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Manny poked at my belly this morning and asked me if we were going to get another baby soon.
How are YOU doing?
We are good. I'm sewing cats and kittens and tiny clothes for each. They are going under the tree for Truly.
There are probably more coming.
(The clothes all come off! The tiny dress is reversible! The baby is 2 1/2 inches tall!)
My admiration for Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr is well documented, so when it came time to pair a charm pack of Lizzie House fabric and a baby-quilt-to-be-made, I turned to the first three issues of Modern Quilts Illustrated for a pattern. I don't use charm packs or layer cakes or what-have-you very often because I don't often own them, and I don't usually make quilts with a single line of fabric. That said, Lizzie does a fantastic job of mixing just the right number of quirky prints with her take on dots and stripes, that it's hard to go wrong when you're looking to make up something for a baby. This was a straight up stash project, and the only thing I changed was the size of the squares (which was dumb and took me much longer to do thanks to having to do MATH which I'm stereotypically awful) and an extra row of solid blocks on the long ends to make a small quilt a bit bigger.
Last month I started ordering prints of my photos to do a side-by-side comparison of some of the most popular online ordering sites. You all were so helpful with your recommendations and with card sending season upon us, I wanted to make sure I was making the best choice for us. I ordered from MPIX, Snapfish and my old favourite, AdoramaPix. Here was my criteria: I wanted the best possible looking print and the one that most closely resembled what came out of my camera. That means: no cropping, no colour correction/filters, and something like a matte finish. I wasn't worried about photo books or other products: just prints. I ordered the same prints on the same night from all three suppliers. It was actually four orders, because I requested both the budget and the e-surface prints from MPIX.
Here's the deal: MPIX and Snapfish both come out with near constant promotions making their prints the cheapest. I will tell you that I was pretty shocked that between these two, I preferred Snapfish for print quality. I will probably use them again if I'm ordering in large quantities for Christmas cards or whatever. In the end, AdoramaPix still has my heart. I could opt for no cropping, their uploader is much improved from the last time I used them, and their print price (without promotion) is slightly cheaper than full price prints elsewhere. I also chose their Lustre paper, which I'm pretty happy with. More importantly, when placed side by side, the colours and tones from Adorama were the most true to what I had taken. This is especially true when it came to Augie and Manny's skin tones. Mpix had them looking a little grey and snapfish upped the contrast in a significant way.
Here's the thing: I'm a average-to-fair picture taker, but if I'm going to go to the trouble of having the photos printed and hopefully put into books, I want them looking the way I took them (however flawed). It might be different if I only took photos of people's faces or groups of people in a commemorative way-- then I don't think it would be so important. But so many of my pictures are of the mundane and everyday variety, and I'd like to think that what makes them worth taking, is what also makes them worth printing. Or that's what I tell my hard drive, anyway.
So. Now to start getting these bad boys in albums that are neither non-corosive or toxic or made from animal parts (is that a thing?), and that will not require a home equity loan with which to purchase. Mo' photos, mo' problems, is what I always say.
I do, I really do.
*(For film photos I would still drive out to Blue Moon in St. John's, and I know lots of my people use Citizens in town for both film and digital.)
Like all good sewing momentum, you become transfixed with items Off The List and then head decidedly that direction (away from the list). I had help this time: Julie over at The Ribbon Jar, an online purveyor of beautiful ribbons, asked if I wanted to be a part of their Blog Hop, celebrating the revamping of their website. She sent me a packet of ribbon along with a bundle of my choosing (disclaimer: it was free to me). That said, it still took me far too long to make my decisions! They really have a lot of great stuff to choose from.
Picking a project to showcase some of what they sent didn't take me long (it's execution is another story). My plan was for a whole stack of taggy rings for Miss Grab-and-Chew, but I'm putting the other two or three on hold for Christmas. I used a free pattern for Baby Rings from Making it Fun (Kathy Miller's blog), scraps from my bin, and strips of Herringbone, Stitched French Cotton Ribbon, and both Red and Golden Wheat Grosgrain. The pattern is great. It's straight forward but does require some hand-stitching and attaching straight lines to curves. It's good practice if you've decided you're not good at either. To make stacking rings, I'm going to shrink the pattern slightly as I go.
Truly is happy to have something else to flick and tug at. She's at the age where it's helpful to have a small pile of toys next to the bed, in the car seat, in my bag, and in her basket in the living room. She has yet to force teeth out, but it's a near constant struggle and she will chew whatever she gets her hands on. I'm glad to be able to have another toy to be able to pop in the wash. The ribbon is beautiful, of course, and I couldn't help but colour coordinate when it came to picking out my own. I didn't own any velvet ribbon prior (the horror!) and I am a sucker for grosgrain, herringbone and twill of all kinds. It's almost time for gift bag season, after all.
The Ribbon Jar is offering one 25 dollar gift certificate to their online store to one commenter. Do you have a favourite type or colour ribbon at The Ribbon Jar? Let me know, and I'll randomly pick a name before Thanksgiving and you'll be on your way to owning it. You can see other participants and enter to win gift certificates here.
Last year I ditched (gave away, mostly) a lot of winter/Christmas/holiday stuff that we didn't use or that I wasn't really feeling. It seemed strange and ruthless to get rid of things like these, but I really felt like I wanted to replace them with things we would all really look forward to see every year. I had it in my head that I wanted to make a holiday quilt, something that came out in November and could stick around through January. I had a small pile of dala horse/My Folklore Japanese fabric that I had been saving in a stack for a project like this, and then the clever bunch over at Purl Bee published instructions for a Striped Star Mini Quilt. Done.
I followed the instructions for the first star to the letter and was dismayed to realize how much pieced waste it created. For every arm of the star I was cutting away large triangles of strip piecing, and in the end I was left with a colourful pile of work going unused. And since last year this time I was in the beginnings of a wicked third trimester, and was running low on time/patience/ability to fit myself under my sewing machine, I put my piles away until I could figure out an easier way of putting them together.
A month ago I pulled them out, determined to get that Christmas Quilt done BEFORE Christmas, and decided that paper piecing was going to be much quicker and leave me with much less waste. I am a mess when it comes to math, but this one was pretty straight forward. I only used the paper for the striped arms of the stars, and then cut triangles out to piece the block together, following the original directions. I ran out of steam after four stars, and being determined to use only fabric I had on my shelves, I decided to put together some over-sized pinwheels to get it to throw-sized. In a perfect world, those blocks would have been some complicated variation on flying geese or something equally as folky, but time is not on my side this year either.
Again, in a perfect world full of money trees, I would have liked to find the some sort of neutral linen or soft wool to back it with. Instead, I pulled out yardage of yarn-dyed stripe left over from pj pants, and a warm grey, Japanese Snowmen print Mariko had de-stashed to me. The kids will like it better and I'm sure that in a few years I will look at its quirkiness with fondness. The quilting is mostly echo/straight-line, but I did use the free-motion foot to quilt all of our names into one of the stars. There are a few small open blocks that I think I might go back and embroider in: exponentially upping the quirk factor (if I'm going with it, I'm going to really go with it).
For now, though, it's done and ready for the couch (or who am I kidding? The floor.) and the next few months. It's also off the list and that is really the best gift. For the first time ever I'm only sharing my sewing space with my deep freeze and washer and dryer and it is AMAZING AND WONDERFUL, not to put too fine a point on it. I also have a space heater down there, so there is really no stopping that list from getting super long.
