When Will no longer snuggles up to me and says with absolute conviction, “Mommy—you’re the prettiest” for no reason at all, I’m just going to crawl into a little hole somewhere and die. Who will think I’m the prettiest girl in the world when Will is 9?! Okay…maybe Ellie. But what about when SHE’S 9?! I need an endless stream of 5 year olds in my future!
Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School
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Last month I checked out a few baking books at the library. It kicked off a baking marathon, and it’s taking its toll. My jeans are uncomfortably snug, I’ve gained 4 pounds, and my muffin top is looking increasingly like it belongs on some ceiling in Italy. Some times I get bitter that modern women are subjected to a standard of beauty like this instead of this, but then I remember that it wasn’t like they had Chili’s back then, so really, how fun could livin’ up the chub have been? Anyway, back to baking. I’ve been baking. A lot. The Happy Baker is one of the most fun cookbooks I’ve ever seen (I didn’t enjoy the memoir part of the cookbook and stopped reading after a chapter or two, but the recipes are easy, fun, delicious, and have very few ingredients, and none that you can’t find at your local Super Target). One of the recipes involves just fritos and milk chocolate. Need I say more? I’m also liking Fat Witch Brownies, even if the signature recipe is just okay and not the REAL recipe for the famous Fat Witch Brownies. I highly recommend the Earl Gray Brownie and want to try the lavender bars really badly, but can’t find lavender extract at any of my normal grocery stores (which means I’ll have to go to Whole Foods, and that’s never good for my pocketbook). My latest library cookbook is a little fancier and the recipes and ingredients a little harder, so we’ll see if I actually get around to making something from it.
Remember this dream on quilt top? When I finished it at the end of October, autumn was coming on strong and I decided to set it aside until working with the spring colors felt right again. The design is based off a quilt that I saw on flickr (which of course I can’t find the link to now–sorry), and that quilt had added sashing to this quilt design from Film in the Fridge.
I’m excited to have such a bright spring quilt to add to the living room quilt rotation! Well, I totally lOVE the yellow solid with Dream On. I think I’m going to use similar colors for my Dream On JellyRoll. I’m fascinated by long arm quilting machines as well. Maybe someday… I think it turned out fabulous, even if the back is a little off! I just bought a charm pack of dream on, and now I’m super psyched to get working on something with it! Good job! Hi Tracey, Do you do the top stitching free hand on the machine, or is there a pattern for that? It looks so uniform, I remain incredibly impressed by your talent and designs! And sorry, I just butchered the spelling of your name! You rock! I love it! I love the pink binding a whole bunch. And I think the machine binding looks great, too! The sloping pieced area on the back? That is what I like to refer to as an “unintended design element”! I think this looks beautiful. I’m glad you chose the yellow for the front. It looks perfect. Will likes saying a cluster of random sounds and then asking “is THAT in Spanish?” No. No, honey, it is not. I’d be happy to teach you ACTUAL Spanish…but I guess your way is more fun. In Ellie news, I had a dream that she just got up and walked across the kitchen, having finally decided that it was dumb to be afraid to walk without help. And then she was just a walker after that. I woke up and this was not true, but in my head the dream was right and I’m still a little surprised that she can’t walk. I went to a class today on long arm machine quilting, and I tell you this: it is way harder than it looks. And harder on your body. And it’s hard on my body in a lot of the same way that tetris is: like I don’t blink and so my eyes dry out, and I’m grinding my teeth in concentration the whole time. (It’s also legitimately hard on your back, shoulders, and wrists…but I certainly added to it with the teeth clenching and refusal to blink.) I have been getting a lot of baking books from the library and making copious amounts of brownies, cookies, and candy from them. My jeans now barely fit and I’ve gained 3 pounds. I can’t decide whether to just make more wrap and elastic waist skirts or stop eating the treats. It’s a very difficult decision. Nic is addicted to the game minecraft. In a very serious way. It’s an obsession now. Last weekend Will said “I see blood in your eyes, Dad”—the result of a week of staying up wayyyyyy past his bedtime. Bloodshot eyeballs. I got an automatic tea maker that has my tea ready and warm for me when we go downstairs in the morning. I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven. Will calls laundry baskets “laundry maps.” I have no idea why. I remembered this because he was pushing Ellie around on a pillow and making train noises and then said “Hey Eloise! Do you want me to get a laundry map so that you can be in a REAL train?” (as opposed to the pillow, which was clearly a pretend train) Then to me “Hey Mom? Do we have any laundry maps that are empty? I mean, with no clothes?” (This is a very good question in our house, but we actually have FOUR empty laundry hampers right now and I’m very proud of my decent housekeeping of the last few weeks!) I woke up to soft calls from Ellie this morning: “Mommy. [pause] Mommy. [pause] Mommy.” While I was getting Will’s waffles ready I heard from the high chair “Mommy. Mommy. Bababa” from the girl who was thirsty. I love that she is a talker. But I am sad that I won’t have the prolonged Momma phase that I had with Will. Already Mommy with no real mama time! In big news, last night she slept through the night. She made it from 7:45 to 5am! I rocked her for half an hour and then she slept until 8am, but I think making it all the way until 5am (a) counts as sleeping through the night, and it’s BIG. She’s been my regular midnight waker for so long, and often my 2/3am waker, too, that I can’t believe she just gave it all up out of the blue! |
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Yesterday I found 
On Saturday I took a long arm quilting class with my friend Melissa. In order to make the course more family friendly we did all three classes in one day. It was a lot of fun and so incredible to see how danged hard following a pantograph is! We tried, but, dude…we sucked. Badly. I mean, it was SHOCKING. We were both relieved that we didn’t want to follow pantographs, because if we had, we would have been very disappointed! The good news was that after a break for lunch we got to try our hand at free motion quilting and we both had a lot of fun. We found some fun new patterns that I can’t wait to try on a full scale quilt. For the very last portion of the class, we got to load our own quilts and spend some time quilting them. I wanted to finish this during my practice time (about 1 hour to load, unload, and quilt, which translates to about 30-40 minutes of actual quilting time, and add plenty of tension adjustments and issues within that small window), so instead of going with one of the newer free motion patterns, I went with one I knew I’d be able to breeze through–a basic meander. It paid off, because I was able to finish the quilt (and went over the allotted time by just 3 minutes)!
I learned an important lesson about lining up a pieced back on the quilting frame. It’s best to have the pieced section running parallel to the frame so that you can line it up perfectly…as you can see here, my pieced section slopes down toward the right side and because I’d had it perpendicular to the quilting frame, I had no idea until I got it all trimmed up at the very end (it’s also made more obvious by the fact that the pieced section is about 6″ higher than I’d intended, too).
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Megan - hahaha, I love the title of your post! I’ve tried to cut back on the baking lately and only bake sweet stuff once a week or so (I try to save it for the weekend). Do you know about the Tuesdays with Dorie group? It’s a group of bloggers baking their way through Baking by Dorie Greenspan. I’m not an official group member, but I have the book and have had great success with all the recipes, even if they’re a bit complicated. The group members always have lots of tasty stuff to ogle, and Dorie’s never led me astray: http://tuesdayswithdorie.wordpress.com/
Fran - Leave it to you to find something with the word Potato and Candy in the same recipe!!! You are so funny! You could add this to your3 Potato Meal to make it a 4 Potato Meal!
And you are beautiful–not at all a chub!!