's own billing.

I really wanted Time4Learning to be a good match for us, I just don't think it's quite right for where and who we are right now.  I am handicapped and stress drives my pain through the roof, which in turn makes it extremely difficult for me to repeat the same concepts over and over to my daughter one on one.  Trust me I hate that fact about myself, but it doesn't change the fact.  I thought the self motivated potential of Time4Learning would help us, perhaps a tutor would have been better, right when we win that lottery we don't play...

All images within this post are merely linked URLs from the Time4Learning website and they reserve and retain all rights to their own stuff.