Stash Busting Blocks

So, I wanted to catch up on all my Quilting Bee Stuff, so I could get it off my mind before I started any other sewing projects. On the Threads Together Quilting Bee, Sept was my month to send out fabric. The blocks I have received and seen online so far are fantastic! I plan to make them into a snuggle quilt for Aaron around the time the baby comes, so he will have his own "new" thing when all the baby presents roll in.

For some reason, even though I made two of these blocks in August when I was supposed to send them, I had this idea in my head that I was going to make a third, bigger block. I didn't make the block, and I didn't send these either for the longest time. So finally I made a third small one and it is ready to send out to 2nd Ave Studio tomorrow:


Terrie wanted to make a quilt with Halloween houses, so she sent out some Halloween novelty fabric and asked us to add to it and make her a wonky house. This was really fun to make.


Finally, Brenda sent out her fabric for October early, and requested a 9-patch block in fall colours. I decided to finish her block while I was in the mode, and since she send batiks, I thought I would use up some of my small, autumny batik stash to finish her block.

Guess What We Got Yesterday?

Frost.

Last Thursday, it was 34 degrees. Yesterday, the high was 11. Hello, fall.

Weird message from Yahoo!?

So, I just got a message from Yahoo, apparently, asking me to give them my email address, password, date of birth and country, otherwise they are going to suspend my account and shut it down within a week. They say this is to make sure my account is still being used. But I use it EVERY DAY. Don't they have some way of keeping track of these things? Don't they already have my password? Why do they need my birthday all of a sudden?

Has anyone else who used Yahoo!mail got this message? I really don't want to email all my account info to some random person who may or may not be Yahoo.

Doll Quilt Swap -- Received!

So I have been obsessively checking my mail every day, waiting for my Doll Quilt to arrive. And look at the little beauty I picked up from the post office yesterday!
This was made for me by Sandi . The colours are lovely -- in real life they are a perfect balance between glowing and soft. Check out this quilting:

The free motion quilting on this little beauty is fantastic. I can do wonky / almost straight quilting, but my curvy quilting is terrible, so I was amazed by her mad free motion quilting skills.

Here is the back, which is equally cute:
And as an added bonus, she sent along this very pretty bracelet! How did she know I love jewelery, especially silvery, swirly things?

I am planning to hang this in my hallway, where it can make me smile as I go through my daily rounds with stinky, dirty children (to the bathroom) and laundry baskets (from the bedrooms to the laundry room) and soon enough snow suits and boots (to the outside world) and wide-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night nurslings (to the couch so no one else wakes up). Thanks for brightening my day, Sandi!

Au Revoir, Good Friends

So, along with my love of quilting textiles, I also love clothes. I love cords, and cotton pants and well cut jeans. I love snugly wooly sweaters and cozy t-shirts. I love cute tank tops and funky tunics. Recently, I had been quite happy to see leggings and skinny jeans with longer shirts and tunics come back, since they have always been good to me (though I think I'll pass on the cut off shorts over top of leggings look this time around). And I feel like I have finally figured out how to dress for my body type and look decent (I know, it took me 30 years to get there). And I had just lost all my baby weight before getting pregnant the first time this winter, and bought some cute new sweaters and jeans that fit well and were not frumpy and did not need to be suitable for breastfeeding on demand.

And then I got pregnant. And now, I need to find a way to fit all my maternity and post partum (ie - bigger and frumpier and very washable) and nursing clothes into my wardrobe. So I had to say au revoir to all my lovely, cute clothes again. Some of them were bought just before I got pregnant with Andrew, and have seen about 6 months of use in the last 6 years. Sigh.

I know its vain, but I greive about my body and my clothes in the last trimester of every pregnancy. And then I greive again shortly after I give birth, and my uterus has shrunk back but the rest of me, well, hasn't. And then when I have lost about half the weight and realize that *certain* bits and pieces are just never going back to their former glory I grieve again. And then I make the best of it, and use it as an excuse to buy new clothes . . .

In any case, it was a sad day yesterday.

Ah well, on inspection, I discovered that most of my nursing shirts have survived two voracious newborns and are starting to fray and pill and stretch. Which I suppose gives me an excuse to buy some new nursing clothes . . . . I knew something good would come of this if I looked hard enough.

Car storage bags

Those of you who know me in real life, and have driven in my car, know that I tend to use my car as an extra closet. Anything I think I might need at some point in the near or far future, tends to get stored in my car. Also, I am not great at removing things like cups and bags from my car. In high school, my friend Maya once commented that she wasn't worried if we broke down on the highway, since she could eat an entire meal out of my car. This has been a lifelong aggravation to my longsuffering husband.

As you can imagine, with two boys things have only gotten worse. Now the car contains all my stuff, plus books and toys to keep the boys busy, plus Aaron's growing collection of rocks and sticks (a boy after my own heart), plus all the accumulated sand and dirt and crumbs that come with small boys. Add to this the fact that we are planning to fit a third car seat into the back of our station wagon, at least for the winter, and you can understand that we have a problem.

Fortunately, I follow the terribly inspiring Jacquie's blog over at Tallgrass Prarie Studios. She was making a baby gift, and to the quilt she added this car storage bag (scroll down to see the bag). I thought this was just what I needed! Although she used the kidlet wall pocket tutorial, (which is a fantastic), I was feeling lazy. So I did this instead:

This bag is very loosely based on angry chicken 's tote pattern in Bend the Rules Sewing. Its not as pretty: no lining, and the seams are not finished more than they have to be, and it only has one strap. But it gave me a great chance to try out my new pinking shears, which made me happy, and it does contain all the guys and books and markers and cups that were drifting around in the back of my car.


Now I just need to make some of the mesh treasure bags from this (new) book:

to alleviate some of the rock and stick dirt and clutter, and we'll be in business. And, um, I guess I need to take all of my stuff out of the front seat when I'm done with it, too.

Obligatory 30 weeks belly photo

I thought you might all like an update on my baby belly. Well, okay, I thought I would give you one whether you wanted it or not. Everything is still going well. The baby is really active, especially when s/he hears the other kids playing. I am healthy. And thanks to my Birkenstocks,a different prenatal yoga video, and a baby that has not wedged its head in my pelvis, I have had very little back pain so far. Now I just have to figure out how I can wear my Birkies in the snow . . .

Let the Nesting Begin!

Well, now that Andrew is settled in school, decisions about extra activities have been finalized, the doll quilt is finished, and Andrew's 5th birthday party is finished (more on that in another post), I can get to baby prep.

Yes, I can feel the itch starting. I washed the shoe matts yesterday, and scrubbed down the kitchen garbage can, and I re-organized the toys in the basement, and sent Dave to the Salvation Army with a bunch of big stuff we haven't been using but haven't been throwing out, and started sewing storage bags for the car so we have room for a third car seat (and because my husband is complaining about the stuff everywhere), and soon its going to be clearing out closets and re-arranging furniture and hanging shelves . . .

Not to mention sorting and ordering prints from digital photos for the last two and a half years, freezing meals, sewing quilts and gifts, and trying to get our house a little bit happier for this coming winter . . .

And the inevitable breaking up fights and putting boys in time out a hundred times a day and reading Tintin and finding fun crafty things to do and going to the park while we still can . . .

Its going to be a busy fall. But hopefully a good, less draining kind of busy.

DQS7 - Finished!

Well, after much planning and careful stitching and stitch ripping and re-working and adding and subtracting . . . I finally finished and mailed my Doll Quilt! I am so proud of this one.

I was really happy with the colours, although I think I would make the sky less busy next time. The quilting, especially of the tree and the grass, worked just how I wanted it to:

Here's the back, where you can really see the quilting details:

When I was all done everything, I thought it needed one final touch. I thought I had some ladybug buttons in the basement, but I was wrong. So I made my own:

I hope my partner likes it. If she doesn't, she can mail it back to me. I'll happily keep it and make her something else. As it is, I think it fits into "whimsical, flowery and bright" pretty well. And I think I shall have to make myself one later.

Fun Kitchen Find

You might notice that I haven't been posting any cool vintage finds this year. That is because I decided not to do yard sales this summer. There were several reasons for this:

• we were a little tight on money this spring, what with extra flights for my Dad's funeral and a new mattress to save Dave's back


• I was crazy burned out and busy


• Saskatchewan has a bit of a Great Depression hang over, so there isn't usually much that is actually great at the yard sales around here - good things are generally kept just in case


• I kept buying things I thought I could fix up, but then didn't fix them up, so they just sat around taking up our basement space, and cluttering my mental "to do" list

After we got back from holidays, and I was feeling less burnt out, I had enough brain power to compile a mental list of things I might actually need (serving bowls, mugs and cups, a tv cabinet with doors, a kids table and chairs) and start a little bit of a hunt for these items.

Well, this weekend I had a major yard sale score. Not only did I find a serving bowl and some funky mugs (no photos of these, sorry), and some free powder blue suitcases (I'll show them to you another day), but I got this:


A hand crank food chopper. It slices, it dices and it grates with the help of three easy attachments and Andrew. Andrew is seriously in love with this thing. Yesterday, we grated and julienned carrots. Today we sliced cucumbers. Tomorrow, we might try potatos. He's even thinking he might be willing to eat cole slaw if he got to chop the cabbage himself. I'm thinking I might be willing to make some spring rolls or dumplings with this baby to chop the carrots and cabbage and onions and ginger really fine. The possibilities are endless. I just have to find a place to keep it in my kitchen where its not going to drop on someone's head and concuss them.

First Day of School.

Yes, it was that monumental event in the life of both a child and a parent yesterday. Andrew went to school. I was so nervous and anxious and excited that when Aaron woke up at 3am, I never went back to sleep. I heard Andrew get up quietly at about 4:30, and instead of coming in to snuggle, he went to play quietly in the living room. After a pretty normal morning, including some lovely french toast with blueberries (got to get that protein and brain food into my boy), we were all ready to go. What with his spare pants and school shoes and glue and scissors and snack and water bottle, his back pack was so heavy that he could hardly lift it. He was in good spirits and being silly. He kept falling over while I was trying to take a "first day of school" photo.


It was funny walking to school with him. As a former teacher and education addict, I love the first day of school. I was a bit sad that I wasn't saying good morning to a new class of students today as I watched all the teachers hurrying to their classrooms. In any case, it was also funny because everyone had their fresh, first day of school clothes and haircuts and faces.

By the time we waited in the playground, sitting on the barrier to the equipment together watching the other kids play, and got our shoes off and out bag in our locker (what with all the snow clothes in the winter, they have lockers from Kindergarten up), and got everything put away in our room, he wasn't so sure:

But he sat down on the carpet as his teacher had requested, and seeing as he was settled, I left, a little teary eyed. All the moms I knew from playschool who were dropping off second and third children gave me a hug and told me it would be okay. And home I went to play with Aaron.

Aaron quickly realized some of the advantages of being the only kid at home:

We also went to the park and played with the babysitting kids down the road that go there every day, and waited at the school playground for Andrew to get out for lunch. Aaron had fun, but by the end of the day he was ready to see his brother:

Andrew was too excited and full of stories to play with his brother (and a little jealous that Aaron got to stay with Mom all day long), but definitely feeling better about school:


He loved his first day. He got to try the computers and do a treasure hunt around the school and see a puppet that "came alive"(he swore) and they got Oreo cookies. He didn't particularly like gym time (no surprise - he doesn't tend to do well with organized kids games or echo-y rooms), but other than that he had a great time and was excited that one of his three friends from playschool was in his class.

I was so relieved that everything went well and he seemed to be really happily settled in his class and liked his teacher a lot. He came home and sat on the couch and finished his snack and told us all about it.

At the end of the day we were all so tired that everyone in the house (including Dave and I) was asleep by 9:30 and the boys "slept in" until after 6 this morning.

Doll Quilt Swap 7 Progress and Faux-made Girls clothes

Thanks so much for delurking to tell me about knitting, everyone! I know a lady in town who can show me how to knit, and I will definitely check out that wool shop on 8th st next time I'm in Saskatoon, Anna, to pick up some wool and needles.

Well, I have been puttering away at my Doll Quilt for DQS7 for the past two weeks now. It has been slow going becuase a) its warm out, so I feel the need to take the boys outside, b) I'm experimenting with newish techniques, so I wanted to make sure I got them right, c)SOMEONE needed a Batman mask in a hurry,


and d) I changed my mind on the colours and techinques to use for the birds and flowers two or three times


Anyway, this is what I've got so far:

Everything is pieced, the birds are fused on and the quilt is sandwiched together. The flowers are not attached yet, I'll do that after I machine quilt it. I'm going to use three colours of thread to quilt it, and I'm quite impressed with myself because I actually went out and bought some new bobbins so I could do this fairly quickly.

Up until this point in my sewing career (I have had my machine for 15 yrs now) I have been running with 3 bobbins. Yes, you heard right. Three. I usually have one black, one cream and one of whatever colour I happen to be sewing a garment in at the moment. With clothes and other things where all the bobbin threads will be on the inside, I tend to keep running with whatever colour I have in at the moment until I run out of thread, then change it to match the top thread at that point.

I'm finding, however, that I am switching between projects a lot more lately, and I feel bad sending other people quilt blocks with grey thread on the top and purple thread on the bottom, and with quilting you can see the thread on both sides of the quilt. So rather than what I have been doing, which is to unwind the remaining thread off the bobbin, wrap it around a business card and generally leave it somewhere silly so that my two year old or my cat finds it and spreads it all around the basement, I thought it might be time to get more bobbins.

In fact, I was so impressed with the look of my new clear plastic bobbins (my old ones are metal) with the pretty thread in them that I tried to take an artsy photo of them:
I think I need a better camera for that to work, though. Something with a detachable lens and 500 features. Or a non-subterranean sewing room (why is it that I can't spell because correctly on the first try, ever, but I can spell subterranean?).

I had a few extra birds and flowers kicking around the basement that didn't end up co-ordinating with my doll quilt, so I used them to make a birthday present for my 5 year old friend, Bea. I picked up a hat and t-shirt and embellished them for her:



It was kind of funny trying to find a plain hat and t-shirt for these, actually. The town I live in has basically two places you can buy clothes for kids (one for adults). I went to Extra Foods to look for something to applique for Bea, and I found that almost all the girls clothes already had Faux-made embellishments. Like, pretend appliqued t-shirts and sweaters with little felt apples with purposely thick, clunky embroidery stitches around them. Seriously, you know hand made is getting to be cool when chain stores start pretending to make funky hand made clothes.

So, Tell Me About Knitting . . .

Okay, I can't take it anymore. I have tried reading (too much concentration). I have tried hexagons (too many fiddly bits). I have tried felt softies (too much peril involved with being jumped on while wielding needles and scissors). I something crafty and portable. It seems I have come to that point where I have to start going to things with no purpose other than to watch something organized by someone else take place. Like swimming lessons. Or park time where your children actually play with other children. Or a reason to avoid doing the dishes after supper (oh, did I say that out loud?).

My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about 8 or 9. But she lived 12 hrs drive away, and I could only remember how to knit and purl, I couldn't remember how to cast on or off, and my mother was not crafty in the least. So I knit one endless line of green something and then gave up. But I think I still have a bit of a muscle memory of how to knit and purl. But how to cast on and off? What size of needles with which wool? What kind of project (a scarf to start with, obviously).

The last few times I have been in Michaels I have found myself wandering through the wool department. I even reached out for a pair of needles and touched their cool, metal surface and then shied away. It is a whole new, foreign world. Which is what I love about it, obviously. So many new things to learn. Something to occupy my mind and keep my hands busy and give me something to research. All things I need to keep sane.

I'm not going to give up quilting, I promise (I have that stash of fabric in the basement to use up, after all). I just need a portable project so I'm not aggrivated when my kids want to go to the park because I"m thinking, "But I really just need to do something creative. Can't we just stay home and hide in the basement?".

So where do I start? Anyone?

We Actually Achieved Food This Year!

So, I have this thing about vegetable gardens.
When I was little, our household consisted of me and four teenagers, and one working parent. This formula meant that we had a garden. Not because my parents had any love of the outdoors or of gardening, but simply because they needed to feed all those mouths on a budget. When my brothers and sisters started leaving home, my parents stopped growing vegetables.

This means that I have this idyllic childhood picture of a back yard full of peas and beans and other things to eat, and this memory of harvesting food off of plants that my siblings had helped me plant. But I have no actual knowledge or experience in how to take care of a garden.

The result is that every year I hopefully buy seeds and dig up a small patch of our back yard. Then I never get around to planting the seeds, or I plant them too late and everything is ripe when we're on holidays, or I plant it too early and the frost gets it, or I forget to water and weed it and everything dies. One year I even failed to grow zucchini. I didn't even know that was possible.

This spring, we tried again. I bought the seeds. We dug up the ground. The boys and I planted the seeds. And then something happened. Because I was out in the backyard with two little boys anyway, and I needed something to distract Aaron from throwing more sand on his head and to stop Andrew from trying to destroy the ant hill again to see if he can find the tunnels, I would get us all to weed the garden. And water the garden. And thin the garden. And weed it again.

And wouldn't you know it, we actually got to eat a few things out of our tiny patch of land. Before we went on holidays we got about 2 weeks worth of lettuce out of our garden. We were welcomed home to snap peas that Aaron devoured while I was trying to unpack, and rhubarb ready for a spice cake.

Yesterday, we ate our carrots. Yes, all of them. The carrots got planted last, and Aaron was getting a bit too excited about planting seeds by that point, so a lot of our carrots got planted in the lawn, or dug under or drowned. But we did get enough carrots that we could eat the little baby ones for a snack in the afternoon, and cook the finger sized ones for supper.

Now we are just waiting for the pumpkins. The vines have taken over our whole garden, which I think is a good sign. It rained the entire week the blossoms were open, though, so I'm not sure if they got pollinated or not. We'll find out soon.

Hope your garden looks a little nicer than ours, and brings you lots of joy and abundance this year.

Quilt Bee update -- July and August

For some reason all my photos always appear in reverse order in Blogger. Sometimes I can wrap my head around it, sometimes I can't. Oh well. In reverse order, here are the blocks I've made lately:

In the International Stash Busting Bee, 2nd Ave Studios sent us the centre scraps,and asked us to make scrappy stars. Here are my two, one pink:
And one blue:

And in July, Shannon asked us to make a block for a hunting lodge quilt. She supplied the bear and the forest pieces. I didn't have much fabric that worked well with this theme, but this was what I came up with:

In the Threads Together Quilting bee we were asked to make wonky log cabins for August. I loved this fabric, it was so bright and fun. I made one slightly more traditional block:

And one a little more funky one:

In July we were asked to make wonky strips with these solids. I made this one at home, while I was listening to an interview with John Cleese.

And this one on my sister in law's sewing machine in Winnipeg, so it was a bit simpler as I didn't have all my supplies with me.

And this was my other July Stash Busting bee block. Lish had asked for stars of pinwheels. I was going to make something more complicated, but then I ran out of time, so I made this simple, but still hopefully striking block. Lish sent the little birds, and the rest was leftovers from my dad's 70th birthday quilt. The pattern said it was a 12" block, and I assumed that was the finished measurement - that is was actually 12.5, but it was a 12" block, so I added the border to round it out.

Kid Picture of the Week

Kris and I have started a fun meme over at Clever Mamas -- the Kid Picture of the Week. You can add a comment here with a link to your photo. If we get enough people we'll add a Linky in a few weeks.

Since Kris put her photo up on the Clever Mamas blog, I though I'd post one here:

Familiar, but from a new perspective

Andrew is taking his first round of independent swimming lessons this week. And we went and bought him a good quality, comfortable pair of indoor school shoes today. When we were in Winnipeg I picked up some comfortable pants and long sleeve shirts for the school year.

The funny thing about these simple tasks is that I have never done them as a mother before. Yet I have such strong sensory memories of going to the little shoe store just down from Keskus mall to get my yearly Buster Browns, and the sting of chlorine in my eyes after swimming lessons, and the feel of being rubbed down roughly with a towel and hurried off to run after-lesson errands, and the smell of new clothes that were presented to me at the beginning of the school year.

Its like deja-vu, only with less polyester and patent leather this time around.

Vacation Round up

So, our vacation was a little more low key this year, because Dave and I were both so burnt out and it rained and rained and rained. We house sat in Winnipeg for two weeks for my brother. A lot of it was just us taking turns watching the boys while the other person slept / got out to civilization. Dave went on his reading retreat while I watched the boys, and when he came back he spent a lot of time with the boys. Because I actually wasn't nursing anyone this year, Dave sent me out to movies and coffees in the evenings while he put the boys to bed and enjoyed Speedvision.

None the less, we did get up to a few things. We went for a hike in the Assiniboine forest:
And took over the construction section of the Manitoba Children's Museum:

The boys enjoyed a lot of Treehouse and Retro Teletoon and PBS, since they only get an hour of DVDs fromt he library a day at home. Andrew was thrilled to get to see TransFormers, Spiderman, Superman, Bugs Bunny and (his new obsession0, Word Girl.


When the sun did peek out we visited the local schoolground which had a great park:
And of course there was always the Thomas Table in Chapters, another luxury for us. This usually lasted for a while before Aaron started getting into everything, but we enjoyed it while we could. Eventually we got so exasperated that we bought an umberella stroller to strap him into. That was after the day he took one of the kids cars they have for sale and I had to chase him around the entire store as he veered and careened around tables of books and surprised patrons' legs. I wonder where he gets his precocious driving skills from . . .


On one nice day we went to the Forks and spent about an hour watching the BMXers at the bike / skate park, and then got lovely organic cinnamin buns at the market. Before this they were doing 360s in a different part of the park, which was equally enthralling.
We went to the Winnipeg zoo, too. Andrew declared the animals too smelly, but he did really like these stepping stones:

And the prairie dogs were a big hit, too. It was funny, becuase there would be this huge empty field with a sign that said "Russian Gnu" or something similar on it. There would be three gnus hiding under a tree in the background, and about 30 prairie dogs wandering around in the foreground of the field.


Then we moved on to Regina, where we set up the tent. You may remember from last year that our tent weathered a huge rain storm, and so Dave was excited to see how it would do in the three days of rain that the forecast was predicting. I told him he could do a guest post about how to select and set up a good tent if there was no water in our tent at all after days of rain. The tent survived the two and a half days of rain we got, so stay tuned for Dave's guest post soon.

Anyway, here I am catching a little more sleep while the boys play with their GI Joes.

We also visited the Royal Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History on a day when it was pouring rain, which had some fun old school museum taxidermy going on, and some dinosoar bones. In the basement they had this fun kids area full of dinos. I think Someone had put a finger on my camera lens, so sorry for the blurry photos.

We were super fortunate that the weather cleared up for the Regina Folk Music festival. This year we did a lot more reading and a lot less active watching of the music. This was partially because some of the music was similar to acts in past years, and a lot of it was stuff that's not as much to our taste as it has been in past years. We did enjoy a lot of the music on Friday and Sunday night, and we really liked a fusion band, from BC, called From Dublin to Dubai -- a fusion of electronica, traditional Irish music and Bhangra dance music. It took me back to my days teaching at Princess Margaret, where the school assemblies had performances from the Bhangra dance team and the Ballywood Dance Team. And to Abbotsford where the IndoCanadian teenagers would blast dance music with traditional Indian beats from their cars. To much of the Regina audience I would imagine this was a whole new style of music so they got a lot more interested listening than spirited dancing. We really liked seeing K-OS live, and Bohemian Soundclash, and a new group called Chic Gamine was great, too.

In any case, can you guess who was reading what?

Aaron had a lot of fun at the Children's area at the festival. Here he is doing some two-fisted mural painting, just before the volunteer kicked him out for overly rowdy painting:

Andrew was getting a bit overstimulated by Sunday afternoon, so instead of making necklaces or painting he decided to peruse a toy catalogue I had brought, and draw:

One of my favorite things about camping is the traditional baths in the laundry tub:

And the campsite we usually go to has these crazy big balls. In past years, I've never let the boys play on them, becuase they do sort of roll, but this year Andrew was old enough to climb across them all himself, so they were a lot more fun. Aaron made his way across with help, but he liked jumping off the shorter ones.

That was about our vacation. I got caught up on my sleep and am now feeling remotely human again. Dave got to spend a lot of time with the boys, and we got to go to a few cultural and city-type things we usually miss out on. We have come back refreshed, and ready to start our new year. How was your summer?