{p,h,f,r} My Grandmother's Quilt Edition

I don't have my photos properly divided into categories, but I've been linking up my progress on this quilt for so long that it seemed wrong not to link up the finished piece. You'll just have to forgive me this time.*

My grandmother had several of these quilt tops tucked away in a trunk in her room for as long as I can remember.  She had hand pieced them with an array of fabric scraps--it looks to be mostly old clothing and maybe, flour sacks?  She never told me the story of them--when she made them, why they were never finished--and I never thought to ask until it was too late.  Isn't that the way it always goes.  You think there will be plenty of time later, and then your time is up.

It took a long time to finish hand-quilting it since it's a queen sized quilt and I am a slow quilter but I didn't mind.  It's relaxing to have a project you can pull out and work on a bit in the evenings without making a huge mess--although it did take up a fair bit of space and I think Chris was glad to not be constantly shifting it around the living room anymore.

My goal had originally been to finish it by Thanksgiving so that I would be able to work on a baby quilt once we found out what we were having.  Obviously that timetable changed when it turned out that little Frances wouldn't be needing a quilt after all.  When I called Chris to let him know we had lost her and that he needed to meet me at the hospital for my induction the one thing I asked him to bring was the quilt.  I knew it would be a comfort and that I needed something to do with my hands while I labored.

When you're experiencing a typical labor you can distract yourself with something like binge watching Gilmore Girls while you eat as much as you can before you head to the hospital where you know they won't give you so much as a popsicle, not that you'd have time to eat one once you arrived anyway.  But when you're laboring for hours and hours to bring a child into the world who you know you've already lost you need a different sort of distraction.  One that you can pore all your grief and prayers and tears into.  That's what this quilt became for me, at the hospital and then at home as well.  I was almost sorry to finish it.

I suppose Frances got her quilt after all.

...

*I guess this post could still be considered pretty and real, but I really veered off the happy and funny once I started writing didn't I?  I'm going to link up to Like Mother, Like Daughter anyway because I do want to share the finished quilt, and the quilt does make me happy, if not actually upbeat.

On Making the Most Fantastic Curtains You Have Ever Seen

Well, okay.  They might not be the most fantastic curtains you have ever seen but they are still pretty fantastic.  

First, the back story.  After we moved in I bemoaned the fact that in a fit of senseless frugality I hadn't bought the rest of the sheets at the thrift store that matched the pillow case that was the inspiration for Margaret's quilt because they would have made great coordinating curtains.  Then one night as I was looking at vintage sheets on Etsy (which I'm sure is a totally normal thing to be doing) I found a listing for a set of queen sized sheets in the exact same pattern.  I don't know what the odds are of finding another set of these old sheets but I took it as a sign and snatched them up--ironically for about ten dollars more than it would have cost me if I had just bought them originally.

I then spent a lot of time unnecessarily trying to decide if I should make long elegant curtains or short cute curtains before I just decided to make them as long as I could given my limited amount of fabric and then hem them up if they looked bad.  The length of the flat sheet ended up being perfect, which is lucky since, you know, that's all I had.  I also lined them with the old twin size white flat sheets that I confiscated from the boys when I decided that I wasn't going to make children's beds with flat sheets on them ever again so that's how wide the curtains are.

Clearly I am a very precise and professional seamstress.

It's really hard to take pictures of curtains with light shining through the windows but I did my best.

The men folk round these parts weren't super impressed, but aren't they sweet?   The curtains that is, not the men folk.  Clearly they're a bit grumpy.

Margaret loves them of course.  If she had words or was able to do more than flail her arms and legs while lying on her back I'm sure she'd be dancing around and singing about how amazing they are.

Once I finished the panels I realized that the one thing that would make them even more spectacular was pom pom trim.  I'm pretty sure pom pom trim makes everything better.  I got this trim from the same Etsy seller I used when I made the crib skirt so it would match.

On another note, pleating tape.  Where have you been all my life?  You just sew this stuff across the top of your curtain panels, pull the strings and congratulations, you've just made pleated curtains.  So easy!

See how nicely everything goes?  Note, don't try to stand on your rocking chair to take aerial pictures  of your nursery.  Your photographs will be blurry and you will probably fall off.  Just take the extra three seconds to grab a stool from the bathroom. You're welcome.

Now, make sure to tell me what you think!  Unless you don't like them, feel free to keep that to yourself :)

Linking up with Ana since it's still February and I need more affirmations than my menfolk can provide on all things crafty :)

{p,h,f,r} The At War With Ourselves Edition

{Pretty}

This little miss may be the subject of all my pretties from now on.  I'm sure one day we'll say she's smart and strong and clever and capable and we won't define her solely by her level of prettiness but for now I'm just basking in the pretty.  I suppose I'm not entirely unbiased but she is awfully pretty isn't she?

{Happy}

I have recently come into possession of my grandmother's old quilt tops.  She had them in a trunk in her room for as long as I can remember but she never talked about them.  I don't know their story--if she made them herself, or perhaps with her mother, or even if she just found them in some antique store--but they are hand pieced and much of the fabric is repeated in the different tops so I'm sure they were done by the same person.

**You may want to just skip ahead to the next section now if you are very particular about what happens to vintage quilt tops.  Consider yourself warned.**

I horrified a lovely woman in a big box fabric store when I was getting supplies for a different project and decided to bring along one of the quilt tops just to see what fabric options might be there to back it with.  Instead of fabric I received a forty-five minute lecture about what I should do instead, which involved me driving up to Lancaster, PA for an expert opinion from a professional Amish hand-quilter.

Because I have lots of spare time for out-of-state day trips....and unlimited funds for buying huge amounts of the highest quality reproduction 30's fabrics.....

In the end I decided to just back the quilt with a sheet.  It's big enough to not have to be seamed and only cost ten dollars.  I can't imagine that the woman who patiently saved and cut and sewed all the leftover bits and pieces of fabric she had to make this quilt top would begrudge me the thriftiness of my choices.  And in the end I don't want an expensive show piece.  I just want to turn this thing my grandmother carefully saved into a real quilt we can all enjoy.

Anyway after what seemed like forever repairing all the torn seams, cutting loose threads and then pressing everything I was finally able to start quilting and that makes me very happy.

{funny}

I love watching the boys play. The surprise Christmas hit this year was a bucket of army men that Saint Nick cleverly thought to split up and dump into each boy's stocking.  It's a WWII set so there are four countries represented (US, England, Germany and Japan) but there is always a hubbub over who gets to be the United States which technically belong to Henry.   And no one ever wants to be Japan who are the only ones that depict men surrendering--which seems like an odd choice right?  Wouldn't they have been the least likely to actually surrender?  These army men are super sturdy which is great because finding the mangled pieces of our old drug store army men all over the house was not my favorite.  Of course I'm still not allowed to throw them away as now they've been relegated to playing the part of war casualties.

The boys have been incorporating their "war men" into pretty much every aspect of their play.  Wooden castle?  Covered with army men.  Train tracks?  Nobody's chugging through this battle scene.  Crafted styrofoam boats?  It's Battle of the Atlantic time in the bathtub.  Okay they probably weren't actually reenacting WWII sea battles but they were seeing how many army men it takes to sink a styrofoam boat.

Spoiler--styrofoam is really buoyant.  

{real}

You may have seen John's Miley Cyrus hairdo from last week which was begging to be spiked up into a mohawk to spite his father for allowing the barber to give him such a ridiculous cut.  Here's a tip, all natural hair gel is not the best thing for creating impressive children's hairstyles. Apparently they are lacking in some magical ingredient that actually cements the hair into gravity defying shapes.  I'm betting it's the parabens.

Well, I let Aunt Kate take the clippers to him and now he's got official big boy hair which makes me want to cry and makes him want to puke.  Of course in his case it may have been all the hairs he kept getting in his mouth and gagging on.......

Make sure to check over at Like Mother, Like Daughter for more, possibly less long-winded, capturing of contentment.

New Year, New Room

Moving all the time is hard.  Constantly rearranging furniture into new houses and reimagining where things might go or how they might be used in a different way or in a different room can be draining--at least for me.  But then, I tend to overthink things.

When we were househunting one of the main things I wanted was a dedicated and usable space for all the toys,books and school stuff we have managed to accumulate over the last few years so that at the end of the day everything could be put away and not continuously spread out over our dining room table.   In our Florida house we had a little room that did hold most of that sort of thing but it wasn't a space anyone wanted to spend any time in--mostly it was a storage room/hallway into the rest of the house from the backyard/sandpit which meant that when we did schoolwork I had to carry it from that room to the table and then back again.  Not awful, but not ideal.

From the moment I set eyes on our new little yellow house I knew that the sunroom would be the perfect playroom/homeschool room/library.  That may seem like unreasonably high expectations for what one room can accomplish, but I think we pulled it off without the room seeming too ridiculously overcrowded. There's room to play, room to do schoolwork and room for all  most of our books.  It's my favorite room of the house, which is good since it's where I spend a good portion of my day.

It's also a really long and narrow room which means it's really difficult to photograph especially for someone with mediocre photography skills such as myself.  So....consider yourself warned.....I am not a professional room photographer/decorator/blogger/etc/etc/etc......

My original vision for this corner involved using our IKEA Expedit shelf to wrap that back corner in an amazing, if not very original, toy and children's book storage solution.  Unfortunately and unbeknownst to me, IKEA discontinued the Expedit and replaced it with something just slightly smaller which meant it would look silly next to what I already had so I had to buy all new ones and bump our current shelf up to the boys room.  Lame.

Now, Chris detests IKEA and would pretty much prefer to go anywhere else but he also doesn't want me lifting boxes of bookshelves and attempting to shove them into the car alone so I carefully made a list of exactly what I needed and tried to give it to him so he could make a quick trip without me wanting to browse through all the fake rooms while dragging the screaming children along but he said he didn't need a list.  He had everything he needed right inside his brain.  He went to the store, came home and assembled the shelves.

I inspected his work and asked him where the rest of the boxes were.

He stared at me in dawning horror as I explained to him that I wanted three shelves and he had only bought two and the realization hit him that he would have to return once again to that most hated of all Swedish meatball selling home furnishing stores.

Poor husband.  It was all worth it though.    

Yes, yes I do let my toddler climb on top of the shelves and also play with glass jars....judge me if you must......

Luckily for Chris, our other IKEA bookshelves fit perfectly into room along the opposite wall.   And our chalkboard fit right over the fireplace on the nails that were already there.  It would probably look nicer hung a little higher but it doesn't bother me enough to put more nails into the brick.

The curtains were the next big project I tackled.  The room came with floor length, tie top panels that had seen better days.

Much better days.

I took them all down and almost threw them out, but then, in a burst of make-do attitude, I decided to attempt to revitalize them.  After a couple of days soaking in oxi-clean and a trip or two through the wash they were as good as new.  The length didn't work with all the bookcases and benches that I have lining the walls though, so I hemmed them all up (so many panels!), cut off the ties and added ring clips.  I'm really pleased with how they turned out--hopefully our landlord is too :)

The other side of the room houses our little school corner.  Chris painted the benches he built for me in Pennsylvania a nice bright white to match the rest of the shelves and I made some cushions--which also turned out pretty well if I do say so myself :)

The benches are super comfy now and also hold all our games and puzzles so all in all they're pretty amazing.  The cushions get a little wrinkly--probably because I used cotton I already had instead of upholstery fabric--but they wash up really nicely which is important.  Things tend to happen in our house.  Messy, often inexplicable things......

The shelf in this corner holds all our homeschool books and things which is much more convenient than having them all in another room.  Now in the mornings David and I can work on schoolwork here while the rest of the kids play at the other end of the room.  It's kind of wonderful.

My curtains aren't all exactly what you'd call even, my cushions are a little wrinkly, and let's face it--my bookshelves are already dusty but I had a vision and I made it come to life using mostly things I had on hand and now we have a really cute and functional room.  My favorite room.  And I'm just a little bit proud of myself for that.

Ready

Okay, I've finished the crib skirt and it turned out super cute if I do say so myself.  I would have made it much more gathered and ruffle-y had I had more white fabric but alas, I'm on the very last remnants of aunt Elizabeth and uncle Nick's old duvet cover that they gave us along with their king sized bed ever so many years ago and I really wanted to just use things I had lying around the house--except for that pink pom pom fringe of course, I got that especially for the occasion :)

I used this tutorial for an adjustable crib skirt--which basically involves making three rectangular panels and attaching them to whatever is under your crib mattress (in our case a wire grid).  She suggested paper clip clamps but I sewed on some leftover bias tape as a ribbon substitute like this tutorial suggested to tie the skirt on instead.  I also made the process even more complicated by lining the panels with an old sheet since they seemed a little thin and see-through without it.....and let's face it, the point of the skirt is to hide all the things I want to stuff under the crib so it needs to be thick!

And now that all my sewing projects are complete I am officially ready for this baby to get here.

I'm starting to panic a little about her potentially taking her sweet time arriving--the boys all came within a day or two of their due dates so it didn't occur to me that she could be early or late when we were making our moving plans.  If she comes on or within two days of her due date I'll still have a good two weeks to recuperate before the movers arrive.  If not....yikes....



.....I might not have been in the best frame of mind when I insisted that we move to Virginia as soon as possible and just assumed that everything would simply work out.  I blame Chris.  Who asks crazy pregnant women for opinions on things that important anyway?

Finished Pillow

Sorry for the bad lighting and the pillow bragging, but there has to be someone out there that appreciates baby crafting more than my husband who thinks this came out "good" and is just glad I finally took his advice and made something square as opposed to intricately scalloped.

I made the back out of a thrifted pillow case which I am now kicking myself for not buying the rest of the set of because I totally would have made nursery curtains out of it.  Oh well.

Now if I can just whip up the crib skirt this weekend I'll be officially ready for the little miss to arrive.  Not that she has an actual nursery as of yet but I'm thinking I probably won't have much time for sewing between the newborn and the moving.......

The Finished Quilt and Thoughts on Having a Daughter

So I finally finished the most time consuming baby quilt in the history of baby quilts, but the final product was so worth it!  Don't mind my quilt model.....he's just really annoyed I was holding up our park trip for ridiculous things like blog photography.

The whole thing took a good ten weeks from start to finish but apparently I haven't had my fill because I just started a matching pillow for the rocker which I can hopefully finish up before the baby arrives....and also the crib skirt that I have all the materials for (including pom pom fringe!) but haven't actually begun.

I still have two whole weeks so I should totally be good.......

I decided to go ahead and bind each individual hexagon which was just as difficult as the quilt shop lady said it would be and did involve a lot of hand sewn repair work from where I didn't get my scallops quite right on the back side with the sewing machine but it turned out even better than I expected and, let's face it, it was going to have that certain special homemade look about it no matter what I did.......

It's even cuter now that I've washed it up and it's gone all crinkly.  And yes, yes that is my gigantic baby belly there.

And here's David, excited because he thinks the photo shoot is over.......

........and then more than a little put out when he realizes that it is not.

It's so much more fun crafting for a girl than for boys.  I feel like a whole new world of options has just opened up for me--not that the boys didn't appreciate all the things I made them but it was definitely harder to find projects to do in general and once we moved to Florida and they really didn't need anything knit for them I was pretty much reduced solely to cardboard creations.  With a daughter I can make all sorts of things--with lace!--or any fancy trim I want :)

The idea of having a daughter is also a little terrifying though.  With the boys there was a sense that I could just do my best at mothering until they get big enough to be handed off to dad for all the how-to-be-a-man lessons.  With a girl (and she definitely is a girl--I had the midwife double check last week when she busted out the ultrasound machine for a head-down check!) all the responsibility for teaching her how to be a woman falls to me.  I'm the one who will be responsible for all "the talks" and I'm who she'll be looking to as an example for, oh, everything....so no pressure there.  It's probably a good thing I started with boys because I am a much better woman now than I was at twenty-five.  And hopefully by the time she's a teenager I'll have grown into someone really worth emulating.

{p,h,f,r} The Quilts, Table Manners, and Laundry Disasters Edition

{pretty & happy}

Who wants another update on the most slowly made baby quilt in the history of the world?  I knew you would :)

Well I finally finished piecing and quilting the whole thing--including ripping out the original quilting from the first six flowers I did and re-quilting them.  Once my hand-quilting technique improved dramatically after reading Auntie Leila's advice on the subject* I couldn't just leave those middle flowers ugly could I?

The extra time it took to fix the ugly quilting also had the benefit of letting me procrastinate just a little bit longer on deciding how to bind this monster.  I found tons of tutorials online about easy ways to bind these hexagon quilts but not a lot on traditional ways so I did what any bibliophile would do and bought a book on the subject--looking back I'm not sure why I didn't just start with the book but I suppose I've internalized the idea that the internet should be able to answer any and all questions I could ever come to think up.  Apparently not.  Internet, you have officially failed me.

While I wait for that to arrive I went ahead and made a yards worth of bias tape which I sincerely hope will be enough--I could have made an actual calculation about how much I would need if I knew what exactly I was going to do with it but, alas ;)

I think I'm going to attempt to bind each hexagon but not in a perfectly mitered way (which the lady at the quilt store did not think me capable of attempting--which of course had the opposite effect of making me want to do it simply to prove her wrong) but in a more rounded scalloped way and if that proves to be a disaster I'll just do a regular scalloped border.  Of course I'm operating on internet directions and a prayer over here and don't actually have any idea what I'm doing so we'll see.  Chris maintains that I should just add enough white hexagons to make it square and then bind a rectangle but clearly he doesn't see my vision--unrealistic though it may be........

Anyway, this is the back of the quilt.  I quilted the edges of the flowers so that there would be these pretty flowers on the back--which also took a lot less time than say quilting each individual hexagon.  I think it turned out pretty :)

{funny}

Henry (after being given the remains of a mostly empty honey jar):  "There's nothin' better than lickin' honey mom."

Nothing indeed son :)

And who said babies don't have table manners?  Apparently this is what happens in our house when you set the table and then proceed to give the baby a piece of bread to distract him while you finish making dinner.  Clearly he couldn't be expected to eat his bread without proper utensils like some wild raised-in-a-barn-savage?

{real}

And this is what happens when you send a certain almost six year old on an errand to return something to the garage and he decides the laundry room would be just as convenient a dropping ground and besides it would save him those extra six steps to the garage!  I'm still not sure how the plastic wrap made it into the washing machine or how I didn't notice it there when I started the load of towels but it surely was wound round that agitator tightly about a thousand time--or maybe a little less, it's hard to say.......

Sometimes you just have to laugh or you might find yourself having a laundry room breakdown instead :)  

*I can't for the life of me find the link for the hand quilting tutorial and I'm starting to feel crazy so I'm officially giving up :)  

And, as always, make sure to go check out more contentment over at Like Mother, Like Daughter!