Friday, May 30, 2014

Reads * Graceling



I cannot get enough of this series. The last time I read this fast and sacrificed this much sleep to read was when I was reading Harry Potter for the first time. Strong but real women, imaginative fantasy worlds, sweet but not too sweet love stories. Kristin Cashore is my new hero. I read these when I was feeling blue and stressed and these books provided the most perfect and complete escape from reality. As soon as I finished Graceling, I wanted to flip to page one and start all over again.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Makes * A quilt for Henry

Penny Patch Quilt-AlongSo while I was away from this blog, my sister and brother-in-law made me a new nephew! And he is CUTE. I just want to cuddle him all day long. For christmas, I decided to make him a quilt but I wanted to kick it up a notch. Lucky me, Rachel over at Stitched in Color was running a penny patch quilt-a-long. Perfect! This totally looks doable and fancier than my usual quilts. I highly recommend this for anyone who wants to give quilting a try. Rachel does a fantastic job of breaking down the process and walking you gently through it all. I don't really have work in progress photos because I whipped this baby up in record time but I'll share the few photos that I did take.




My fabric choices were all based on a super cute woodland animal print. Using the colors found in that print, I selected a bunch of fabrics with smaller patterns. I had to add in a handful of solids when I realized that I didn't have enough different fabrics to make this design work. I would have liked to go easier on all the darker colors but I'm a practical sort of gal and this quilt will have all kinds of things spilled onto it in its lifetime so I figured darker fabrics will hide stains better.


Lots of arranging and rearranging. It's easier for my eyes to catch patterns in photos rather than in real life. I'd arrange, take a photo, then rearrange. It helps me to more evenly space out colors and patterns. I have about twenty of these photos.


This is my "I rolled out of bed and straight to my sewing machine look. This is the step that makes my arms sore. I learned that rolling up the quilt helps with the "Where do I put the $%*^ the parts of the quilt that I'm not sewing??" dilemma. But the quilt does get heavy and even with a walking foot, my hands are super tense as I feed the quilt through the machine.


Finished! I spent Christmas Eve frantically finishing up the hand sewn binding - my fave part of quilting!


I must have ripped miles of stitching because I couldn't get the quilting straight. My mismatched corners didn't help!


Look at the gummy smile! Eemo loves you!

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Let's try this again

hello? is anyone there? it's been awhile dear neglected blog o' mine. this poor thing has changed so many times over the years. i give up. i'm just going to share everything i like! let's think of it as a smorgasbord of happiness. onward!