It's Christmas day, and we spent the afternoon with the Parents opening gifts and eating a delicious lunch. It was a nice sunny day, and after months of unseasonably cool weather it was nice to sit in the warmth and enjoy time with relatives. Piper made out like a bandit with clothes, books, and a few toys!
I, personally, have fallen in love with my ice-cream maker. Thank you, husband!
Although most of my time is taken up with the house these days (my brain looks like this: househousehousehousehousebabyhouse), I have managed to get a bit of sewing done. Thank heavens! I was going out of my MIND.
I have been trying to finish the quilt for my new niece, Maggie. I pieced a back I liked one insomniatic evening and pin-basted the next morning. That afternoon, I stared down my sewing machine and resolved to use my BSR function on my lovely new Bernina.
I did a practice run to try my stipple and decided just to jump straight into it. And...I liked it!
I've never met Maggie, and she's just a month old, but she was born with a clubbed right foot. I'd been thinking about the design of this quilt, and how hard she is going to have to work to walk. She is facing surgery and years of corrective footwear, but if you look at it like that, it's overwhelming. I thought to myself, take it one step at a time.
So, taking from the tiled patterns, I decided to call this quilt Stepping Stones. She has a long way to go but I can't wait to be there for her.
I bound it in blue and I'm hand-sewing the binding now. It is such a pleasure to work on this quilt. \
Anyway, I loved stippling so much that I went crazy and finished my Albatross Quilt, a.k.a. "Happy Campers". I can honestly say this quilt looks MUCH better than I thought it would! The blocks themselves were like "ergh" to me but now, trimmed and sewn together, dayamn. It looks FIIIINE.
Oh I feel so happy to see it DONE! I'm going to try Rita's machine binding technique for this quilt, once I decide what fabric to use for the binding. Then it will go up on my Etsy store and hopefully into the cot of a sweet little new baby.
My friend Claire and I went halfsies on some Nicey Jane fabric and she was gracious enough to cut it for me! I picked up some Kona cotton in Robin Egg blue to match. Ideas are percolating...
All that green and blue!
I also went a little nuts with precuts recently...and now they are staring me in the face.
What to make, what to make...hmm...!
And, finally, I should have blogged about this ages ago, but on the same day we found the house, we won a car seat for Piper (in a free raffle!), ate an amazing breakfast, and bought a new sewing chair. Oh. Oh my. It's so nice. It scootches across the floor, it goes up and down, it's WHITE...it's very cool. I feel like a proper sewist now. I have a little sewing area.
Life is good.
Merry Christmas!