Winter Storm Projects

Well, the storm is really still coming. So far today it has been just raining and is just now starting to freeze over and switch to snow. Some parts are supposed to get up to a foot of snow, we will probably be closer to the 1-3 inches range. But I digress...

First project up is a beautiful clock that my husband assembled from a kit! He had to sand, stain, finish, and then put it all together. He has been working on it for the past week or so and I think it turned out beautifully!

don't you love the winter facial hair? :)

pardon the coffee table full of toys...

Second, I am up to 20 stars for the wonky star quilt. I am looking forward to cranking out a lot of these while I am at our quilters' guild sewing retreat. We are all crashing at a local hunting lodge for the weekend with our sewing machines, bathing suits (for the hot tub), and lots of (ahem) drinks. I will get to participate in only the first of these activities, but that is okay. I am looking forward to hanging out with the ladies and getting some work done!

Third, I have 3 more girl baprons done! I had the lilac thread in the machine, so they all got done at the same time. Next, some boyish ones. :)

Fourth, a sneak peak at the latest church themed quiet book. Getting pages ready for the hand sewing to commence over our vacation!

Timothy's project for the day? Figuring out the complexities of the piano's foot pedals. :)

Impending Doom and Pinterest

I have this sense of impending doom when it comes to my crafting time in association with the birth of our second child. I have several crafty friends who have multiple children and I do have hope for my crafty future, but not for the few months after her birth. Which is fine. I will be busy with other things and it will be a nice break. But I must cram in as much as I can now.

While I still can. :)

The wonky star quilt is coming. I have cut out 98 sets (4 squares each) of white fabric (over 6 yards!) and have close to 70 full sets of colored stars. I also have enough for 13 more sets of colored fabric, but they are all different colors. I'll use these along the edges where I need partial stars to square out the pattern. So far, 10 stars are done. 87 more to go.

I also completed 6 boppy covers this week using this pattern. It is a really easy pattern and I am getting quite good at zippers! I find that if I pick 2 fabrics for the cover (one on top and one on bottom) I can get 2 covers out of each pair of 1 yard. 6 yards of fabric and 6 zippers equal 3 for me, 3 for my sister Amy. :) No pictures until her baby shower!

Enter Pinterest. An obsession for me at the moment the sparker of waaayy too many good ideas. The last thing I need on my plate is another project. Today, however, I actually competed some of the projects I have pinned!

First, Jared helped me make betty crocker mixes for cookies. I love not having to pull out all of my canisters of flour, sugars, baking soda, etc. to make one batch of cookies, but just reach for a package that needs just a couple of wet ingredients added. However, I really don't know what kind of flour they use and how much other preservatives they used. And they can be expensive! Enter these recipes. It took us a whole 30 minutes of mixing, writing on bags, and scooping ingredients and I now have 6 sets of cookies ready to go, only needing butter, 1 egg, and a little vanilla. Yay! Recipes are here. I am thinking if packaged with typed directions or even in a mason jar that these will become an awesome youth group fundraiser.

Next, I made some baprons (aprons for babies). The directions and pattern can be found here. I decided to make a whole bunch of them. Look out all of you pregnant friends and family members! :) They were really easy to assemble and are so soft...they are lined with flannel! I have 2 made, with 9 more cut and ready to go. I did change the pattern from a tie back (which I find annoying) to having a snap or strip of velcro. This may restrict the flexibility to size accordingly to the child's neck, but I am going to experiment. Timothy is sleeping or I would have had him model...maybe tomorrow. :)

Third project of the day is to start prepping for a church quiet book. I have had some ideas spinning in my head for some time now and have seen a couple of versions this past week that solidified my ideas. I bought all of the materials today and will start cutting tonight. It is going to involve some hand stitching, so I figured that I can start it up now and work on it in the car when we drive to Michigan and back in a few weeks. Pictures will be coming!

Where was Timothy during all of this? Mostly sleeping (I work during naps), but he did get a new set of chunky triangle crayons yesterday and he enjoyed some daddy art time this afternoon (the paper is hiding behind Jared's computer). We figured he was ready when we went to Walmart and he was completely satisfied for an entire 20 minutes with my pen and the shopping list. :)

Only on Ash Wednesday...

would my husband be burning palms on our back porch during his lunch. :)

This is an amazing blog

My mother-in-law found this blog, shared it with me, and I will share it with you, if you are interested in learning more. It is a different story and a different child, but give you an idea of what tube feedings is like. Start reading in June 2009.

http://www.anunexpectedpath.com/

Lots of cutting

2 new projects in the works...only a few hundred more that are trapped in my head. :)

The project on the left is a quilt that everyone in our quilt guild is working on. It is a quilt made of a single block, but when rearranged, it looks like 4 completely different quilts. We are each making one for our next quilt show (sometime in September or October) to show how one block can be interpreted in many different ways. As a teacher, I was immediately drawn to the idea. As the maker of this quilt, I feel challenged to take a block that I would not be normally drawn to and turn it into something that I will hopefully love. So far, I have it all planned out and am looking forward to buying the fabric, hopefully soon. More postings to come...

The project on the right is a wonky star quilt that I want to make for our guest room bed. I am using lots of different fabrics because I like the scrappy look and I have the goal of hopefully making a bright, cheerful quilt. Total, this means I need 97 stars (each made up of 4 white squares and 5 colored squares). Interpreted: a lot of cutting for me. :)

As of this posting, I have enough colored squares to make 63 complete squares and some additional squares that I can use for partial stars around the edges (all from fabric that I had in my stash!). Not pictured, enough white squares to make 30 stars ready to go. I am throwing in the towel tonight and giving my wrists a rest. Tomorrow, I'll cut some more white squares (it'll end up being about 388 white squares total) and take 4 of every set of 5 colored squares and cut them in half diagonally. Confused? There is a link to a tutorial that I am following in this post. I would like to start sewing my triangle pieces this weekend. My goal is to get this quilt bed-ready before this spring when I am hoping to have a garage sale. I would like to have the old bedding sold and out of my house. :)

Crazy? Maybe. But I figured that I can push myself now, because the end of June is coming and I have a feeling that I will be taking a vacation from sewing world for at least a couple of months. I just hope that burnout doesn't set in too early...

clean thoughts

1.

So I read this blog posting today, which also led me to read this one too. I was having similar thoughts today and appreciated that someone else had the same frustrations with themselves. Sometimes I spend way too much looking at all of these awesome projects that people post and I don't have time to actually do my own projects. See my post about 2 quilts. I think I just solved this problem. :)

2.

When I am feeling overwhelmed with possibilities and the lack of time, I look at my cat and feel better. She has all of the sunny spots in the house memorized and travels from spot to spot throughout the day to follow the sun around. :)

3.

I am super excited about my new clothesline. :) We haven't been using the cloth diapers for the past couple of months because running them through the dryer just isn't enough...something about hanging them in the sun just makes them so much fresher. I was using a wooden folding rack, but it finally fell apart, never to be used again, and it is just too windy around here to just lay them over the deck rail. Problem solved thanks to my father-in-law and hubby. Thanks guys!

4.

I got a new diaper in the mail that I bought to investigate. I like it. It is a simple diaper cover that came with 3 prefolds. Right now we use pocket diapers, which are nice, but I know that I don't have enough smalls for a new baby that is going to need a lot of changing. I am also not crazy about having to wash all of these covers and inserts when I could be using the same cover (as long as it is just a wet diaper) and just replacing the insert. At least this is my understanding. I am looking for thoughts, all of you that cloth diaper. :) We will need to invest in a few more before the baby comes, so let me know what you use!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I am trying a new (to me) collage function on picasa. If you click on the above image, you should be able to see it in a larger format. :)

14 months

Happy 14 months!

meowing at the kitty in the book

signing "time" - as in I want to watch the Baby Signing Time video :)

I forgot to put that one on his list of signs he knows. I also forgot telephone, which is a sign he made up on his own. We were trying to figure out why he kept hitting himself in the side of the face when one day the phone rang and his hand went up immediately to the side of his face and it clicked. Whenever the phone rings, he sees someone on the phone, or he sees the phone and he wants to play with it, the hand goes up to the ear. :) It is so interesting to see him learn how to communicate and what he comes up with!

Weight: 19 lbs, 14 oz

Height: 28.75"

Words, words, words

Words in Timothy's vocabulary:

mama

bye bye

no

up

meowing at the cat :)

Words Timothy can sign:

bye bye

drink

eat

cracker

more

up

baby

so big!

no (consists of wildly swinging his arms)

whatever else he wants, he points at. :)

We have been watching Baby Signing Time, vol. 1 and recently checked out vol. 2 from the library, so we may have an explosion of new signs over the next week or so. He is also really walking around furniture now and becoming much more bold in his actions. He isn't crawling yet, but would rather just scoot on his bottom to get at what he wants.

watching the superbowl!

He is also doing really well with food. He is enjoying picking up foods on his tray and putting them in his own mouth and gnawing on lots of different finger foods. He has been putting the weight on too over the past couple of weeks and has passed up his pre-flu weight, so hopefully we stay on track now with the weight gain - mommy and daddy couldn't be happier. At some point, he snuck his 2 front teeth in! By the time I saw them on Friday for the first time, they were definitely through his gums and showing a bit. I think this explains the random outbursts of crying in his sleep he had last week.

I had an appointment on Thursday and the baby is looking good. Heart rate is consistently up in the 150s and I have been feeling more and more of the baby, although the placenta is on the top of my uterus and I think that is preventing me from feeling more than I am. We have our big 20 week appointment in Sioux Falls on Friday and will get to see our baby again on an ultrasound. According to the different wives' tales and gender charts (so much fun to read about) we are having a girl in every instance. So we will see...hopefully they will keep their legs uncrossed like Timothy did. :)