Scheming and Dreaming

I always seem to have way more ideas for projects than I can actually complete. And the more I finish, the more my list grows! I'm beginning to think I like thinking about crafting better than actually crafting.

I've got 3 quilts in progress now (the sampler, a gorgeous sunflower quilt that is totally assembled but needs to be quilted, and a third quilt that has been cut out but not pieced at all yet). Plus I have brilliant ideas for 2 quilts for a dear friend's kiddo (who is about to be 2 -- by the time I make her a baby quilt, she'll be in college), as well as quilts for my mom, for my mother-in-law, and for another friend. And my grandma just requested a quilt (any quilt will do, I think) after finding out that I started quilting. Oh, and my husband wants a cathedral window quilt one day.

I also have 3 knitting projects going: a blanket I started a year and a half ago, a scarf I started about the same time, and a lap blanket I started last summer. Oh yeah, and a knitted lion that is done but needs to be sewn together and stuffed. So that makes 4.

And I spent 30 mins this afternoon browsing in a quilt store, gathering fabrics for Mother's Day projects! Although those aren't going to be quilts (sorry, Mom and Mom-in-Law!). So I'm hoping I can get those done and wrapped by next weekend... And I'm sure there's something else I've got planned that I just can't remember at the moment.

Oh well. A girl can dream!

Sampler Block #3

Here's the 3rd block. This one is called Devil's Claws. I am super excited with how this one turned out.

This block has several flying geese units, which are sections with 2 triangles are pieced onto a rectangle to make a unit of 3 triangles. There are also 4 squares with triangles pieced onto the outer edges, so this block (like the others) required a bunch of piecing.

I learned my lesson from the 2nd block, and I was careful to piece the entire block with the same sewing machine (and no changing presser feet, either).I have a 1/4" piecing foot on the machine, and it really seemed to help me keep the seams even and consistent. Of the 3 blocks, this one is definitely closest to being square -- which they are all supposed to be!

I also really like the colors on this one. I'm not normally a huge fan of sweet pastels, but I think these fabrics all work so well together, and plus they fit in with the 30s theme of this quilt.

I'm just so happy with how much better this block looks than the last one. I'm making progress!

Images from Central America

Here are a few pictures from our trip to Central America last month. (I ended up with around 1,000 pictures, so it took me a little while to sort through them all!).

This is the small plane we took from the airport to the lodge where we stayed. The flight was about 30 minutes, which gave us a chance to see the jungle from the air. I love the palm trees painted on the tail!

The view from the plane:

The absolutely delicious lunch we ate nearly every day we were there: stewed chicken with

beans and rice, coleslaw, plantains, and Coke Light. Yum!

A howler monkey having figs for breakfast. We watched him for probably 5 minutes as he moseyed his way through the canopy of these trees, munching on figs as he went.

We had a great time and saw a wide variety of wildlife, from birds to monkeys to tarantulas!

Buntings

My husband and I do a lot of birding when we travel, but we also feed the birds in our back yard. We tend to see the same birds over and over: cardinals, house sparrows, blue jays, house finches, mockingbirds, red-bellied woodpeckers, and downy woodpeckers. But every now and then, we get something a little bit different.

This weekend, we had two male indigo buntings hanging out on our goldfinch feeders (here's one of them, with a goldfinch on the feeder to his left).

We also had a male painted bunting drop by for a visit, but I wasn't able to get a good picture of him. He looks a lot like the indigo bunting, but he is even more colorful, with a green back, red belly, and bright red eye.

You just never know when you are going to see something different, right in your own back yard!

Thank you

My friend Gladys is a talented scrapbooker, and she has shown me a few of her paper-crafting tricks. I'm still pretty new to card-making, but I really enjoy being able to give someone a hand-made card. Here's a thank-you card I just made:

And the inside:

This isn't my best work ever, but I think it turned out pretty well. Besides, if it looks too good, you can't tell it was made by hand!

I took a light blue card from Paper Source and used a medium-sized stamp, stamping it several times, to get an all-over pattern on the front of the card in dark brown ink. I filled in the holes with a small bird stamp and a small flower stamp from the same collection using the same color ink. I like how the stamps run off the edges of the card, so the design likes like a section from an even bigger pattern. The inside features a "thank you" stamp in the same brown ink.

I enjoyed making this little card; I hope the recipient likes it!

Sampler Block #2

This is the second block from my sampler quilt. This one is called Wyoming Valley, and it also includes a ton of half-square triangles. I'm not quite as happy with how this block turned out; it's pretty lopsided.





And the points aren't nearly as sharp as I would have hoped. I was a little disappointed when I got it all finished; somehow the individual rows didn't look too bad until the whole thing was assembled.

It took me a little while to figure out what happened, but I think the problem lies in a lack of consistency with the 1/4" seams between each of the pieces (as opposed to a problem with cutting the pieces correctly, for example). I sewed some of the pieces using my sister-in-law's sewing machine, some of them using my sewing machine, and some of them using my sewing machine with a different foot on it. And clearly those seams all came out just a little bit different, and so the block as a whole came out pretty wonky.

I will probably re-do it before I finish the quilt, but I was pretty frustrated with it after getting to this point, so I'm going to wait and work on it later. Despite my frustration, I can definitely say this was a good learning experience! And that was part of the point of making this sampler quilt -- to learn -- so it was time well spent!

Christmas in April

I made scarves for my grandmothers for Christmas last year. I made this one for my dad's mom and a similar one in shades of blue for my mom's mom. The scarves are just plain and simple garter stitch using Lion Brand trellis yarn, so they were pretty easy to make but the yarn has a neat texture.

I knew I wasn't going to see my mom's mom until after New Year's, so I finished her scarf and mailed it off well before Christmas. I took my time with the other scarf because I usually see my grandma at my aunt's house a day or two after Christmas.

Turns out that she was going to be in California visiting my uncle for the holidays. By the time I realized that I wouldn't see her in person, it was too late to finish the scarf and mail it to her in time. So I planned to finish it off and send it after she got home.

Well, with one thing and another, I finished the scarf but didn't get around to weaving in the ends. So here it is April, and we went to visit my grandma last weekend, and I brought the scarf (with the loose ends dangling) and a penguin gift bag to wrap it in.

I did finally weave in the darn ends in our hotel room, and I wrapped the scarf and gave it to her, and because she is my grandma, she didn't even hassle me for being 4 months late with her Christmas gift. As a matter of fact, she said that she had been wanting a scarf to go with a couple of outfits, and she thought this scarf would be just the ticket. I'm just glad that she liked it!

In Need of a Hat

As I get older, my sun protection habits continue to evolve. I used to focus on sunblock as my main strategy to prevent burns, but now I tend to focus on wearing more clothes and using less sunblock. (As a bonus, wearing long pants instead of shorts means less shaving!)

I used to hate wearing hats, which my mom always insisted that I needed to wear when outside in the sunshine. But I noticed a couple of years ago that wearing a baseball cap seemed to help keep my husband from getting sunburned when he was outside all day. I used sunblock on my face, of course, but I always seemed to miss a spot -- and my scalp was particularly prone to burning. So I tried wearing a hat, and it worked like a charm. And now I am a big believer in hats!

I have a baseball cap for short trips outside and a bigger sun hat with a wide brim that protects my ears and neck, too. The one problem is that I'm pretty new to hat-wearing, and I often forget to pack a hat.

Case in point, I'm at the beach for the weekend and forgot to bring either one of my hats. Fortunately for me, my husband brought TWO hats and graciously offered to share one with me. That is good news for my poor scalp!

30s Sampler Quilt

My dear sis-in-law and I came up with the brilliant idea to make sampler quilts together. We are each making a quilt following the same pattern; she is using fabrics from her stash, and I had to buy all new fabric because this is just my fourth quilt and I don't have a stash yet. So our quilts should turn out very different, even though we're using the same pattern, which is part of the fun.

This is my first block. According to the pattern, it's called Homespun. I really like the fabric in the center square; it looks like an old-fashioned tablecloth to me. I'm pretty happy with how the block turned out overall, too. It was my first attempt at half-square triangles, and I think they look pretty good for a first try.

Ellen and I had originally planned to make one block a week, which, by our calculations, would give us plenty of time to finish the quilt tops, sandwich the tops to the backing, quilt the quilts, and bind them -- in other words, to finish the entire quilts -- by the end of the year. (We started in January).

Well, we're already a little bit behind, but she has been working on some other really cute projects, and I have been working on things that have nothing to do with quilting. But we are still plugging away at the sampler quilt, and I'm having fun with it. The idea, for me especially, since I'm so new to quilting, was for me to practice some different techniques, particularly applique, and maybe hand-piecing at some point, so I'm not really in any particular hurry to finish it.

I've already learned a bit about piecing the half-square triangles so the points come out sharp, and Ellen showed me how to do chain piecing on the sewing machine, which saves time because you don't have to stop and trim threads between every little seam that you sew. That little bit of knowledge has already made this project worth it!

Travel Medicine Update

We have been back from Central America for 2 weeks now, and I am happy to report that I did not need the antibiotic for traveler's diarrhea while we were there! So far, I am showing no signs of having contracted malaria, either. Although I did get roughly 2 dozen mosquito bites, so I'm still diligently following the anti-malarial medication regimen, just in case. Two more weeks of antibiotics, and I should be in the clear!

Preparing for International Travel Part II: Packing

Our trip involved a 3.5-hour flight on a major commercial airline, followed by a 30-minute flight on a 3-seater Cessna commuter plane (technically, it holds 4 people, assuming the fourth person weighs 50 pounds or less). Not only did we have weight restrictions on baggage for the commuter flight, but the cargo door on the plane is tiny, so it was recommended that we bring soft-sided (e.g., squishable) luggage.

Which we didn't have. So both my husband and I bought new duffel bags, and he got a new backpack, and we planned to pack everything for a 6-day trip into 2 duffels and 2 backpacks.

And we had to bring lightweight clothes for hiking/birding, lightweight but comfy hiking shoes, big ridiculous hats to block the sun, bug spray, anti-itch lotion in case the bug spray didn't work, sunblock lotion, the aforementioned anti-malarial medications, everyday basic toiletries for both of us, two pairs of binoculars (for the birding) and my camera equipment (1 digital SLR camera, 2 lenses, an extra battery plus battery charger, and 4 memory cards). And I also tossed in a knitting work-in-progress, in case I got bored on the plane, and my husband brought along a couple of guides to the wildlife (primarily birds, but also other critters) of Central America.

Somehow we got everything into the 4 bags, made the weight requirement, and -- this is the good part -- got through the trip without missing anything OR having to do laundry. A packing job well done.