A skirt.

While making a run to the fabric store during my recent semi-annual quilting day (All day! With quilters who know 100% more than I do! And door prizes!!), I of course had to buy a sweet kid print along with my brown fabric for my quilt binding. It whispered, "Make me into a skirt," when I saw it in the shop. It didn't hurt that it had chicken-like birds on it; I'm kind of a sucker for poultry.

This was a one-nap skirt, meaning it took me under 2 hours to make it and it was so simple I could do it without much brain power (I make it a rule to turn my brain off during nap time, it's really what's best for everyone.) I found a simple pattern here (I. Love. Oliver & S.) and pulled a ribbon from my voluminous stash...please refer to my comments on craft hoarding in the previous post. I think you should know that this skirt involves cutting fabric from selvedge to selvedge, meaning you just fold in half and cut it to the length that you want the skirt to be (plus 2 inches for seam allowance). It's truly no muss/no fuss, which is a beautiful thing when you are working whilst brain-dead.

This is definitely going to be made up in lots of different prints throughout the various stages of her toddler-hood. And as you can see here, it's particularly good for wearing while giving tune-ups to your rocking horse.

Hello, Sunshine!

Well, that was a long hiatus. It turns out that toddlers are a bigger timesuck than Facebook and Pinterest stuck together and multiplied by a factor of 8 billion. Who knew? Add this to the long list of things they don't tell you before you have a baby (this list would include such gems as: you will most likely poop while birthing and toddlers don't know to lean over while puking so be ready to do a massive hair wash in the middle of the night when the stomach virus hits). Oops, did I just mention poop AND puke in the first paragraph of my resurrection post? They also don't tell you that you will become more obsessed with bodily functions than you ever thought possible. It is what it is, folks.

Enough about that, let's get to the crafting. In the recent months, enough has been happening that I now deem worthy to share, hence, I'm going to try to revive ye olde blog(e). I've been slowly getting back to making things, and I mean slooooowly getting back to it. First there was the responsibility of keeping a child alive and happy that kept me from creating, but because we didn't think that was enough of a challenge, we also decided to move in the first year of her life. Hahahahahaha! Haha. ha. This meant, of course, completely packing up my craft room, a task which I couldn't have managed without my friend/real estate agent coming over and throwing stuff randomly (!) into about a billion boxes. I'm not kidding when I say a billion, either. OK, maybe it was more like a million, but all I'm saying is that the movers actually started laughing at me midway through the move when I kept directing them to bring box after box to the craft room in the new house. Finally, after schlepping his 788th box of beads up a flight of stairs, one of the guys said "No, you don't," when I told him that I wanted the 789th brought to the craft room. I went upstairs to see what he meant and found a maze of stacked boxes taller than me...my very own hoarding reality show.

It took over a year to tackle it. And some tears. And a chunk of change. And a patient, patient man who was willing to give me a whole room to myself, walk past stacks of boxes of glitter and buttons and fabric for a year, deal with my intermittent meltdowns when I lost it because I hadn't made anything in a hundred years and couldn't even find anything if I'd tried (most common quote that started these rants: "I can't find the [expletive deleted] hot glue gun!"), and then, after all that, help me walk through planning, shopping, and putting together a functional room. It's almost there now. Not quite finished enough to photograph, but it's functional and it's beautiful and it keeps me sane.

So!

A quilt. This is my Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake quilt. Have you read it? I likedbutnotloved it, but while I was reading that book I couldn't get enough of the cover art. I kind of flipped out a little over the colors and declared that I would make a quilt top in those same colors. It's a super-simple nine patch, inspired by this quilt here. We took a trip to Lancaster to see a friend, and in between visiting farm stands and gorging ourselves on fresh ice cream, we scoured the fabric stores with book in hand.

This is my first quilt that I sent out to be quilted. What I'm really trying to say is that this is the first quilt I've ever made that was big enough to fit an adult body, and therefore it terrified me to try to quilt it by myself on my little machine. I actually tried and failed, so hey, a least I gave it a shot. But I wanted a finished quilt more than I wanted a dead quilt and a nasty drinking habit, so I sent it out. I love the little circles because they are kind of egg-like (slightly ovoid) and pick up well on the egg/bird theme going on in some of the prints. I also like that I didn't have to do it and I feel blessed to know that there is a woman near where I live who thinks having an industrial-sized quilting machine in her dining room is more important than a table and chairs. So now that I've figured out how to have someone else quilt my tops, I think I'll finally get around to having the baby's quilt finished (she's 2.5, in case you were keeping score.)

I chose to stick one of those little flim strip bits that are so popular right now (for good reason!) down the back of the quilt. It turns out that it makes it very hard to decide which side to look at.