Quilt #5!!

I have finished my 5th and by far my hardest quilt yet! I'm slightly delayed in posting about it because it was being made as a birthday project for my sister. I didn't even start making it until the week of her birthday so of course it was very late getting to her! Last week I finally finished it and sent it off in the mail. I'm excited to share some pictures of it now that it is no longer the "secret" project that I am working on. The pattern was purchased from the amazing blog Cluck Cluck Sew!

The longest part was cutting out 168 triangles, 168 kites, and 42 circles!

The middle circles are appliquéd on.

I used 17 different fabrics to make up the random color pattern and the brown to bring them all together.

There is very little quilting, just a few straight line stitches up and down each block.

My first pieced backing! It's a little random but was meant to use all of the pieces of fabric that I could.

Washed and folded and ready to be mailed off! It arrived to my sister a few months after her birthday but I hope she enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it! There are definitely more quilts using this pattern in my future :)

I have one quilt that I have been working on for a long time waiting just to be quilted and one quilt that I am dying to make! Then I need to take a bit of break because this is getting expensive!!! I'll be back at it this summer :)

Spring Break

A nice perk of being a teacher is getting this one week off each spring. I love it because it gives me a chance to clean the house and finish up projects but most importantly because it signifies the end of the school year is near! I counted today and we have only 12 weeks to go!

I spent the beginning of the week working on my super secret project. It is soooo close to being done and I can not wait to show it off!!

My second secret project was a belated cake for Makenna's birthday. I took it in to my parents house and told my mom that I just didn't have time decorate it. I think she knew something was up when I couldn't stop smiling as she cut into it!

A RAINBOW cake! Whenever you ask Makenna what her favorite color is she says "I love every color of the rainbow, but my favorite is purple." I thought this was appropriate!

Andy has been doing P90X now for a few weeks and didn't want to take a break even when we spent 3 days with my parents. He has all of the kids doing yoga with him!

To get out of the house, Mom took us all to a play center in Medford and they had the best dress up clothes! James wants me to try and make one of these for him... hmmmm...

Makenna wants me to make her a skunk costume! This one was cute too.

Can you see the rainbow? This was on our drive home.

Spending the last few days of spring break getting the house all cleaned up and sleeping in! I hope everyone else was able to take some time to relax as well!

World Wide Web

I am constantly reading home decor and sewing blogs! Recently I have been obsessed with two exciting tools to use with the blogs.The first thing I found makes reading my blogs a lot easier. I have seen google reader used before but I didn't like that it was an extra page for me to go to and you didn't look at the blog in it's original screen.

While reading a blog, I saw somebody else using this add on to their google reader. It is a little next button that stays on your bookmarks bar. No matter what page I am on, I can click on the next and it will take me to a blog post that I have not read yet. Then I just keep clicking next until it tells me that I am all updated on my blogs! So much easier!! (When I can find where I found out how to do it, I will update. )

The second thing that I am supppper excited about is a great new website called Pinterest. I can not tell you how many things I have found on the web and think, that would be fun to make! Then I bookmark it and it gets lost in a sea of a million other bookmarks. Pinterest helps us visual people to see all those bookmarks! This is the opening page that you can browse through and see what everyone else in the world is pinning!

After finding pinterest I had to wait a week or two on a waiting list before I got an invitation. I was so excited when I got the e-mail a couple of nights ago! I have just gotten started adding all of my bookmarks to the site. I love all of the categories that you can put things into.

These are all of the quilts that I either can't wait to make or have on my list to make again and again. I just love how visual everything is and how all of the quilts and inspiration for quilts can be on one page.

My other favorite part of pinterest is that you can look at what everyone else is pinning. Make it Perfect is a blog that I love to read (and where I found out about Pinterest!) I can go to her Pinterest home page and look at all of her great pins! I've typed in quilt to the search bar and looked for hours at hundreds of different quilts that people have pinned. Then it's easy to repin them to my board!

So that is my rant of why I love living in the technology age! I'm working like crazy on a special project that I can't wait to show off in a few weeks!

Crafty Saturday

It was a very busy in our house this week! We started off with Andy having a minor surgery (everything went well and he is fine now!), on Thursday our computer quit working and on Friday our water heater went out again! Thankfully we got everything fixed before Saturday and we were ready to relax for the weekend. We had an amazingly crafty Saturday that even Andy got involved in!

I have an entire craft room in our house and yet I tend to move everything out into the family room so that I can be closer to Andy and the TV. I've recently taken over our dinning room table. There are about four projects going on here and I made progress on each of them over the weekend!

This pile of apples has been calling Andy's name to make into an apple pie. If you know my history with pies you know why I have been putting him off for a while now. I finally made a deal that if he makes the crust I will take care of everything else.

The most successful pie our house has ever seen! It took some good team work (and a lot of cleaning up the kitchen afterwards!)

Andy's birthday was a couple weeks ago and my sister sent him a personal ice cream maker. Another part of our successful Saturday was going to the grocery store so we finally got some ingredients to make ice cream.

We finished the day off with a dinner date, movie and Andy eating his homemade ice cream with apple pie!

I'm excited to have Monday off to spend some more time sewing, sewing and more sewing! Hopefully this week turns out to be as good as the weekend was.

Hmmm...

I know it has been forever since I updated but I had time to update tonight and couldn't think of anything to write about! I have about a million things going on but am in the middle of everything and have nothing completed to show! When I don't have a crazy timeline of Christmas it takes a lot longer for things to get done around here. I have been working like crazy and spent most of tonight coloring a book to share with my students (Andy says that coloring can't be considered work but when it's 30 pages it is!)

I did finally go through and update the blogs that I visit daily! One blog that I recently stumbled on is Life In Grace. I LOVE it!! The first post that I read was about her house tragically burning down right before Christmas. After reading that post I had to know more and spent an entire night reading. I recommend it as a great read!

On the topic of reading (and more randomness), for the first time since summer I had time to pick up a book and read it. I had heard about the book "The Help" and checked it out from the library. It was amazing and really worth reading. I spent hours each night because I literally could not put it down!

Promise to be back later with something more interesting for ya!

I-Spy Quilts!

I'm finally posting pictures of the I-Spy quilts that I made for James and Makenna for Christmas! I read about these quilts a while ago and was itching on getting my hands on a bunch of different fabrics. I posted a while ago about how I was able to get all of the different fabrics using a fabric swap from Obsessively Stitching. Andy helped me a ton with doing all of the measurements. These were the first quilts that I made without using a very specific tutorial.

There are almost 200 different fabrics!

They were not the most exciting thing on Christmas morning but once the hype of all the toys settled down they enjoyed playing with them.

The backing one each of them:

Each individual square was straight line quilted around.

I know they are not perfect but I feel so much pride and joy when I look at them after putting hours and hours of hard work into making them. I hope that James and Makenna enjoy them for years!

2010 Year in Review

I can't believe that it is over already but we had a wonderful year with some big changes! Here are a few of the things the we did and accomplished in 2010!

I completed my first quilt! I have now become addicted and spent all day today working on quilt #5.

We spent a few different weekends on the Oregon coast. Went on a few day trips, a few shopping trips, and a few family getaways!

Biggest news of the year: WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!! It was all God's planning and a huge blessing. It was also a big huge pain almost every step of the process. We have been living here now since May 3rd and are enjoying (almost) every moment of home ownership!

Along with the house came our first garden. It came and went quickly! The only thing that survived were these tomatoes.

We spent a wonderful week at the coast with most of the Wallace family celebrating my Grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. As my Dad says, "we had a family reunion and only one person got shot!" That should tell you how the week went :)

Andy started a new hobby of brewing beer. He takes over the kitchen for a couple of weeks at a time and is really enjoying the process. He even tried a pumpkin beer for the holidays!

I completed my first year of teaching! It was a wonderful year that I was both happy and sad to see end. These two women were a huge part of what made it a success. This picture was taken on a field trip to the Salem Public Library where the three of us and 20 pre-schoolers rode on 2 city buses to get there and 2 to get home with bus transfers in the middle. It was a miracle that we all made it back!

We celebrated our one year wedding anniversary! We took a trip to Seattle to celebrate. We enjoyed a Mariners baseball game, walking through Pikes place, and riding up to the top of the space needle.

We also took a second trip to Seattle with friends in September.

James and Makenna spent a whole week with us in the middle of summer! We jam packed the week with fun Salem activities ending with a trip with mom to the Portland Zoo. It was successful enough that I think it might happen again this summer.

Andy started a new job at Frito Lay. He has been there for 4 or 5 months now. He has really early mornings that took a while for us to get use to but he really enjoys the work.

We repainted and gave our back room a face lift! My favorite part of being a home owner is decorating!

The Oregon Ducks were number one in the BCS for the first time ever! They are headed to the national championship on January 10th. Andy is ecstatic and counting down the days!

That was our 2010! There were lots of changes but all for the good and we are looking forward to all that will come in 2011! We hope everyone has a safe and fun New Years Eve!