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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

A view of the whole quilt.

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

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.

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.

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.

And we took weird pictures with it.

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.

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

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

But really.

Everywhere.

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

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

Then they walk their boards out.

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

Go, tiny surfing Eddy! Go!

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

Also, did I mention that Eddy got a ukelele?

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

Seriously, though, the chicks went everywhere.

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

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

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.

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

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

Teamwork makes the dreamwork, baby!