Happy Birthday Gampie!

Today is Jay's dad's birthday and so the kids and I made him a movie full of "cool tricks!"

Brace yourself.  It's longer than 10 minutes, but it gives you a nice taste of life around here.

(ok ok. I admit. I cut out a lot of.... naughtiness :D)

Happy Birthday Jim!  The kids are so lucky to have such a fun grandpa!

Bedtime "Makeover" for Peach

This isn't a very exciting post.  BUT, I like to chronicle my sewing endeavors to remind me that I do sometimes get to do things that stay done.  because most of what I do all day is stuff I repeat EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. and it has a tendency to wear on a person and their sense of self worth.  at least for me.  i like to feel productive  and permanently checking things off a list helps me with that.

not that any of my posts are very exciting...

In the past, when the footies in the kids pjs get holey, I would just cut off the feet and maybe hem the bottom if I was feeling generous.  But this time, I just couldn't do it.  I forgot to take a pic of why (you can kinda see in the final product shot below...) but this particular pair of pjs had super cute feet- they look like little frog faces!  I just couldn't bare to decapitate them, so I decided to figure out an easy alternative.  

I could redo the feet, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary unpicking and I don't own a serger (yet) so it just wouldn't be as nice of a finish.  Then I thought, why not just sew on a bit of reinforcement!  So I place the inside-out foot on top of some spare flannel and 

just sewed around the edge, right on top of what was already there.

Worked like a charm and took a whole 10 minutes!  There is still a hole, but her feet can't feel it and won't be able to make them bigger.  Plus you still get the benefit of the little grippies on the original feet.

Looks like Hazel may get to enjoy frog feet in a couple of years too :)

Peach has a blankie.  She takes it everywhere I let her take it and when she got it, it was actually a hand-me-down blanket from our cousins.  It had already gone through 2 babies before her, and now endured daily punishment from her for 3ish years...  One day I discovered that she had somehow ripped almost half of the crochet border off!  It would be one thing if it were just the crochet, but it was the fabric that was ripped.

SO, I decided to cut off the rest of the border and sew on a new one, keeping the blanket largely intact, just leaving it a couple inches smaller.

removed border

I also forgot to take a closeup, but what I ended up doing was using some large light blue ric-rac I had in my stash (that also matched and since Peach's favorite color is blue....) and sewing it all around the border.  

Now to see what she would think of it...  Blankies are tricky things.

I love Peach's morning hair.  This is actually one of the more mild days for her...

Luckily, she was thrilled by the blue and it is dragged around as much as always.

It felt so good to do a bit of sewing, even if the projects were super small, but it sort of whet my whistle and gave me the bug.  I've got a few other projects underway now. :)

Easter

Easter was really fun this year!  The kids are finally old enough to enjoy the egg dyeing (as opposed to The Frog's first Easter, when I ended up sitting alone, dyeing all the eggs myself.  fun.)  I tried to show the kids the trick where you color on the egg in white crayon and then when you dye the egg, the crayon part stays white.  They all took it a step further and colored with all kinds of colors before dying them, which turned out to be a great way for Hazel to be able to participate too.

 Since we have 9am church this year, I made everyone get dressed for church before opening their baskets and searching for eggs.  Here they are waiting for daddy to come down (and I'm sad to say, they didn't actually wait for him all the way.  We didn't realize he had hopped into the shower).

 This is just a funny shot.

 Our kids get super spoiled because they get a basket from the Massachusetts easter bunny and the Utah one :)  Because I know this, I always try to go low-key, but I think I got a bit carried away this year.  on accident.

 The bunny ears and tail were in the dollar section at Target.  I couldn't resist!

 I at the last minute, decided to host Easter for whatever local family didn't already have plans and so my little sister's family and parents came down.

 We took many many photos of all the kids together, and believe it or not, this was the best one.  (If I got a nickel for every photo of my kids with thumbs in their mouths...)

 These little dolls are something I started last year intending to be for easter, but as usual, I had too much going on and I had to bag them for later.  I thought about trying to finish them for Christmas, but all my spare time went to the quilt for my mother-in-law, so I finally got them done in time for Easter this year.  They are topsy-turvy dolls!  One side they look like they're ready for a fancy event, and if you pull their skirt over their head...

 they're dressed in their everyday wear.  I think they turned out so cute!

 The hair is probably my least favorite part... it was annoying to sew and I'm worried it's not going to stay in.  Only time will tell...

Peach wanted to be in the photo once she saw what I was doing.  However, the dolls went into quarantine right after I took these photos because we had just discovered that Peach had LICE.

EW.

It was super disturbing to see those little bugs crawling in her hair, and even MORE disturbing to see how many eggs were in there.  We are so lucky that nobody else seems to have gotten it.  (where SHE got it, I have no idea...)  Needless to say, my spring cleaning got a huge jump-start that day, since I had to wash pretty much everything in the house that could be thrown in the washing machine and vacuumed everything else.

We're still on red-alert around here, but so far so good :)

Sorry to end on such a yucky note.

Valentine's 2014

Yeah, so, this is a bit overdue...

Jay and I actually celebrated our Valentine's Day a week early, at Tuscany (fulfilling a childhood fantasy of mine.  and sadly, is not worth the money.  if you were wondering*) seeing opening night of Ballet West's Sleeping Beauty (SO SO SO AWESOME!  Might be my favorite ballet... so many awesome women's solo parts!).  We've had season tickets for years now #imsoluckymymanlovesballet2 and I still have NO photos of us there together!!  

Tonight!  We're going to Ballet West II's "The Little Mermaid", so hopefully I'll remember to do it!

ANYWAY, the week-early thing is important because we watched my little sister's kids overnight so she and her man could have a special night away for Valentine's.  I had meant to get lots of cute cousinly togetherness photos, but it turns out, there wasn't much time for photos with a 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 year old to take care of.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, actually.  But I'm happy to only have 3 bums to wipe every day, instead of 5. :)  (and if my mom hadn't watched their baby, it would have been 6!)

They didn't come over until after lunch, so I tried to make a special breakfast for Jay in the morning.  His all time favorite is Eggs Benedict, and though I've made it many times before, this was definitely the best time yet!  I'll tell you why

1) Homemade English Muffins:

2) Hollandaise sauce recipe from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". (which I forgot to write down before returning to the library!  doh!)

3) "Poaching" the eggs in a slow-cooker** made everything SO much less hectic, and I was able to put more attention on the Hollandaise- which actually wasn't that hard!  I can never get the blender method (which is what most scaredy cats recommend to novices so they don't scramble the eggs) to thicken up properly!  Give me a whisk and a pan on the stove and I'm good to go. I like being more in the thick of it when I cook :)

I admit, we eat our Eggs Benedict with bacon.  Not the most traditional, but most excellent. :)  And I cook them the uber-gourmet way: in the microwave, between double paper towels.  In fact, you can see them in the background of this next photo...

and here are my flowers from the Jay :)

Now, if I could only make good rice Krispie treats...

footnotes:  Chris!  How do you do that?
*But Valter's Osteria is worth every penny!  Get the pasta tour, or just get the spinach ravioli or the limoncello angelhair.  My mouth is watering right now thinking about them...

**How to "poach" eggs in a slow-cooker, brought to you by "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook ".  Heat about 1 inch of water in the slow-cooker for 20 minutes. Crack each egg into a separate, Pammed, ramekin or small bowl (I could only fit 4 eggs in my slow cooker) and place them in the hot water.  Cook with the lid on until the whites are no longer runny.  (me thinks it was 15-20 minutes?  it's very flexible, the slow-cooking...)

Quilt Reveal!

So, I'm a thief.  First time I can remember stealing anything.  And let me tell you, I was soooo soooo nervous.  And then to try and fit it into my luggage to go on the plane... that was no small feat.

Let me back-up.

I like to quilt.  Probably not as much as my mother-in-law does though.  She has an awesome machine quilting set-up in her attic that she let me use to finish up this baby so long ago.  And I've pretty much been working on this next one ever since.

Wait, I need to back-up some more...

So, Jay's mom was showing me her stack of quilts and talking about the techniques behind them and all that interesting stuff and then she came to the last one that still had safety pins in it because the quilting hadn't been finished.  She said it was the only quilt that survived the fire when their house burned down about 10 years ago because it had been sitting in the bottom of a trunk, for some odd years waiting to be finished.  The quilt had to be professionally cleaned to get all the smoke smell out of it, which removed all the pencil markings she had made she she would know where to quilt, and so she never got back to marking it again.  Now, she's more of a machine quilter, and she said her eyes just aren't good enough to see to do hand quilting anymore.

I Immediately thought, I should finish it for her for Christmas!

I had no idea what that thought really entailed...

So, the day we left, I snuck into the pile of quilts, frantically ran it up to my luggage (because I knew if anyone caught me in the act I would never be able to pull off lying about it) and used every muscle in my body to cram it into an already brimming suitcase (with my other quilt in there as well...) until the zipper finally closed.  (Meanwhile, wondering how the inspection people would ever get it back in if they were to search my bag.  which they always do...)

We got home and I first thing went to JoAnn's to pick up a lap loom, kinda like this, and set to work.

I first started on the few flowers whose markings were still visible.  After finishing those three squares, I thought to lay out my work when I noticed how all I had just done looked like the work of a Kindergartener compared to the beautiful quilting Pam had started...

Feeling a bit dejected, I carried on.  and on and on and on.....  I can see how a quilter becomes quickly proficient - even the smallest of quilts naturally lends itself to much practicing.

Most of the squares had only a couple of subtle lines or loops left from the cleaning, and so I would scour the flowers that had already been quilted in other squares (thank goodness there were repeats!) and I would figure out which one it was most likely to be, and then try to draw it on, freehanded.

I worked on it almost every night for a couple of hours until I felt a bit burnt out in October (and feeling like I should be thinking about Halloween costumes...) and took a little break.  Then November started, which is when I start panicking about Christmas presents, and I quickly jumped back on the band-wagon.  Finally I had done everything I could see, but there were very intricate borders that had no markings to go on and there was no way I could free-hand those.  I tried a few techniques, all failures, and decided to wrap it up and get the opinion of a master quilter - hoping I could finish the rest during their week long stay.

Pam was very surprised, it was awesome!!  She says she didn't even notice it was gone! score!!  

There are benefits to living far away... knowing me, I'm sure I would have inadvertently blown the whole thing in casual conversation.  

"you don't feel like something from your house might be missing do you?  just checkin'.  no reason..."

Upon further inspection, Pam realized that I hadn't gone around the handles of all the baskets in the outer 9 squares, and I knew then that there was no way for me to finish while they were in town.  We went to my favorite quilt shop's end of the year sale and picked out a binding fabric (and some more fabric for my next quilt. hehe).

Well, 3 months later, I finally finished the quilting and man, am I relieved!  Here it is!!

I wish it were easier to portray the quilting in the photos, but it's really just not the same as in person.  This quilt definitely has much MUCH more quilting, and much more intricate quilting than anything I've ever done.  I really love the look of hand-quilting. It just feels so much more authentic and true to the art form.  (though don't get me wrong, I now officially understand just how much longer it takes to do it by hand.  I machine quilted my sampler quilt in only a few hours!!)

All the white squares have a flower with about 20 petals on it, and a 1/4" border

Each basket has one of 7 different flower patterns between the handle and the body.

The baskets themselves also have quilting in them.

the back side

And a little something to record a bit of its history.  (This was done on my embroidery machine, very quickly, by comparison!)

Jay had to fly to Boston at the beginning of March, and so he took it with him to hand deliver for me :)  These photos are kind of bad because I finished that tag the night before he left, and I remembered, lying in bed, that I didn't get to take any photos of it yet, so these are not taken with natural lighting, as I prefer to do...

So now you know what else I've been doing, instead of blogging!  There's probably one other major thing taking up my time, that I will hopefully be able to blog about soon.  The time is not quite right yet. :)