What, me? Disappear for months on end for no reason? No, that’s not poss…yeah. It is possible. Blerg.

Anyway, the past few months have been crazy busy, both with work and quilts (and hey, what’s that, some actualy KNITTING?!).

The hand sewing caught my eye again, and I knocked out a ton of flowers for the quilt that time forgot. Or maybe I forgot. Whatever. Don’t judge me.

People are STILL HAVING BABIES and I’m still having to knock out quilts for folks who refuse to find out what flavor of baby they are having. Like, seriously, how hard is it to sneak a peek during an ultrasound? Ask the doctor to slip you a strip of paper detailing the bits of your baby? I guess it did give me the opportunity to use up the rest of the strips I cut up for the Flower Quilt pictured above (I had about twice as many as I needed), so I can’t complain too bitterly.

This is the Peacock Tail and Leaf Scarf from Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia, which I adore both for the eye candy and the patterns. This book is full of nupps; I’m not a huge fan of knitting them myself (note that the scarf above is cleverly utilizing beads in place of the dreaded nupp), but hoo boy do I love the effect they have when knitted by someone who has a good grasp of how to do them. That book is a must have for any lace knitter, if for nothing else than inspiration.

And finally, the always happening sock – there is one around the house at any given time, in some stage of being knit. I’m not huge on following sock patterns for some reason; I have some lovely ones, but I tend to enjoy mindless knitting with my socks, and dragging a pattern around doesn’t really make that possible. I didn’t want to break up that girly swirl I’ve got going on in this one, so I knit in some waste yarn and then I’ll go back and do an afterthought heel on this one (and it’s mate).

Beyond those things, a couple of momentous things occurred: I ran a 10K and another 5K, my daughter turned 3, and I turned *mumblemumbleglurg* another year older. I passed a Macroeconomics class with a 101 average, which I wasn’t actually sure was possible but the grade my instructor gave me assures me that it IS possible, and I’m starting on the Microeconomics class in two days hoping to maintain this streak of A’s. The class I took in the spring, Intro to Marketing, ended up with a B average, but I’m not upset by that at all. I’m just glad that I never have to step foot in that professor’s classroom EVER. AGAIN.

Running is actually going really well, and I’m about to start working on a 10K training program to get my endurance up – that 13.1 mile run is creeping up on me in 6 months, and I’ve got to get my tail in gear if I don’t want to, you know, DIE. Also, apparently my cholesterol is too high, so more exercise and eating less meat is in store for me. Sadly. Because steak is delicious.

Anyway, still alive, still crafting, still schooling and working and doing all of that. And parenting. Don’t forget that one.

I’m on a quilting ROLL, y’all.

I’ve had these fabrics sitting around my house since…well, since the last house we owned, which means that I packed them and moved them TWICE in the past year. I bought them from a local quilt shop in Austin; they weren’t a specific line of fabrics, but just a fat quarter bundle they put together on their own, and the set caught my eye. But then I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with them; I was super new to sewing and quilting, so they were set aside for a while. And then we put the house on the market and my sewing supplies were exiled to Storage, and I totally forgot about them until I was unpacking stuff for my craft room.

With the baby explosion that has been going on for the past year, I was happy to discover that I already had some fabric that could swing either way – I have friends who actually DO NOT FIND OUT WHAT THE SEX IS before the kid is born. Like, really? I would go insane from not knowing, simply because I COULD know if I just asked. I’ve got a nursery to plan, baby clothes to buy, a name to pick out…not finding out does. not. compute. But, since my friends are obviously not neurotic like I am, they are forcing me to come up with alternate themes for their baby quilts. I’m adapting, y’all. Put that in my yearly performance review.

With that out of the way, I’ve finally started on the Big Boy Quilt for my son’s bed. It occurred to me that at some point, we were going to have to move him up to a normal bed; at 5, he is still in a toddler bed because he fits in it. But I think his ego will quickly take a hit when the other kids are pointing and laughing because, hey, YOU ARE IN A TODDLER BED. AT 5. His mama dresses him funny, too, but that’s another story.

Anyhoo.

The kid loves robots. Seriously. He walks around the house, chanting in this creepy monotone voice, “I AM A ROBOT. I AM A ROBOT.” So I cashed in on the current trend and picked up some of the Michael Miller line, complete with Robot Camp fabrics. It’s Bright! And Cheerful! There will also be coordinating curtains, pillow cases and a throw pillow or two in the end.

My husband, the loveable goof, is worried that the quilt won’t be heavy enough by itself as a bed covering. I politely reminded him that we live in TEXAS, where it will quickly become hotter than the surface of the sun, and if a quilt isn’t enough for that kid then we need to get his cooling system implanted into MY body where it would do some good. What do you think? Will a quilt be enough to keep a 5 year old boy warm in the night?

In February, I have:

Sent quilts two friends who had three babies between them. (For the math challenged, that included a set of twins). These were SUPAH SEECRET projects, so I didn’t blog about them at the time of creation. Mommies would have known (one mommy is nursery theming with mushrooms, and the other, well, two quilts for twins kinda gives it away as to who they were for).

Knit a looooong scarf, out of two skeins of Manos that I had sitting in the stash:

Started work on a One Block Wonder quilt. This has been a lot more fiddly than I thought it would be, but then again, I’m a super simple quilter; I like straight lines and quilt tops that go together in a single day. This ain’t that kinda party, y’all. It’s pretty, and I’m looking forward to it being done, but I’m not sure I’ll be making another one.

And, I RAN. I ran in the mornings, I ran in the evenings, and on Valentine’s Day, I got up at 4:30 in the morning and drove to downtown Austin, where I stood around for TWO HOURS before the races started (my sister ran the half marathon, remember) and then I ran a 5K in a very shameful amount of time. But the point here? Is that I did it. Proof positive (I’m the one WITHOUT a medal, because they don’t give those to 5k runners. We were lucky to get a banana and a bagel at the end of our race):

And that I plan on doing it again in April. And in May. And maaaaaybe next February, when I’ve committed to running a half marathon. 13.1 miles. Which is further than my DRIVE TO WORK. Seriously. But I’m going to do it; I’m still excited about running, which is a positive thing I think. Of course, after watching my sister limp around after her race, I’m not sure that I”m ready for what I’m getting in to, but she’s going to run the FULL marathon next year, so she will still be in more pain (and have more bragging rights) than me.

February is on its way out, and I’m hoping to finish up another baby quilt, and knock out sleeves for Cassidy. I’m stranded on Sleeve Island, y’all, and I’m struggling to find the motivation to haul myself out of there and finish that damn sweater. It will be done just in time for the heat to return to Texas, so my timing is (as ususal) fantastic. Now, if I had finished it LAST week, it would have been perfect for this:

That would be snow. In Austin. This happens every few years, and it doesn’t stick around all that long, but we get all excited and freaked out while it’s here. Schools close, people stock up on essentials, and anyone that has lived anywhere north of Lubbock starts eyeballing us like we’re crazy. The small amount of snow we got would not cause them to bat an eye, but to us? It’s a juicy disaster waiting to happen. However, throw a tornado our way and we’re out on our front lawns starting up at it, slack jawed, and narrating the whole thing to our camera phone for later uploading to YouTube.

We normally head off for the holiday, like a ton of you do, and spend about three or four days out of town with family for the holiday. This year, that didn’t really work out for us, so we stayed at home and created our own Thanksgiving holiday as best we could. We had the turkey, the dressing which was MADE FROM SCRATCH, like, I made the cornbread that went into the cornbread stuffing FROM SCRATCH, appreciate it NOW, the green bean casserole, and the pumpkin pie. We went to a lot of trouble for a meal that lasted about thirty minutes and required a lot of cajoling on the part of two very small people to just try the dressing for heavens’ sake before you start howling about how you don’t like it. Next year – frozen pizza. I’ll make the pie again, though.

While everything was roasting and baking and cooling, we managed to get some Christmas decorating started.

That is our brand new, frabjulous Christmas tree. It has a billion tips and a four hundred thousand lights or something, and I love it. I mainly love it because it does not look like a large version of a Charlie Brown christmas tree. While he was doing that, I turned into Martha Stewart and slapped up some garland and poinsettias around the house.

I can’t just, you know, bake and cook the entire holiday. I have some leftover fabric from the Half Squares quilt top that I put together, and with the help of a tutorial, I’m attempting my first applique. So far, I think it’s okay, but we’ll see when I give them away as gifts. I’m on the watch for Present Face. Giving handmade gifts is always a tricky thing, because while there are folks out there that appreciate the time and effort, there are other people that thing that handmade = cheap or dumb. You have to be careful and choose your recipients wisely.

The worst part of the whole thing was figuring out a way to get all of the little leaves cut out without losing my mind, but one Lifetime sappy movie later, I managed to get it knocked out. I’ve sewn some of them onto the canvas I’m using for backing, and I’m happy to report that I only have to pick out the stitches on one of them and redo it. I plan on making two of these suckers.

We finished everything up with a trip to a nearby zoo; the kids had never been, and were appropriately excited. Especially when this dude slipped into the water and came up close for a little heart stopping fun:

He was inches from us, just kinda…I don’t know, trying to decide if we’d taste good if he could get to the other side of the glass. I’m sure I’d be pretty damn tasty, Mr. Crocodile, but I think I’ll skip the taste testing portion of the visit.

So. There’s a serious explosion of babies lately; so many that I’m not really sure what they are putting in the water, but HOO-BOY am I glad that the ol’ tubes are tied. Whatever it is that is causing all of y’all go get frisky, it’s powerful stuff. This doesn’t impact me directly, except that there is a flood of new babies to hold and snuggle and hand back at the first sign of a dirty diaper or fussy time, but it does require me to sew, quilt, and knit my buns off in an effort to provide handmade lovies for all of these folks.

Unfortunately, while everyone EXPECTS something, I’m all about SURPRISE, HERE IS YOUR QUILT/SWEATER/WHATEVER, so I like to keep it on the d-l. Hence, I cannot show you pictures of said quilts until they are sent out to the mommies. (Let’s face it – the daddies generally don’t care.) But I do happen to have something I can show you, in the form of  a finished quilt top:

That would be a half-squares quilt, with Moda Tranquility for the pattern and some Kona cotton for the solid. I FREAKIN’ LOVE IT. Who knew that two triangles could make something so fantastic?!  I haven’t gotten anything to back it with as of yet, but I think that I’m going to leave this downstairs as Mommy’s Blanket (No, You May Not Play Superman With It, Go Find Your Own Blanket). I have to have a blanket on me when I’m chillin’ on the couch, and this one looks to be mine.

Also, I made baby shoes. Considering that 99% of the babies that are popping out these days are boys, you would think that I’d make them in some boy appropriate fabric so that I could give them to someone.

They are decidedly pink, and also decidedly for a baby, which my two-year old was rather unhappy about as she tried to squeeze her fat little foot into one of them. I couldn’t find anything heavy to give them more padding on the bottom, so I made something up:

THAT’S RIGHT. I quilted baby slippers. Lord knows what else I could have been doing with my time, but I got the bug out of my system and they can sit until Sarah realizes that they will fit her Cabbage Patch. After that, I’m not sure I want them back.

We’re getting so close to the purchase of this house that I can taste it. Literally. I’m licking the house as I’m typing this – THAT IS HOW CLOSE WE ARE.

This is my new porn.

So many things are going on – trying to get the apartment repacked to move, although that starts next week; trying to get movers scheduled, closings scheduled, childcare scheduled, painters, furniture, it’s like I’m going a mile a minute and it doesn’t feel like there is an end but I know there is because HELLO GIANT EMPTY HOUSE WAITING FOR ME. I’m driving my kids crazy. And my husband. And probably a million other people that want me to just shut my face up about the house. I will, I promise, in about 11 days.

In the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy with this:

Funny what a ton of triangles can look like when sewn together.

And this:

All sewn by hand, y'all!

And I’ve even dabbled in a bit of this:

The craftiness is about to be boxed up, though, and shifted about two miles west to the new digs.  This is one move that I’m not dreading one little bit.

Every night, I tell myself that I'm going to knit, or sew on a different quilt, but every night I find myself adding on to this thing.

I love it. I love it so much, my husband is considering accusations of adultery.And we're Catholic, so I might be put in stocks on the front lawn or something. I have to work on it a little bit every single night or I feel…jittery. An intervention might be in order, but c'mon, who can resist such a lovely quilt? I've also been working on my free motion quilting, although I'm still not happy with it. I keep slapping together two cheap fat quarters and working on the motion, meaning that the little one in my house has plenty of blankets to keep her creepy ass baby dolls in blankets for years.

Finally, believe it or not, I have been knitting a bit here and there. I picked up the needles after months of not touching them. My Madli shawl is 99% done, and once I get the nuts to finally start grafting it (I actually made an attempt the other night, but I stopped in the sheer terror of 120+ laceweight stitches dropping and the entire thing ending up in the trash because there is no frakkin' way I would EVER recover from that mess, so help me) it will be gorgeous. For right now, she's residing in the basket right next to the couch, reminding me that the only thing that stands between me and a fab shawl is a couple of scary hours of The Kitchener Stitch. My butt is clenching just thinking about it.

I think that I'm going to have to dig around in the storage unit tomorrow, though, because Cassidy is calling my name, and she's a siren. That sweater would be smokin' hot in red, and I happen to have the perfect yarn in a bright red stashed. Somewhere. In the storage unit from hell. 

With the completion of the Mod Sampler quilt, I needed another project ASAP. What makes more sense than starting a hand peiced hexagon quilt?

At what point do I just admit it? I'm insane. A queen sized quilt, pieced by hand,is the utmost in crazy making. And also, it may be making my hands hurt. It won't stop me, though. I'm dedicated to my insanity. On top of that, I've had a number of baby blankets that I've been working on, because people keep getting knocked up and popping out kids. The first one is for a little boy that was born a while back; I haven't wanted to rush them and demand that they hand over their baby immediately for sniffing (I love the way a baby smells. I can't help it.), so we haven't met him yet. However, their lives are returning to some idea of normal, so I knocked this little gem out as a "Welcome to the World" present. 

And the next one is a gift for the guy who sold us our house. I know, right? It's like I'm looking for any excuse to fire up the sewing machine and stitch two available pieces of fabric together. But the truth is that while he was a nice sales guy, my husband has been playing a lot of online Call Of Duty with him, and he's a genuinely nice person. This is their fifth child (HOLY CRAP, GET SOME CABLE, PEOPLE), and I firmly believe that every baby needs a hand sewn baby quilt. It's a basic right, folks – air, water, and baby blanket upon popping out of the womb. 

I haven't even started on the blankets for the babies that are in progress; every couple of weeks, someone else announces that they are pregnant, I swear to Heaven above. All of these recession babies are keeping me and my sewing machine busy. It's a damn good thing that all of my yarn is buried in the depths of our storage unit, because I couldn't knit even if I damn well wanted to. 

I may have also attempted sewing a top for myself, but we're going to pretend that didn't actually happen, mmmkay?

And finally, The Husband's quilt is in progress. Strips are being cut out, and I've convinced him that a simple pattern is required, as opposed to some busy nightmare that would never get quilting because BEJEEZUS, there is no way I want to do something fancy with a quilt that large. I just tried my first free motion quilting last week on two fat quarters from my stash, and it looked like a rabbid ferret on a coke bender decided to make sweet, sweet love to my quilting stash. In other words, IT SUCKED. So I quickly slapped a binding on it and handed it off to my daughter as a doll quilt, because hey, she's two; she doesn't give a happy damn if my quilting stitches were uneven and crossed over each other. She's just excited to have a tiny blanket to cover up the world's ugliest doll (I am NOT KIDDING on this, she loves it and takes it everywhere and even got mustard on it when she was trying to feed it). I totally pawned off my quilting mistakes as a special gift for my daughter; do you see how I did that? Lemonade from lemons, baby. That's me.

I finally bound the edges and moved it through the washer and dryer; I was totally caught up in other projects, though. I blame Flickr; I was browsing through projects in some of the groups that I joined, and I saw these adorable hexagon quilts that folks were creating using the English Paper Piecing method. Next thing I knew, I had 500 die-cut paper hexagons and an order of fabric sitting on my lap to make my own. 

And then, I had the fight of my life with the sundress pattern that I mentioned in the last post. I purchased the elastic thread, dutifully wound it up by hand into my bobbin, and….nothing. I could NOT get the fabric to gather up the way it was supposed to. I jacked with the tension, I fiddled with the stitch length, and I hauled out my manual to see if there was something I could find that would help. Online forums, blog stalking…nothing was giving me any clue as to what I was doing wrong. 

Then I decided that it was my fault for buying a machine that was focused solely on quilting. Since it is all computerized, it adjusts the tension automatically; I can override it on the top tension, but the problem was with the bottom tension – as in, there wasn't any. I finally stopped by a Husqvarna dealer and asked the shop owner what I was doing wrong. I would love to tell you that she was friendly and helpful and took the time to work with me, but I'd be totally lying and then lightening might strike me and I'm not sure my insurance covers that kind of crap. She acted like helping me was KILLING HER INSIDE; she was much more focused on getting her quilt on the frame in the store than she was with helping stupid me (who didn't even buy the machine from her shop! OMeffin'G!).  The cherry on the top is that she asked me what kind of machine I had and how much I paid for it, and when I answered her, she *sneered*. SNEERED. AT ME. And my awesome machine.  I think she was annoyed that I brought my children into the shop with me, and they WERE being rambunctious, but Mike snatched them up and took them outside within five minutes of us getting there. It sucks, because that shop had a great selection of feet and accessories for my machine, but she can suck my ass, because I sure won't go back in there. 

What was I talking about? Elastic! Anyway, she might have been snotty, but she fixed my issue without knowing it – she reminded me that I needed to pull the thread back through the bobbin to a certain point so that it sits in the groove. Once I did that, I was off and flying with the top of that dress. I am now looking for all sorts of uses for the elastic thread, because that stuff IS AWESOME. Here's proof:

It is adorable. No, no arguments, it is ADORABLE. Admit it. I want to make another one, but I'm wondering how it would work with a knit fabric, and maybe really wide straps that could almost be considered sleeves.
Quilting is just the gateway drug to full on sewing. Be aware.

I TOTALLY CALLED IT. I knew that talking about my sewing machine in public would anger it. After I wrote that post, I sat down to put together some blocks for a new baby blanket. Sure enough, the tensioning is all jacked up AGAIN, and I spent an hour trying to get it to work AGAIN. This is the bajillionth time I've had this exact same problem with it; it would hum along fine as long as I was sewing on cotton fabrics exclusively with standard cotton threads, but the second I deviated from that formula, BLERG and BLARG and PHBOOOT. It would break down and I'd have to send it into the shop, where they would repair it for $80 until the next time it decided to go all wonky. I lived in fear of changing materials, changing threads, changing the tension on my own; any of those three would throw that machine off.

This time was the last time, though. The Singer pissed me off enough that I pitched her to the side (figuratively; pitching a sewing machine would cause a lot of damage to walls, methinks) and purchased something new. Uh, make that new to ME.

Meet my new baby. A Husqvarna Viking Quilt Designer, which was a trade in that someone brought in at the local Joann's (our Joann's hosts a Husqvarna dealer inside of it). I was headed in there to find something cheap and quick to get me through the next six months, but when I saw her, I just HAD to have her. Look at the size of that throat! (Heh.) The quilting table! The fancy pantsness! I'm just getting used to using her, but man, it's like a whole different world using this thing. You get so used to your own machine's quirks and weirdnesses that when you are presented with a machine that works like it is supposed to, every time, it kinda throws you off. I keep expecting the presser foot to not engage all the way, but on this machine it automatically lowers the presser foot when you start sewing. I never have to worry about that tangled mess of thread you get because, DUH, you didn't make sure it was all the way down. The bobbin literally THREADS ITSELF through the machine. It came with all the feet I could need, and the two that I really, really needed for quilting were either thrown in for free (a darning foot) or included at 50% off (a walking foot). I'm adjusting to the little beeps and bloops this thing emits when I'm sewing, and I have to remind myself that there is no presser foot latch on the back of the machine, like my Singer had; those two columns of buttons right over the needle control the foot, the needle down, and I'm sure a host of other things that I'm not using properly as of yet.

My first official project on this machine is a 9 patch baby blanket, with sashing between the blocks.

But my first true test of this thing will include this:

and this:

and a certain dress pattern that is burning up the net.