Frog Tape Winner

YAY KATE! 

 The winner of the Frog Tape Giveaway is Kate!  Thanks to all who entered. 

 In other news, I dress my baby in the same shade of aqua as my walls.  (Windswept)  I think I find this more humorous than said baby. 

 Seriously cute.  I love this boy. 

My husband has some family in from Milan, Italy.  In typical Italian fashion I had less than 24 hours notice of their arrival to our house.  Nice.  I will admit it caused a teensy bit of marital stress, but thankfully I was able to pull together a good-looking table for them.  Prosciutto, golden honeydew (way better than the regular, BTW), parmesano reggiano, salami, 53 other kinds of cheese, Italian Meatloaf, and some red wine.  Bellisimo!

 The summer is winding down and honestly I am quite thrilled.  Don't get me wrong, summer is always nice but for real... I hate watering flowers every single day.  (They barely made it to July 4th this year.)  And it's been so hot that being outside has been uncomfortable.  Especially with a baby strapped to me. 

So now that it's not 300 degrees outside we've been doing everything on our trusty picnic blanket.  This particular day we did scratch art.  I always thought you had to put black paint on top of the crayon-ed paper but this lovely blog post said nope!  Put black crayon on top of the colorful crayon.  Okey dokey!
We did and it worked!  And since we were outside, the girls used twigs on the ground as the scratching devices.  Very cool.  I love sharing art projects with them that I remember doing as a kid.  I remember doing my first scratch art thinking it was so magical. 

Our little homeschool will start soon and I am loving the build-up to it.  The planning, the book buying and lending, the new materials here and there....  Such anticipation for all of us as we explore these unchartered waters.  Sewing has been a great resource already as we've used it for measuring, counting, adding, and of course fine motor skills. 

Isabella is making a pillow for a penpal and although we're about a month past the penpal's birthday she has done most of it by herself.  I am super excited to have her finish it up and hope that she will be encouraged to make more things for others.  That will be a blog post for sure!

Enjoy these last summer days.  Hopefully your flowers have fared better than mine.

A winner!

Random.org has chosen #4, The Knapps, for the CSN Giveaway. Double congratulations to you as you commented on a baby on the way!! Hooray! I'll be sending you an email with the info.

Speaking of babies, I HOPEFULLY will be also joining the baby club (again) soon. Due date is approaching and we are all a-twitter here. Well, mostly just me and hubs.

I am so tickled I got to make some more Love pillow covers. Funny it was exactly a year ago that I did the tutorial with Amy Butler's Love fabric.

My oldest turned 5 (FIVE?!) this week. So no one told me teenage drama would start at 5. I'm going to keep blaming the no sleep situation and hope it will soon pass. However we did have a lovely time at the "birthday house" as she calls it. Being 39 weeks pregnant we kept it very low key. MIL brought pasta, I made some pulled pork BBQ and dad grilled out some chicken sausage brat things. I'm all for simple but nice.

AND I met my goal of completing this quilt before baby came. A sweety of a client commisssioned me to make this for her daughter's birthday on the same day as my daughters! Well I'll be... It did have silks in the front which did not survive the washing and drying process. Probably would have done ok if it were a regular quilt but as a rag quilt it did not work out. So I had to undo the entire - YES, I said entire - quilt to pull out the 17 silk squares. Substituted them with regular cotton fabric and we're back on track. The velvet is still on the back which I pray will wash well and last for lifetimes.

Congrats, The Knapps! Happy Birthday to my little girl and the velvet birthday girl! Blessings all around!

Winner + Boy Quilts

The winner of the CSN Giveaway is #1 Sarah! Someday I will learn how to import the Random.org widget for proof. If any of you are keen on that, I'd love to know how to do it. Anyhoo, thanks so much to all who entered and what fun gifts you gave your loved ones!

I've had some boy quilts enter my life lately. A good friend roped her brother into taking pictures of my loot from the shop. He did a great job of making my quilts look extremely gorgeous so naturally I got to repay the favor with a quilt for the baby boy on the way.

It was my first time to work with Echino fabric and it was great! A tad on the expensive side but totally worth it. I love the linen feel of it and how extremely creative the prints are. The repeats are a fantastic blend of stripes, dots, and a novelty item (helicoptes, busses, and cameras in this case).

Next up was a rag quilt (surprise, surprise!) made with Robots from David Walker. I ran across an unbelievable sale a while back and went hog wild ordering the entire line. Rag quilts are such a dream to make at this point in my life. Pretty fast, easy, and always a fun result when it comes out of the dryer all fluffed up.

I'm thinking of doing a rag quilt tutorial since I'm going a little nutso over here with them. I assume there are a gazillion out there already, but what's one more, right?

A very happy new year to you all. May it be safe, happy, healthy and quilty! Thank you so much for stopping by my little blog. Cheers!