The Love of A Family Makes a House a Home

Recently when my Uncle Wayne was having some health problems, I thought it would be nice to send him a quilt.  After much conspiring with my mom, I picked out a pattern I thought he would like and some fabrics I thought he might appreciate.

He's color blind, so I wanted to stick mostly to grays to force myself to really concentrate on contrast, texture, and pattern more than color. I thought I'd make some little houses.

Little rows of houses.

The piecing was pretty straight forward, but I wanted to do some really special quilting for this project.

I did some pretty basic stuff on the houses themselves.

But then I added a sunrise.

Then I used these sparkle stickers to trace a special message.

Then I used my very fancy free motion sewing machine foot for the very first time to quilt the letters into the border.

Here's the finished quilt!

The back:

And the front:

The love of a family makes a house a home!

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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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