The Mom Visit

Recently (well, okay, a long time ago because it took me forever to get around to blogging about this) my mom came to town for a visit.

We took a bunch of goofy pictures and giggled endlessly at them.

Mostly we spent loads of time playing with the dogs and hanging out in the pool, but we also ate at a couple of really neat restaurants. First of all, we ate at the Grand View which was perched atop a mountain and was reached via a nauseating mountain drive (I was the only one who got sick.) I do have to admit, though, that the view was worth it.

Also, the food was not too shabby.

We also tricked Roy's at Pebble Beach into celebrating my birthday (definitely not my birthday).

After a predictably delicious dinner, we enjoyed a little stroll along the beach.

Also, we saw LOTS of fuzzy bunnies. Go team!

We went out to Monterey and, of course, saw our friends.

Also, we visited our Voltar friend.

Also, Miss Kitty!

And many hats were tried on in stores.

So many hats.

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Vintage Strawberry Shortcake

One day I found a vintage 1980s Strawberry Shortcake sheet at a thrift store for $2.  It screamed to me "QUILT BACKING!"  I therefore bought this pattern and pulled out my fabric stash.

Strawberries!

Here they are all pieced together.

Pink border:

Flower border:

Here I am quilting it up. I mean here's Rupert. Helping. Or interfering. Or whatever.

I decided to bind it using the trimmings from the sheet.

Here it's time to baste.

And here's the quilt all finished.

My favorite part, though, is the back.

Can't say that about many quilts.

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A Decade of Photo Shoots

Recently Eddy and I realized we've been together almost a decade (married 5 years.)  We figured that's sort of a big deal, so we have a lot of fun adventures planned over the next few months.

When we found out that our friends Emily and Neal were coming to San Francisco and that Emily was going to do some photo shoots while she was here, we thought it would be awesome to kick off our 10 year celebration with some fun pictures.  The last time Emily took our photos was for our elopement:

There's Emily hard at work.

And there's Neal (he married us!).

And here we are aboard the Maid of the Mist on Niagara Falls tying the knot. (We totally did it before we found out about Pam and Jim, btw.)

Emily also photographed our family ring ceremony in St. Louis:

There's Neal doing that marrying us thing again (this time with bunny ears!)

It only seemed appropriate to do a photo session with Emily and Neal 10 years later. This time we picked a sunny spot in SF.

And we brought books.

And we brought quilts.

And we skipped about and generally behaved like dorks.

She even got some cute ones of us individually (which is harder to do than you might think.)

We even snuck a picture or two of Emily and Neal that day.

If you like the beautiful pictures Emily took, you should also check out the blog post she made about the photo shoot. It's awesome (and was posted in a much more timely manner than this one!)

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The Quilt of Our People

Being Team Sunshine Fuzzy Bunny and all, I basically can't resist any bunny fabric that exists.

Additionally, I've been wanting to tackle a log cabin quilt for approximately one million years. I decided on a log cabin variant called courthouse steps.

I got a fair amount of help assembling the blocks from Rupert

(meaning he just lazed around on my stuff when I was trying to work.)

Here's a picture of the basting process that shows the amazing backing (dear lord, whyever did IKEA cut down on producing fabrics?)

And you know I can't resist stripey binding.

All finished!

Now I hoard forever.

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Garage Facelift

We've finally started working on the front of the house (much to the delight of our neighbors, I can tell you!)  We've got a lot of work to do and will probably start in earnest in the fall or winter.  But for now, the area in front of the garage is starting to look reasonably schmancy.

You might remember what the front of our house used to look like:

Pretty classy stuff. That picture was even taken after we replaced the garage doors!  This is what it looked like when we bought the house.

It had a wonky (and dangerous!) garage door with lots of cracks and icky light fixtures and it was generally unsightly. Then we had the house painted and added new light fixtures and it looked a lot better.

Next we decided to add these old-school house numbers. Well, Eddy added them. (I totally helped.)

The next thing we thought it needed was potted plants. That means plants ride home from the nursery in the passenger seat as is our tradition.

We failed take good pictures of this step, but trust me when I tell you that we went to the nursery 3 times in a morning trying to get just the right pots and plants.

That is, after we special ordered the giant pot in the middle and spent 2 months waiting for it to arrive.

I'd say it all worked out in the end, though. We are still working on a lighting solution to illuminate the house numbers at night, but it looks pretty darned good during the day if I do say so myself (which I do.)

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