Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

    I great big puffy heart *love* comments, so please let me know you visited! I try to always reply!

ellie’s signs

Monday, July 25, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

Ellie has even more signs and words in her repertoire.  ‘help’ is my absolute favorite because of how darn useful it is!  I love that she says the word and signs at the same time—I don’t have to worry about her being a late talker at all!  ‘doll’ was said/used for the first time yesterday, which is very exciting because we do a lot with dolls around here (I’m sewing her a little doll and making her a big dollhouse pillow right now and yesterday we dressed up my Addy doll in a summer dress). 

She still loves to talk about hats the mostest.  Oh how hats make her day!

the beginnings of a dollhouse pillow

Monday, July 25, 2011 Posted in doll house, embroidery/applique, fabric, gifts, kids, pillows

If you follow my pinterest boards, you’ll know that I’ve been a tad bit dollhouse obsessed lately.  This dollhouse pillow, in particular, immediately caught my eye.  I knew I wanted to make one!  Since Children at Play didn’t arrive in time to the be the star of Ellie’s quiet book, I figured I would instead play with it in a dollhouse pillow!  This weekend I play around with making the front of the house and the inhabitant.  The doll is based off the illustrated dolls in the Children at Play prints.

If I can stay on schedule, I hope to get this finished up in the next week or two!

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Kristy - Hopeful Threads - That is darling!!! Love this fabric line too!!!

Fran - Do you have small children working in a sweat shop sewing for you? It’s illegal, you know! That’s the only explanation I can come up with to understand how you can produce so much!!! I was CLEARLY too busy keeping up with Erica Kane’s daily exploits! You are amazing–and this is just adorable. XX000!

KathyH - AAAAAHHH! That is so stinkin cute! Love it!

Megan - That is so cute! It’s a great way to save on space if your own house is too small to have a dollhouse in it. Haha. What beautiful stitching on the doll.

Friday, July 22, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

Will and I like to make up words. 

Will’s favorite/most used word: imaginate.  verb.  to imagine.  As in “but I was imaginating that I was a pirate!”  (also works in the past tense as “Look at this beautiful picture!  I imaginated that I was a king!”)

Mine: disgustified. verb.  to make disgusting.   As in “well, maybe you could have let me help you with that string cheese package before you disgustified it.”

quiet book sew along week 2 : my vegetable patch page

Friday, July 22, 2011 Posted in kids, quiet book

I almost got two pages done this week, but decided to start potty training Ellie on Wednesday instead of waiting until Monday as planned, so I spent Wednesday and Thursday watching her hoo-ha instead of doing…well…pretty much anything else.  The good news is that we’re over the worst of it AND she’s been easier to train than her brother.  Woot!  Here’s a peek at the page in work:

The idea for this page came from the Piece & Quiet pattern carrot patch.  After seeing it described as the most time consuming page, though, I knew I wanted to make some changes–for starters, just 6 veggies instead of 10.  I wanted to use slits in felt instead of pockets because I wanted to have different kinds of root vegetables hiding below their green shoots so that the activity behind the page would be surprise versus counting (for this reason I also skipped stuffing the carrots, onions, and radishes–I wanted them to be able to hide better in the ‘dirt’).

It came out very much as I had intended, but I’m having a few second thoughts about my method.  Already I pulled one of the green leafs off–felt is great at not fraying, but it’s not so great at being strong when it gets skinny.  I’m also concerned that I need to shore up the edges of my veggie slits or have them rip from use.

The best part about it was how incredibly FUN this page was to make.  It’s very freeing and whimsical to do a project like this and I have a feeling I’m going to be very sad when it’s over!



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Toni - That page is so cute! I have been saving some ideas for quiet books for my boys, too, and I love this one! They are always helping me in our garden so I think they would really like it. Your fabric choices are great!

Kristy - Hopeful Threads - LOVE this!!!!

Susanne - WOW….If we were in person, I’d give you HUGE hug. I’m potting training L right now and I really HATE telling people. As I’m sure you know, the first thing everyone says is “isn’t she kinda YOUNG?” Or “Do you think she’s ready for that?” Or they just assume I’m a crazy tiger mom…..

Amanda - Oh, how cute! I need to start the construction of my pages for Liz’s book…I better get a move on so I make it before Christmas! LOL!

Deborah - what a labor of love this book will be. I made one for my nephew some time ago and it was hard to give it away after all the work that was put into it. Yours is darling already!

Heidi - This is adorable, what a great idea!

Audrey - This is so adorable! I was trying to not start anything new, but I may have to jump on the bandwagon for this one. It would be an awesome Christmas present!

Fran - Oh, super super cute!! You are going to have so much fun with this!

Amanda - I only completed the background for one page…I hope to work on more of it soon. The link includes the other projects I progressed on this week for WIP Wednesday…hope you don’t mind the multi-tasking of my posts! 🙂

Holly Abston - I love this page, but I have to tell you that I laughed until I snorted at this “…so I spent Wednesday and Thursday watching her hoo-ha instead of doing…well…pretty much anything else”

Carrie Kindt - This is so crazy, because I made up a page for my quiet book back in summer 2010 that looks almost identical to this! I totally made it up myself & thought I was so creative…haha 🙂 I was expecting to see you link back to my site, saying that’s where you got the idea. How funny! I can’t believe you have all the exact same things. It DOES help a lot to stitch all the way around the entire veggie, and have a stick inside for stiffness: http://www.simple-creativity.blogspot.com/2010/07/harvest-basket.html

Traci - I love your page, Carrie! I think having the basket there is really cute! My inspiration for this was the Piece & Quiet book page, but just with adaptations to make it easier. 🙂 One thing I know from working in the scrapbook industry is that we all have pretty much the same inspirational inputs so it’s not unusual for two people to come up with similar things! (As my friend Jen and I would endlessly discover when magazines issue would print on the same month and we’d both have layouts in there crazily similar that the other person had no way of seeing beforehand!)

Giggles - Would ricrac work for the greens? That would give it a fun texture and they have they super skinny stuff but it wouldn’t tear like felt does. I’ve never seen a garden page in a quiet book before. What a great idea.

Patti - Super idea! My grandparent would love this

The Ruffles Quiet Book | Lickety Split - […] in our one was pointless and looked a bit lame plus we found this amazing page on Pinterest (original source here) which I really wanted to copy. It doesn’t have a specific educational purpose but it is […]

Carol - I’m looking at soothing for my Adult clients with Anxiety/Disability. These would be really nice – we could do the art project and the Quiet book could then be a resource.

Thanks, Carol

Heather’s quilt

Friday, July 22, 2011 Posted in gifts, quilts

I have been wanting to make my famously cold sister-in-law a quilt for a long time, but couldn’t decide on a pattern or fabrics.  I wanted something that would fit in with the style of their home, but struggled to think of something modern enough.  I decided that the FRMQG solids challenge (use at least a little bit of each of the squares in our solids charm pack with the addition of just one other fabric) would be perfect for her, especially if I paired the solids with linen.  I saw a similar quilt somewhere long ago–a rainbow rectangle in the center with a navy background–but I can’t remember who made it (sorry!).

Look carefully, because this is the first and LAST quilt I’ll make with true linen.  😛  It’s like sewing with burlap–I find it impossible to cut or piece straight and as a result, it’s a little wonkier than I would like.  With such a minimalist design, any inaccuracies are obvious!  My favorite part, though, is the tiny bit of aqua in the binding.

I decided to quilt it very simply by outlining the rainbow box with white perle cotton.  I had so much fun quilting it that I know I’ll be using lots more perle cotton!  It’s backed with more linen and will hopefully be a perfect lap quilt for Heather’s place!

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Erik Henne - Were the babies in picture two part of the present? If so, they must of fallen out in transit. No babies in the box…

nicke - totally in love with that! pinning it!

Alli - That’s so pretty! I love the way your outline quilting looks. Is there batting between the layers?

Heather Henne - I love it!! The aqua in the binding is my favorite part too — I’m always folding it so it will show and it looks great on our leather chair 🙂 I would like to clarify that when she says her “cold sister-in-law” she means, cold temperature and not cold hearted ;D

Holly Abston - I LOVE LOVE LOVE this quilt! It is a perfect mix of modern/graphic and still nostalgic and sort of soft with the wrinkles-are-ok-linen. Love it.

Sunday, July 17, 2011 Posted in Uncategorized

We have taken to putting Ellie in Will’s shirts for bedtime.  It is adorable.  But it does make her look like a boy