Missing a Design Wall . ..

One thing I miss about my house in Melfort is my sewing space in the basement. Although I have a cute, compact little space here, I miss being able to spread out and leave the mess of a half finished project or three on the floor, the tables and the wall (like in this post here ). I find that I am especially missing my design "wall" (which was really just a piece of batting I would tack to the wall).

Now instead, I have a design board which is about big enough for a doll quilt, or I can spread out a piece of batting somewhere and stick parts to it, then roll it up when little "helpers" arrive to get in on the action. Unfortunately, when I unroll said project, it looks something like this:

 Then I get discouraged, and I don't really have the patience right now to move all the pieces around and figure out what is wrong when bits keep falling onto the floor and wrinkling all up like this. I do know what's wrong: I either need more reds and oranges in the frames, or I need to make it all blue, green and whites. But that requires more cutting and playing around with which blocks belong where. So instead of fixing this quilt (the beginnings of boy #4's quilt) and sewing the blocks together, I got frustrated and pulled them apart.

I briefly contemplated just doing this (only with fabric, of course):

 But in the end, I did this instead:

I think this quilt needs to wait until I either figure out a way to hang some batting on the wall, or have the mobility to use the floor as a design space again (not so easy at 37 weeks pregnant). So instead I'm going to sew some brainless, satisfying smaller projects with happy fabric, and leave quilt piecing until later.

The Waiting Game Begins!

These photos are from last Monday when we still had snow. A week later and 5 days of freakishly warm weather means our yard is now full of mud, not snow and ice. And now its back to "regular" March weather.

One month to my due date has come and gone, and spring has sprung in Montreal. While my kids finally get to go outside and enjoy their sandbox, their fort and - soon - their bikes, I am increasingly finding myself inside, sorting and organizing and, mostly, resting.

I feel like the new life in me is a little like my kids in the sandbox these days. They are re-discovering all the joys - wind, sunshine, excercise - and pains - skinned knees, wet mittens, and dirty hands - of the outside world. And I am remembering, and about to rediscover all the joys and pains of that early, intense stage of motherhood that is caring for a newborn.

In the meantime, there is little I can do but wait, prepare, and distract myself from the inevitable change to come. Work is almost finished. Baby clothes are being sorted, emergency bags packed, and the last few re-organization tasks are planned or completed. And then there is just the slow, measured wait. Trying not to panic. Trying to keep busy and distracted while simultaneously doing a lot of nothing but resting and staying calm. Keeping our household operating, while realizing that our rhythm is about to change, and accepting that things are just not getting done as my energy and stamina wanes. Life is slowly, inevitably, briefly, turning inward.

Sewing Time!

Well, I finally got a day off where no one was sick and I had a few hours to myself. I decided that aside from sleeping (which I did quite a bit of) and tidying up a little bit (enough to make things sane again), I decided it was time to sew!

I decided that I need to get a few UFOs (unfinished objects) finished, so I can feel more excited about sewing again, and I wanted to start with this quilt:

These blocks were made for me by the ladies of the Threads Together Quilting Bee way back at the beginning of the quilting bee craze. I loved these fabrics, and had been collecting them to make a wonky log cabin quilt for Dave and I's bed. Instead, I decided to hand them over to my quilting bee with no instructions, and see what I got back. A few people flaked out and I ended up with only 12 of the promised 16 blocks. Since I had asked for small blocks - 10 1/2 " - this meant I either had to put huge sashing around them or make a bunch of blocks. Discouraged, I put them in a bag with the leftover fabric and left them. Occasionally over the last few years, I have taken them out and played around with them, but always I have put them away again to work on another project. I still love the colours and fun bee and butterfly and owl fabrics in them, and the blocks I received were really stunning, so I've always felt bad that they were sitting in a bag, unassembled. It seems so disrespectful to the ladies who worked so hard to make them.

So I finally decided to just make one block to replace the one block that just didn't fit with the rest, and sash them together, and make a small quilt. Right now this is about 40 X 50, but I might add a scrappy border to it, which will make it about 46 X 56. I figure we have enough little people in the house that its okay to have some little quilts around that are just the right size for their laps.

The other thing I wanted to start on today was a baby quilt for the new baby. I decided I'm going to do really simple square - in - square blocks in these lovely bright colours. Some are from a couple of fabric bundles I picked up at Fabricworm.com, and the Pezzy prints are from a yummy bundle of pezzy prints I picked up at Pink Chalk Fabrics (also online). I wanted to get the cutting done while I had no little fingers around.

Since Emma stays up so late, my old quilting routine of cutting and ironing at night when everyone is sleeping, and then sewing during the day when I have a few moments hasn't worked, so I was glad to get these all done today. I was really happy because I figured out a way to get all the fabric I'll need from two 2 1/2" strips and one 4 1/2". This means I have enough fabric left from these plus the other fabrics I ordered as "potential" fabrics to make a nice log cabin picnic quilt later this year (I want to make a second go at the quilt-as-you-go method in "Patchwork Style").

Emma came home while I was sorting out and spreading out the fabric for the last photo. I gave her the leftover bits and pieces and she had fun playing with them until supper time. Soon she'll be a great quilting apprentice to have around the house.

Here is some of the leftovers from my original stack, although since I cut them in pairs and then folded quickly, you can only see half the fabrics here . . . I am really excited about this baby quilt. It should be super fun.

Fab Little Quilt Swap Conclusion . . .

Well, the Fab Little Quilt Swap is now at the point where all the quilts have been sent out, and everyone is checking their mailboxes for their quilts to come! Since the swap is mostly out of the US, I am considered "international" and have to mail early. So my part in the quilt swap has come to its happy conclusion.

Here is my finished quilt. My partner was ruthiequilts , the queen of all things bitty (she is one of the members of the truly amazing bitty block committee). She likes some order and structure in her quilts, and had just photographed some quilts with all 3" churn dashes that she loved, and she had lots of pics of tea cups and tea pots in her photo stream.

So I put all that together to make her this little quilt, which I called "Catmint Tea". She loves it, and I'm glad it made her happy - I had a lot of fun making it.

In return, I got an amazing quilt from Angela / Twee Cut to Pieces. She read through my blog when she was looking for quilt ideas, and must have read my post on my ambivalence about staying home again after being back at work. She put that together with this amazing illustration to create this masterpiece for me:

As soon as I got it, the pretty quilt found its place on my quilt wall in the kitchen, to remind me to enjoy all the things I love, and relish this time I'm going to have at home with my little ones.

Angela actually won a blogger competition with this quilt, too, so it is very cool that its now mine! I really and truly love it.

Inspiration Overload

So, now that I am done my Fab Little Quilt (no time to down load pics and do a proper post on that today, so it will have to wait until later in the week - if that is too much of a tease, just check my Flikr stream), I am trying to finish up some WIP's and think of what I want to make for a baby quilt, and for Emma's big bed quilt.

The problem is that I have too many ideas and choices. I've gathered some awesome fabrics for both quilts, and part of me wants to just do simple one-patch quilts of some variety. But I know I could do so much more, and I sort of want to stretch myself a little bit, so I never actually cut into the fabric. Instead I just toodle around on Flikr thinking, "oh, or I could do that. or maybe that. oh, that's nice too . . ." without actually choosing an idea, or thinking about how short my time frame is before the baby is actually here.

And every time I do settle on a plan, life gets in the way and I have to wait a little longer to start working on it. This week I thought that I would finally get some solid sewing time in, because Thurs. and Fri. are half days at school. But Emma picked up Hand-Foot-and-Mouth Disease and she is highly infectious, so she has to stay home from daycare all week. So there go my free days - AGAIN.

I think I just need to acknowledge that as much as I'd like to be making more complex and challenging quilts right now, my actual sewing time is short. So I need to think simple, stop trying to over-complicate my own life (one of my favorite pastimes) and just make something relatively quick, that  I will still be happy with. I will have years when my kids are older to make Dresden quilts and Postage stamp quilts and carefully crafted and balanced Improv quilts and Wonky neighborhood quilts. Right now I just need to think lovely, simple, comforting quilts in happy colours to brighten our rooms and warm our hearts. Right? Right.

So maybe I should spend that extra 15 min. I have here and there sewing instead of popping in to Flikr, overloading my brain with MORE inspiration. Well, okay, once my Fab Little Quilt arrives at its recipient's doorstep, anyway. Then I will cut into that yummy stack of baby boy fabric. Promise.  

Bye, bye hair!

Well, my hair has been pre-Raphelite-ing again, and had become pretty unmanageable. I was mostly just throwing it up in a messy bun or braid, until Emma got a hold of it and pulled it all down and apart. Since I have no immediate plans to swoon in rowboats or languish on the edge of city ramparts or otherwise take advantage of my long, unruly hair, I decided it was time for it to go.

So, off to the hairdresser I went. She asked if I wanted most of it cut off in a ponytail so I could donate it to a wig-making for cancer patients charity. I said yes, of course. How fantastic would that be to have my hair, which is just irritating me, used for something so wonderful? And since my hair is such an unusual colour, it really is perfect. Rather charmingly, when I brought home and dried out the ponytail, Dave asked if we could keep it next time in case I died, so he could remember my red hair. I told him he was being very Victorian and that the ponytail was going in the mail.

In any case, here is the hair that was cut off, and here is my new haircut:

I was hoping for something a little longer, but my hair grows. Fast. So this is good for now - light, easy to clean, hard to spit up in or pull, and polished and professional for the next month while I'm still at work.

"

So, if I was in my "Earth Mother" phase back in the day in Saskatchewan (see my pre-Raphelite post), what would I be in now? My "Urban Working Mom" phase? My "I'm Too Busy to Construct an Identity" phase? Any thoughts?

Stage Two of Nesting Complete - Paint!

As I mentioned on Monday, I have been in that particular stage of pregnancy insanity where you must throw your entire household into upheaval and get everything ready for the baby. I beleive with Emma we got new wardrobes and I sewed everything in sight - wipes, change pads, baskets, wall organizers, quilts . . . I was a mad sewing demon. This time it appears to be painting and re-organizing.

I think I might have mentioned that we are switching all the bedrooms around. Since we were moving all the furniture anyway, and two of the bedrooms did not get painted when we moved in, and the third has been liberally sprinkled with Aaron's idea of wall art, I decided that there was no time like the present to paint. My long suffering husband agreed to wash walls and move furniture and peel tape, and gave me free reign to choose colours and paint walls.

Since I finished these rooms it has been snowing, and there is only pale, filtered light to see the new colours in, but I had to show them off in any case because I love them. When we were in Saskatchewan, I was always trying to pick paint colours that would liven things up and make our space more stimulating. In Montreal, I find that I am chosing colours that feel calm and happy as a foil to all the chaos and crowding (not to mention all that red brick).

Our room, formerly the boys' room, is at the front of the house, facing the street. It is this lovely moss-y, pine-y green. Dave and I both love it, and it feels so soothing to be in this room now.

And look, I even sort of made the bed for you (the duvet cover is in the laundry right now, and what with all the painting, the laundry is sadly neglected, so pardon all that white. I think I'm going to finally pull out my Freshcut fabric and make a wall quilt and possibly a bed quilt with it. And the fact that it has been re-issued and I could get more of a few prints I was missing or had used for other things helps, too.

Emma's room (formerly our shared room) was a neutral-y white colour with lots of handprints and wall art fromt he previous owner's kids. Yuk. Frankly, it has been driving me crazy for the last year and a half, and I have been itching to paint it, so I was happy to finally get the chance.

This room has no windows, just a sliding door joining it to the boys' room and the main door leading to the living room. It is pretty dark, and when I started applying this yellow-green paint I discovered that part of the reason for its sad, cavern-like feeling was that the former owners had painted it a neutral with a purple undertone. I totally do not get why you would put a cool, dark undertone in the paint of a dark room. In any case, this meant I had to add a second coat of paint, since there was this strange pink glow emmanating through the seemingly flourecent yellow at the end of my first coat.

The end result is a pretty, soft green that will be great to match with pink for now, but will have staying power for when Emma moves on from the pink thing. There was nothing in this roome except a giant, ugly, cheap Ikea wardrobe when I went to take this picture, so I thought I would show off the baby bump. Because this room has so little natural light, it is hard to photograph. The colour of the back wall is pretty accurate, but it is a little more yellow in real life.

The boys have been moved into the former study at the back of our bedrooms. They seem to have really taken to this room, and play in it a lot more than they did their former room. I think they maybe feel more secure because they are in the middle of the house rather than slightly isolate at the front of the house. They are still on their futon mattress, although plans are brewing to build them loft beds in the spring or summer.

The boys initially really wanted a similar colour to their old room, and this is pretty close. It is a little bit lighter, because there is less natural light at the back of our house (thanks, hill covered in tri-plexes on the other side of our back yard). Aaron decided once we had already bought the paint that he wanted grey instead, and then of course Andrew decided he would like red. We compromised and told them they could each pick a colour for their bed when Dave builds them.

Now that the painting is complete, we have started sorting and moving. Hopefully I'll be able to show you that next week, along with my finished Fab Doll Quilt, which has to be mailed in a week or so.

Hope you have a lovely weekend, and if you are in our area, find a way to enjoy the snow!

You might be nesting if . . .

on your first official day of Spring Break you put two coats of paint on a room, prep another room for painting, cook two chickens, make a batch of chili (neither of which are actually supper for tonight) and bake cookies.

You know you are Jill nesting if the kitchen floor has been left un-mopped and there are three baskets of unfolded laundry to be tackled while you are doing all this . . .

Ahem. But in my defense, my husband did put our mattress in the middle of the living room, on top of the laundry bins that contain the washable mop heads and other clean laundry.

Free Pieced Tea Cannisters

So, the next step of my Fab Little Quilt is to make a tea cannister. Above is the first one I made, inspired by the crazy bird on the fabric. He matched perfectly with the churn dashes, and I love the cannister, but the yellow was overwhelming everything else in my quilt and killing the overall design. So cute or not, it had to be replaced.

 Fortunately, when I was first tinkering with the block, I made a label that I thought was with the same yellow as the cannister above, but was really in a more orange-y print from the same fabric line. It clashed with the yellow in the bird fabric and wasn't working at all. I pulled it back out tonight, along with a little piece of my latest funny animal fabric (I love this designer's animals - they are so whimsical and happy), the original green and yellow, and a bit of the fabric I bought for this quilt. Here is my second cannister:

One of the ladies on Flikr commented that it must be catmint tea. I think it fits in with the overall colours of the quilt, and is still cute without stealing the show, don't you?

So, on to teacups, and then to put the puzzle pieces all together somehow!

Let the Switch Begin!

So, the "big switch" has started. Dave has reading week, and he spent a number of days of it moving things around. So far we've done some of the "easiest" moving first. The white storage thing that was in the hallway is now in our bathroom (making it look much tidier, I might add).

Next, the bookshelves from the entry way were moved into the place where the linen storage used to sit. This is nice, as these shelves are narrower than the storage unit was. The down side is that Emma is much more interested in the books now. I found her leafing through "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" the other day, which gave me a good laugh.

We moved those bookshelves, because Dave's bookshelves needed to be moved out of his former study. It is going to become the boys' room, so all the books had to move out to the living room. Now we look much cleverer, as we have the Ante-Nicene Fathers and assorted other theology and commentaries sitting out in our entry way.

Yes, I know the shelves are covering that door, but that is the door to the basement. As we have a basement suite, we don't ever use that door, so its all good.

Now we're on to the more complex changes - moving beds, toys, clothes, drawers while simultaneously painting rooms. All of our bedrooms are turned upside down and the boys' bed is a room with a stuff-covered office desk, while their toys and drawers are shoved into the center of their former bedroom while the walls are primed and painted.

I think we're all feeling a bit turned upside down too. Every day when Emma wakes up or comes home and something is different, she says, "Momma, come see! Come see!" and takes my hand and makes me come and check out the "new" thing she has discovered. Aaron asked this morning if the living room was still going to be the living room when we were all done. I am surprised every time I walk by a door and see a bed in the study. But, we think its better to do these changes now than when we are also adjusting to the new baby's arrival. So, hopefully we'll have a few weeks between the transition of our house and the transition to being a household of 6.

Fab Little Quilt Swap Progress . .

So, I've been working away at my Fab Little Quilt in little bits and pieces over the last few weeks. I'm running out of time, and ever time I've planned to work on this quilt lately, someone is sick or I'm sick or I decide to have a nap first and wake up 3 or 4 hours later with no more progress made . . . sigh. And now I'm stalling because I don't know where to go from here. So, after checking out my partner's photostream and favorites and galleries and thinking about my strengths as a sewist, I came up with these two sketches:

(nope, I can't take credit for the soldier at the bottom, but I wanted to include him. Its always nice when your son decides to take over your sketchbook . .. ) I thought my partner would prefer the one on the right, and I was correct. I bought a few new fabrics and pulled a bunch from my stash and ended up with this fantastic little pile here:

Then, I started making churn dash blocks. Have you ever made 3.5" unfinished (3" finished) churn dash blocks? They're fiddly. They require lots of precision and trimming and pinning and proper pressing. They took me about two weeks to finish, but I think they look great:

But now I was almost out of time, and my original quilt required about a dozen or more cup blocks, which are also fiddly and I was sick for 2 1/2 weeks and exhausted from teaching, and I started playing around with a simpler idea . .

So I made my teapot, and now I feel like I've hit a wall . . . do I want to make a cannister and two cups, like in the plan above? Or do I want to make a yellow bird teapot and some cups in vertical rows . .

And if I only want to make two or three teacups, then what do I do with all these fab fabrics I pulled to make teacups? I wanted to do 3 or 4 dainty cups with the little fabrics, and then some funky clunky mugs out of the bigger prints. But then how will I balance out the quilt?

What to do, what to do? So much pretty fabric, so many ideas, and only two more weeks until my mailing deadline, and not even a finished quilt top. Sigh, I'm usually more on the ball with these things, but I'm feeling a little lost and nervous of making something "too simple" or "not good enough" for this swap. I think I might just start making teacups and a teapot and a cannister and if I don't want them for this quilt when I'm done, I'll use them in a little quilt of my own. Thoughts, anyone?

[Un]Productive Saturday

Or would the proper Postmodern Punctuation be Un/Productive? Not sure. Okay, enough obscurity.

In any case, I had plans for today. I was going to get work done on my Fab Little Quilt (I shall have to show my progress on that sometime). I was going to finish editing my chapter in the Crosstalk Daycamps Manual. I was going to fold the laundry (I say that every day . . . that way one day it will get done). And then the boys decided to start playing one of their favorite games this morning - Softies in the Kingdom.

Softies in the Kingdom is one of those wonderful games entirely invented by Aaron and Andrew. It involves all the stuffed animals in the house, and it has been ongoing for over a year. Sometimes there are dramas involving lost family members that need to be reunited. There are dragon attacks, spy missions, burned down houses and destroyed communities that all require the entire relocation of the softies from room to room all through our house. Usually by the end there are bears and hippos and tigers and monkeys strewn all over the house in every room as they have become casualties in some epic battle or natural disaster, and the whole thing ends with a few lone survivors and a massive clean up operation.

Unfortunately, Aaron has determined that there are just not enough scary bad guy softies. There is one giant tiger and one dragon puppet, and other than that, there are no really evil looking bad guys. So, today Aaron decided it was my assignment to solve this problem.

I agreed, with plans of making little round black dots with horns and fangs and red glowing eyes (the three things required of the softies). And so I started cutting out pieces and fusing fabric to webbing and getting things ready.

And Aaron walked by and asked, "But where are their arms?"

So I cut out arms and started sewing again, and I got the faces fused and stitched on.

Aaron walked by again and asked, "Why don't they have any legs, Mom? They need legs."

So I cut out some legs and started sewing the horns and legs together, when I realized that if I just added some claws, then they could "roll their terrible eyes and bare their terrible teeth and wave their terrible claws". And at the very end of the day, we ended up with these:

Terrifying, aren't they? Here they are devouring my bills and looking at a takeout menu - guys this bad obviously don't cook themselves.

And here they are hanging out on a shelf, waiting for some cutsie softies to come by so they can jeer and make clever remarks.

I photographed the process of making these guys, if anyone's interested in a tutorial . . .

Oh, yes, I did mention knitting . ..

because I finally knit something other than a rectangle!

Fingerless gloves! Never being one to start off with, say, a scarf, I decided that I needed something small but interesting to start with. After an afternoon over at Valerie's house learning how to purl and make cables, I took my borrowed needles and pattern and gifted wool and set off to knit these babies. I needed a few more tips and tutorials along the way, but I got them knit! The one above is the second glove, which is much tidier than the first glove.

I liked my pair so much, that I decided to knit my sister in law a pair for Christmas. Of course, since I finished them in the car on the way to Cambridge on Christmas eve, I don't have a photo of that pair, but here is the very pretty wool I used anyway:

Now I'm working on a simpler pattern with just a rib stitch and a thumb hole for a certain pair of boys who think these resemble ninja gloves, so I can have my pair back . . .

Grumble, grumble, grumble . . .

We have had a very strange winter. The temperature varries from day to day between -15 and +5 degrees Celcius. There are two problems with this:

1. The sidewalks and roads are constantly thawing and melting and being rained on and then snowed on, making it impossible, most days, for a 7 month pregnant woman to do any but the most necessary and cautious walking.

2. Colds and flus are rampant. Andrew has been home all week with a bad flu/cold/ chesty things, which I now have. Emma was sick the two weeks before that with a bad cold and then pink eye, all the children threw up on one of those weekends for no apparent reason and so it has gone all winter. This means that I have not had a single weekend or day off without sick kids (or a sick me) since the last weekend of Christmas holidays. I am thoroughly sick of being or taking care of sick people.

Add these two features to my normal end-of-pregnancy grumpiness and a particularly busy few weeks at work (report cards, anyone? subbing on my prep blocks for all the OTHER sick teachers, or teachers marking exams, anyone?) and I have not had much of a breather lately. Every time I feel like I'm coming out of the woods, someone else gets sick.

I felt bad on Wed, because it was my day off, and I was SO grumpy that Andrew dared to STILL be sick when I wanted my day off to visit friends and sew and get my haircut and not have people to deal with that I was not the most nurturing Mom, I'm afraid. Ah well. Hopefully he'll remember me on better days and not on that one.

Ambivilence

In a word, that is how I feel lately about the whole going to work / staying home deal.

When I was at home full time for all those years, I thought my brain was melting away to nothing. The sheer tedium of simply raising children was going to kill me. Quilting, sewing, blogging, baking bread and obsessively reading parenting books were all strategies I used to keep myself engaged in some way. But it seemed so boring. So under stimulating. Here we go to the park - again. Here we sit down to a snack of bananas and cheese - again. Here we are wiping smeared banana and regurgitated (on purpose) cheese off the baby, floors, and walls - again. Here we are breaking up the same fight over the same toy - again.

Then I had to go back to work. And suddenly, the last place I wanted to be was out of my house. I wanted to be the one who said when my children went to the park. I wanted to be the one reading "The Busy Spider" for the 500th time. I wanted to be the one breaking up the fights, handing around the healthy snacks and cleaning up the mess. Because while I was there I could be sure my kids were getting to the park, being read to, eating healthy and learning the ropes of rudimentary civilization. Not that I was particularly good at cleaning up, keeping things organized or being a disciplinarian. But at least I was responsible when things went wrong, not someone else.

The last year and a half have been a lesson in letting go. In allowing other people to share the burden for my children. In allowing my children to adapt to different situations and different parenting and care giving styles. And we are all okay.

I realized I had made my children, and my role as mother, into an idol. I was putting my role as Mother, and my children's needs -real and perceived - ahead of myself, my marriage and God. This was not a healthy state of affairs for anyone.

But now I come to another impasse. I love my current job. I love the students, I am having fun teaching my courses, and I like the people I am working with. I love the action and stimulation and quick thinking required to be a high school teacher. I love the repartee, the funny things teenagers do, and the necessity of outsmarting them before they outsmart you. For me, although teaching is serious business, I am at my best when I treat it like a game. It energizes me in a way that staying home does not, even as it drains away the energy I would love to be putting into my own children's lives. Yet the possibility of having an impact on even a handful of students every year over the life of my teaching career is thrilling. To think I may have helped them through the hell that high school can be - that I have given them hope, helped them to feel like they belong, inspired them to learn, to grow, or to become kinder or more responsible human beings - is a huge payoff.

In two months, I go back into the role of stay at home mom. Back to that new baby place full of mindless, sleepless repetition. Back to trying to nurse the baby while you read to the toddler and do a puzzle with the 5 year old (and help the 7 year old with his homework). Back to trying to get everyone to sleep at the same time so I can get enough sleep to make it through the day (or night). Back to that place where excitement means you went to the library before the grocery store instead of after.

Yet it also means going back to the world where I can be the one guiding and caring for my children. Where I can truly get to know them and build the solid relationships that will allow me to keep being influential in their lives as they grow and change. Where I can learn patience, discipline and organization and hopefully pass on a little bit of it to my kids. Where I can be there when they leave on the bus, and when they come home and when they go to bed. Where we can take our time in the mornings, instead of rushing everyone out the door by 8:30. Where my kids don't ask me, "Do I get to eat breakfast with you this morning, mom? I miss eating breakfast together."

And how do I feel about going back to that world? Ambivalent. On the one hand, I want to stay home with my kids until they hit grade school. That was always my plan - to be there for them in those early years. On the other hand, I love to teach, and I know I will miss it as  much as I miss being at home now.

I suppose the best I can do is to go back into that stay at home mom world with a fresh perspective. Remembering what a privilege it is to stay with my kids and raise them. Appreciating the relationship that will be formed between myself and my children by putting in those endless hours or reading, puzzle building, breastfeeding, changing and feeding them. And keeping this new balance between the real needs of my children and the needs of my marriage, my personal well being and my faith that I have been discovering in the last year and a half.

So my friends, here's to my last two and a half months of teaching high school. And to a hopefully more balanced return to full time parenting. Wish me luck.

Wonky trees . ..

I know, I'm a little obsessive about finishing these, but I don't really want to start on something new until I get at least one of my 3 or 4 UFO's finished. I don't like to be working on too many things at once, or I spend so long deciding what to work on that by the time I choose something my time to work is done. So, here are my wonky trees.

Mel's in grey and orange:

And mine from my stack of brights:

Right now I've sewed the two trees together, but I might unpick them and use them in separate parts of the quilt. I have a lot of blocks with this background fabric right now, enough that the other blocks look out of place. So I put away all my blue fabric and decided that the last 3 blocks will not contain any blue, in an attempt to balance out the colours in the quilt.

Remaining blocks to make: two log cabins, two teacups, two houses and one gnome. Then I will mail off Mel's blocks and put mine aside until I've made my Fab Doll Quilt and a baby quilt. I think Baby #4 should get his quilt finished in time to use it for late Spring trips to the back yard and park, don't you?

Things not to say to a woman who is six months pregnant . . .

- Are you sure you still have 3 months left?
- Are you having twins?
- You look like the baby's going to come any day. April? Really?
- I thought you were at least 8 months pregnant.
- Wow! You get bigger EVERY day.


Seriously, friends, students and neigbours (not to mention husbands). This is my fourth child, so I'm not tiny, but I'm no Goodyear Blimp over here. Give me a break already.

this moment . . .

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
(via soulemama.com)

Fixed the link

from the last post, which will now lead you to the Fab Quilt Swap. Thanks for the correction, Shannon!

Cool Invite . .

So, I got a cool invite a few days ago, which I couldn't help but accept! I received an email, asking if I would like to join a by invitation only doll quilt swap. The swap mamas hand picked some quilters from a variety of swaps whose quality of work they appreciated, and invited them all to this swap. I was bowled over that I got asked to join in! You can see their Flikr group here .

Even though it is a little thing in the big picture of life, it is still really encouraging. I have been stalling out on sewing a lot lately, partially because I don't have much time, but partially also because I feel like I don't want to keep sewing if I'm going to be mediocre. This is, of course, my own issue - I don't like doing things I'm not extra good at. I also am one of those ironic people who fears both success and failure in equal measure. Although my friends often tell me they think I'm talented, I think, "Well, of course you say that, you're my friend."

To have a few really amazing swap mamas invite me to a group of really top notch quilters (I feel like I must have been number 99 out of a hundred or so, but none the less) is confirmation. Other people who make quilts think I'm doing something great.

I am also happy to have a creative challenge after the total lack of creative energy I've been putting into sewing lately. Because let me tell you, to meet up to the standard of some of these amazing doll quilters is going to take everything I've got. Bring it on, I say. Bring it on.

Despite the little time I have right now, I've signed up for the first round. After all, life is just going to get busier in April, and I'd like to at least do one round . . .