New House, New House Pillow

For our California house I made this little house pillow that matched our living room just right and that we both loved.

The thing about moving, though, is that we generally change our minds about what colors we want in the house and so some of our old things don't fit so well anymore. It was tough to say goodbye to that house pillow, so I figured the only thing to do would be to make another to take its place.

It was an exciting chance to use some of my fancy new quilt rulers.

I also used my Farm Girl Vintage quilt book to make some of my favorite little hearts inside of churn dashes.

I decided to add little stems so these corner pieces could be connected later.

Connected with vines, that is!

Here's the pieced top all basted and ready for quilting.

I did some diagonal line quilting that reminds me of the rainy days here in Portland.

Here's its new home!

Best house pillow ever.

Remember the Summer?

It has been a real long time since I've blogged.  That means we're going way back to the summer time in an effort to get caught up.  It's nice, actually, to look out on a snowy Portland and remember all the summer fun we had with Eddy's family when we visited the midwest.

First we went to Wisconsin to visit Ceci.

She showed us how to eat all the cheeses.

I mean, like, all of them. We also went to a Zoo. Turns out the Madison Zoo is particularly punny.

But there were penguins there.

And things to stick our heads through. And pose next to.

Eddy's favorite is always the polar bears.

Also, we did some drinking with Ceci on the UW Madison campus.

The botanical gardens in Madison had a great spot for me to have tea parties to topiary bears.

Also a beautiful Thai Pavilion.

Next we went to Chicago to see these characters.

We got to meet little Harrison for the first time. He and Eddy had a lot of shared interests.

Clearly we couldn't visit Chicago without also hitting the Lincoln Park Zoo as well. Eddy was sad that the polar bears were off exhibit.

I sat on a tractor there. In the middle of the city.

We also did some Divergent tourism.

We went to the Merciless Mart.

It wasn't what we expected inside based on the books.

Get it? Because post-apocalyptic literature?!  And pillows?

Patient and Neat

In our California house we had mixed luck with wall murals. On one hand, I made this super great bunny cross stitch mural.

On the other hand, we eventually realized we needed to have a piece of furniture directly in front of it and that didn't make much sense visually, so we eventually painted over it. Sad face.

In this house, though, I wanted to try our hand at another mural. Knowing that neither of us is particularly artistic in the painting sense, I wanted something even we couldn't muck up. Enter the paint-by-numbers.

Have you ever done a paint-by-numbers painting? I tried one when I was a kid and pretty quickly got frustrated and quit. I mean, all those tiny little shapes to fill in with a tiny little brush?! Ugh. Not for me. However, I couldn't help admiring the plethora of paint-by-numbers murals showing up on Pinterest.

This one at Camp Wandawega is probably the best known.

This one by Strawberry Mohawk is my favorite, though.

I figured you don't need to be artistic to succeed at paint-by-numbers, you just have to be patient and neat. So we borrowed a projector from Eddy's office over Thanksgiving break and started tracing.

(Did I mention our living room is green now?! IT'S SO AWESOME!)

Actually, Eddy did 100% of the tracing. The job got easier as it got darker.

Then we had a wall covered in numbered pencil shapes.

Next day we went to Lowes and waited a whopping 2 1/2 hours for them to kindly mix 35 paint samples for us. They were really nice about it and they took a picture of the sample pile when they were done because we beat the previous record of 24 samples for one customer. That's right. We're record holders.

Nothing left to do now, but paint! Eddy painted the first blob.

Sometimes there were some painting distractions.

Here I am pointing at the very last blob that needed painting.

See that crazed look in my eyes? That's from working on this thing non-stop days, nights, and weekends for 2 1/2 weeks.

Here, let me see if I can get a better shot of how crazy this thing made me.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

It was all worth it, though.

Here's a neat gif I made of photos taken at the end of each painting day for at least the second half of the painting process.

Even the cat approves, and he is very discerning.