Friday, June 30, 2017

Happy Birthday to Me

Last year for my birthday, I bought myself a present.  I have been known to trawl Etsy on the regular in search of vintage quilt tops that I can finish and quilt myself.  It's a really inexpensive way to collect vintage quilt tops (which I can't get enough of) but more importantly it's an opportunity to practice my quilting skills on a top that I'm not terribly committed to since I didn't spend hours piecing it myself.

So last year I found this guy right around my birthday and I couldn't say no.

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It took me a long time to quilt it up because other projects and because I always try to push my quilting skills a bit when I do projects like this, so it always takes a ton of time. I finally found some patterns I was pleased with and some techniques I was able to *just* scrape by at.

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The quilt had a very ugly white border and I went back and forth about whether to just remove it (especially because it was fairly crooked and a little stained.)

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In the end, I decided to keep it and I'm glad I did because the borders are my favorite part now.

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I had to have striped binding because I just can't resist a good striped binding.

Here's the scrappy backing that is mainly made up of vintage sheets.

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A view of the whole quilt.

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And here it is in its new home alongside the sweet Maneki Neko pillow that I made awhile back!

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Friday, June 23, 2017

Tropical Adventures in Paradise

If you're wondering why we're lacking the general pastiness that most Portlanders sport this time of year, it's because we enjoyed an extra-long vacation in Kauai this spring.

We did some snorkeling, of course.

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We saw sooooooooo much wildlife on the beach. Seriously. Here's a picture of three (THREE!) monk seals on the beach with a sea turtle all like, "Hey! Wait for me, guys!" We saw this basically every single day.

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I got rammed in the butt by sea turtles on two separate occasions.  That's how much wildlife we saw on this trip.

We also saw some neat stuff around the island.

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And we took weird pictures with it.

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Yeah, I'm making a weird face because there are a lot of spiders who live near the face hole of this wooden pineapple.

Also, it was almost Easter when we were there, so we dyed eggs.

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In other Easter related news, mom brought these old fashioned chicks for everyone.

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We (I?) sort of became obsessed with taking them everywhere.

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But really.

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Everywhere.

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We even found a friend for them for sale at a toy store.

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Eddy took surfing lessons. Look how good he is at surfing on land!

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Then they walk their boards out.

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Then, turns out, they're real far away and even though you can see them kind of well, your phone sure can't.

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Go, tiny surfing Eddy! Go!

Seriously, though, most of the trip was just tons of great family time.

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Also, did I mention that Eddy got a ukelele?

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He has not put that thing down since we got back. He loves it so much!

Seriously, though, the chicks went everywhere.

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And somehow I want this picture of my brother with a lei on his head to be the last picture of this blog post.

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That's just the kind of trip that it was.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

I've been wanting to make a banner recently for our entryway and I've been toying with some ideas, but I just couldn't settle on anything I was happy with until Eddy reminded me of a fortune cookie we had with a Chinese food dinner on one of our cross country road trips.  It seemed fitting, so I whipped up a fabric banner and started laying out the lettering.

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It was a pretty quick project, just took an afternoon.

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I installed it on some driftwood we gathered along the Oregon coast.

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Teamwork makes the dreamwork, baby!