Dinner Napkins and Baby Quilts and Much Sweat

I swear there's something wrong with the air conditioning in this apartment. I keep the shades pulled shut at least until the sun is on the other side of the building and run the air conditioning 24 hrs a day, but last night it never cooled down and today it was about 82 degrees all day. Ugh. I hate sweat, but I can't not sweat in here.

Anyway. I did finish up a top of a small baby quilt that I'm working on for my husband's college roommate's first child. I'm hoping to get that done soon, since she was born a couple months ago. Oops. I'll show it to you in a few days. I just have to scrounge up some batting and then I'll stipple quilt it.

I finished up the quilting on my blue & green quilt on Saturday night and just have to do binding now. I was working on it while watching Planet Earth. Very interesting if you don't mind the occasional stupid science babble. I was having a hard time concentrating on the quilt anyway.

I did some dinner napkins today so I will show them off. Ta da!

Memorial Day

Tree peony

Azalea

Iris

Dad's new toy just for nostalgia's sake

Here are a few images from our weekend. Hope yours was lovely.

Butterflies

I think we might have just agreed to buy our first house! There's not actually a signed sales agreement yet, as it was a For Sale By Owner thing, but we just agreed to buy anyway.

This has taken sooo long for us. We'll have been married for 6 years this summer and we've been wanting to buy for forever, but for various reasons, it never made sense until last summer. So we've been looking for approximately 2 1/2 years now, only seriously for about a year. We've made 3 different offers and looked at a bazillion houses online and in person. I so hope that its over with.

Now on to the other 100 things that have to be done before you actually own the home. Then its on to the 1 million things that need to be done to make it our own.

I hope I can actually sleep tonight. I don't think I will.

Variety

So we spent a long weekend up at Mom and Dad's. That was nice. We don't get many chances to go away together these days with the man's schedule, because he generally works a few hours even on his day off, but he took a night off and managed not to have anything scheduled for his off days. Yeah! It was nice to spend some time with the family.

We picked a good time to go. Mom and Dad's pond has had a leak in it for quite awhile and they had moved all their koi to a temporary holding tank for the winter. They repaired the pond last week and we had the good luck to be there for the transfer of the fish back to their pond. There were so many of them! We counted them and took some pictures of them and measured the biggest ones. The fish are pleased to be back home and are very happy when you come to see them. They all swim over and beg for food.

My husband loooooves the pond and spent the whole time fawning over it and Dad kept telling me that I'm going to have to let the man build a pond. I say we get a house first and furnish it, then perhaps we can argue about what to do with our money next. Besides, he can live vicariously through Dad. We are still looking for a house and have one we're considering, but as usual, there's a catch.

Anyway, another one of my favorite things about going home is actually being outside and enjoying all the flowers and plants. The lilacs were in bloom and so were the crabapples. Lovely smells everywhere. I checked on my tree peony and it has 7 fat buds on it. That may not sound like much, but its slow to come and well worth the wait for them.

I managed to finangle Mom and my husband into helping me with pinning my blue/green king-sized quilt and have finally started quilting it. I finished the top sometime last summer and have had it riding around in the trunk for ages and am just now getting around to quilting it.

I've also been plugging away at sewing on the yo-yos and am happy to report that I now have 120 attached, 280 to go!

Mother's Day

I got the rare chance to go home with my husband to my parents house so we are making a long weekend of it. Yeah! This was my gift to my Mom.

Plum Smoke Ring from Farafield

and candles & tissue paper flowers from me!

Cause she's a frou frou kinda woman.

More treats for me!

I bought another ring for me. Don't know why, but its apparently a new fascination that I have. This one is from Farafield, and it was the Silver Smoke Ring. My husband thinks it looks like a Jolly Rancher.

Slow Progress

I've been working on my yo-yo quilt and its going rather well, but slowly. I'm up to almost 80 sewn on. 320ish to go!

Yo-Yo Quilt Progress

My walking foot had a small piece break off of it awhile ago and it would droop in the back after awhile and create drag. I would just nudge it up and it would be fine for a little longer. I sat down to quilt up the yo-yo quilt Sunday night and it was terrible. So I gave in and bought another one from this eBay shop where I've purchased several other feet from. It arrived Thursday, which isn't bad. I sat down and quilted up the quilt yesterday.

Today, I remembered while I was showering that I hadn't monogrammed the back. I like to do that for quilts that are for me and I can't for the life of me seem to remember before the quilt is quilted the whole way out to the border. So I ripped out one corder and added a monogram. Then I discovered that I had put it down too far, so I had to spend several hours very carefully pulling out the monogram. ERGH! I monogrammed it again and this time, it was perfect.

Then I fixed the border quilting, sewed on the binding and trimmed it up. I love, love, love the binding. Its so cute! I made it slightly wider than I usually do and I really like it. It also seems to be going much more quickly than normal when I am handstitching it to the back. Not sure why - maybe cause its fatter? Or maybe its just the fabrics. I don't know, but its making me happy! So anyway. I've got to finish the binding and then I will start attaching the yo-yo's. Not quite sure how I'm going to do that yet. It could take forever!

But here's a sneak peek of what I've got so far.

Etsy Purchase

I recently "rewarded" myself with the purchase of the Olivier ring from MaryMusic's etsy shop and it arrived today. I was so happy with it, I thought I ought to share. It came with a lovely little robin's egg blue ring box, a postcard from another shop on etsy, and a pair of earrings. Wow. The ring is even prettier in person and I love it.

Highly recommended.

Lots of nothing to say?

I'm afraid I've taken a bit of blog break because I can't think of much to say. I've been dragging my husband outside for a bit of fun any chance I get. The weather has been so lovely and I can't handle sitting inside staring out my window at budding trees and sunshine. We've tried to take up tennis and we have been exploring the bike paths and parks around the city. I intend to keep it up - I'm in desperate need of exercise and have been packing on the pounds lately! He works an odd schedule and quite a bit of it is outside his regular shift, so he'd much rather stay at home some days, but we both need the exercise and its good to do things together. As much as I sometimes dislike living in the city, there are parts that are great and I intend to become familiar with them all!

We've also been house-hunting and that seems to occupy my thoughts. I'm tired of looking and I hope we find the right one soon. Its hard to know what the best decision is and its hardly as if its a minor one! I understand that you're not buying your dream home the first time around, but I'm not one to move much. I'd very much like to stay put for awhile!

We did go to a local quilt show a couple weekends ago and had a look around. I was a bit disappointed. There were some really well-made quilts there with some really great hand stitching. Unfortunately, most people's color choices don't seem to appeal to me. Why do older ladies pick the ugliest prints and colors? Its too bad that there's not more representation there from younger quilters. This is the one picture that I took. Not that it was terribly novel, but I did like it and it was obviously made by someone with younger tastes than all the other quilts at the show!

I have been doing a lot of hand quilting on this quilt and I've started quilting up the quilt that will become my Yo-Yo quilt. The hand quilting is slow so no point in posting pictures of that and so far, the yo-yo quilt is all white, so no point in posting that either. I'll post pictures later when I have something to show.