Motivation help needed

What can I do to get my lazy butt up off the sofa and get my sewing room organized? I've got the space, not too much stuff, the budget to paint and make it pretty, but I'm still suffering from TDL* disease.
How do you motivate yourself?


* TDL = Too Darn Lazy

One more secret project

My summer has been filled with secret projects, and it's been tons of fun. Organizing the quilt block collection for our guild's outgoing president, a set of cushions for the owner of the LQS, the FQ cushion, the golf tee bag, and now the one for Judy's birthday, shown below. Just one more little project to go, but it doesn't have a deadline, so who knows when you'll see it. I'm giving myself a gift today of tidying my sewing area. One day I hope to approach Judy's standard for a well-organized sewing room.
Here are the pics of Judy's pillow. I loved loved loved designing the embroidery and pulling the whole thing together.

Next secret project revealed!

Heike at work is retiring and I wanted her to have a little something to keep her company on the golf course.
Here's an in-the-hoop zipper bag, customized with a tee holder and her name.
Heike, I'm going to miss you - everyone else's eyes glaze over when I talk about quilting too long!

Little ironies in life

Our neighbor had a water line break near her house. However, since her son built the house we now live in, they were so sloppy that they ran her water line under our property.
So, when the line broke, they first tried to find the break by starting in her basement. Their snake got stuck, and they had to dig. Only they had to dig in our yard.
On a rather less pleasant note, the son came to our house and said "the city is coming to dig." Since he said it that way, we believed the city needed to do the work. However, he had actually PRIVATELY contracted with the city to dig. What we thought was a government activity was actually his private contract. Not acceptable, but we're watching the situation right now.
Anyway, they dug. And dug, and dug. The hole is now the size of a minivan, and they couldn't find the water line. They proposed digging under our house, which we refused. Eventually on the second day they found the water line.
The irony? It has been known for a couple of hundred years that our back yard is covering an ancient Roman road. That they know, but they had no clue where a water line was placed just 30 years ago.
Sigh.
Here's a video of the last of the digging.

Prototyping an embroidery design

So there's this embroidery design I'm creating. For me it's all new and tricky, trying to get designs and fabric and needle and thread to all work together.

This project is an applique project, in which I applique an embroidered piece to a background piece. So I need placement lines, need to make sure the satin stitch will cover the fabric edge, and so on. 

So I decided to stitch out just some key areas - the largest curvy bits, the outline, and the width of the applique outline stitch. Thanks to the features of my nifty machine, I can just jump from one area of the design to another with the use of a stylus. 

And here's the result. Everything seems to fit nicely, although I might widen the applique satin stitch a bit.

The outer circle is a basting line, delineating the edge of the embroiderable area. The next oval is the applique line, and you can see 4 points where I checked the width of the satin stitch. 

All that mess in the middle were tricky bits of the actual design.

I like it when I get to plan a project and the prototype looks like everything will go fine.

'Nuff said Sunday

The girls at the stitch and bitch last Thursday didn't see it until I pointed it out. Never in my life would I be able to lift the lower flaps, not with THAT expression on his face.