These pictures are from last week when I mentioned I needed to babysit my nephew so my Mom could be with Granny during her last hours.

He LOVES playing in this activity chair!

Then he got the hiccups and talked to me for a while…

Enjoy your weekend!

My grandmother, as a young woman

This morning I woke up to the news that my grandmother, Audrey Alleyne (she went by Alleyne) passed away last night. It’s sad news but I wasn’t too surprised. Her health has been declining for many years as she battled with dementia.

At my high school graduation in 2003.

I prefer not to remember her how she was at the end. I want to remember her as she was when I was a child: always full of laughter, generous and fun. Dementia took that away from her and made her confused and scared.

My only regret is that I didn’t learn to crochet from her when she still remembered how. I still have one of her crocheted blankets.

Hug your loved ones tight tonight!

My partially completed Zig Zag Quilt

Remember how I said in this post how I don’t like to have more than one project going at a time? Oops. I do now! I have put my Chasing Chevrons quilt on hold and started this zig zag quilt. It’s for a very special little girl in need, but I’m going to wait on the reveal until I get the OK from her parents.

The pattern I’m making up as I go along, but it’s based on this quilt by Rita at Red Pepper Quilts. I think I’m going to do purple instead of black pieces, though. And ALL the material is from my scraps bin or my stash. Hooray for a scrap buster!! And I can tell you where each scrap came from… but if you just look at the quilts in this post you’ll find them soon enough!

So on my to-do, list continuing from this post:

1. JD’s Silly Safari Quilt (in progress) Complete!!
2. My niece’s Christmas present (sleeping bag) Complete!!
3. Chasing Chevrons (in progress)
4. My husband’s T-Shirt Quilt (picked out the shirts to use)
5. A scrap quilt (doing zig zags)
6. Doily Quilt (bought the fabric!)

Happy Wednesday! I’m going out to my parents’ house in Orange County to watch my nephew. Normally his Grammi (my mom) watches him while my sister and her husband are at work, but my Mom needs to go to the hospice today to visit HER mother… Unfortunately she’s very, very sick. It’s been coming for a long time now, so we’re not surprised, but it’s still sad. Happiness and sadness in the same day, isn’t that how life works?

Vintage Pattern.

(Unfortunately the seller has since closed up shop, so I can’t link you to it.)

I thought that it would make a really cute Christmas gift for my two-year-old niece, Scarlett, so I bought the pattern. Unfortunately, I didn’t look at the listing closely enough though because all of the measurements were in metric! I set out buying fabric and cutting as best as I could, but I ended up ditching the pattern completely and just winging it. This is what I came up with!

Completed Kitty blanket!

I used Kona Candy Pink and the striped fabric is by Brother and Sister Design studio. The inside is lined with this soft pink fabric (anybody know what this fabric is called?? I love using it, but can never remember what it’s called!)

Detail of the head and lining.

I thought the head on the original pattern looked kinda scary and demonic, so I changed the eyes on mine to make it less scary.

Closeup of the face.

The whiskers are ric rac left over from Liliana’s quilt. I applique’d the eyes, nose, lips and chin and added french knots for whisker details.

The quilting on this one was kind of a nightmare, there are puckers all over the place on the inside of the blanket. I decided to let them go though, as I was running low on time and I figured as long as they were on the INSIDE, not the OUTSIDE, I could live with them. It was also originally meant to be a sleeping bag, but I decided that adding a zipper is outside of my skill set at this time so I just left it as a blanket.

Scarlett and her parents loved it and in the end, that’s all that matters! I’ll just be glad that this one is over.

We spent some time in the beautiful Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked to Emerald Lake…

We attended Tour de Fat hosted by New Belgium Brewery…

Ate some yummy food at Lucile’s Creole Cafe…

And spent some much needed time with family!

Hope you had a fun and relaxing labor day, too!

My family and I at the Huey Lewis & the News concert!

On August 7, my parents, brother and I visited the Orange County Fair and saw Huey Lewis and the News. They were on tour to promote their new album, Soulsville. They opened with “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll” and then, along with their backup singers, sang some songs from their new album.

Huey and his amazing backup singers.

One thing that bothered me was Huey’s attitude! He seemed annoyed to have to play all of the hits that made them famous and successful, which I didn’t appreciate. I can understand that he might be tired of playing the same songs for twenty years… but come on. Those songs are what made you famous. Be gracious about it.

See the trumpet player at the top left? He was doing that fist pumo the whole night.

Overall, we had a really good time at the concert. They even did an a Capella portion of their songs. The concert was a gift for my Dad for his birthday, and he had a good time, so that’s all that matters!

Ready to Pop Invitation

The first thing I did was research baby shower themes. I didn’t want to do the typical pastel themed baby shower, I wanted to do something unique and different. That’s when I came across these Ready to Pop Baby Shower Invitations from CandlesandFavors.com. I loved the saturated colors and since my sister and her husband love movies and movie going, I thought it was perfect. It’s also gender neutral if your guest of honor has chosen not to find out the sex of the baby until the delivery day.

Food/Beverage table

I carried the theme into the decor of the food/beverage table in a few ways. I grabbed some yellow napkins, utensils and red plates from Target and Big Lots! that went along with the theme. I had some red party cups for beverages, which fit in perfectly with the theme. I bought a couple yards of the red and while polka dotted fabric from Joann’s and made a table runner to give it a punch of color. I really wanted red/white stripes, but I couldn’t find any, unfortunately. The fruit arrangement went in a cute red bucket found at Joann’s. I placed condiments for the popcorn bar (more on that in a minute!) in baby jars I covered with red ribbon. All of the food and beverage items were labeled with place cards that I made by mounting yellow scrapbook paper on to an existing place card, and then writing the name of the food on red ink on white index cards. A friend of Teresa’s made the gorgeous diaper cakes that went on each table as a centerpiece. Finally, we added red, white and yellow balloons for a finishing touch.

Tea sandwiches and other appetizers.

I decided to save on money and do a light lunch/appetizers rather than a full on meal. My husband is a caterer, which also helped. He made some tea sandwiches and other appetizers, as well as the fruit arrangement. Thanks to him I also didn’t have to rent any table linens, they all came from our garage.

I also came up with the idea of doing a popcorn bar to add to the light lunch offerings. I had a bowl of regular popcorn and a bowl of kettle corn, with an assortment of toppings in the baby jars with red ribbon glued around them. Condiments included kosher salt; cheddar and nacho cheddar cheese powder; red, white and yellow M&Ms; and chocolate chips. I originally planned on using these favor boxes from CandlesandFavors.com, but unfortunately I didn’t read the description closely enough. So when the boxes arrived I was surprised to find how tiny they were! Instead I went out to Target and got some of those plastic popcorn boxes from the dollar bin. Beverages were simple: water, iced tea, coke and diet coke.

Onesie table

Instead of games, I wanted to focus on activities the ladies could do during the shower, while visiting with Teresa and each other. One of the ideas we came up with was this Onesie decorating table. We supplied iron on designs, stencils and fabric markers and blank onesies and bibs and had each of the ladies decorate them. They really enjoyed it and now Teresa has PLENTY of onesies for baby!

Click each image to make it larger!

I also had a picture frame with a white mat so the guests could sign it with wishes for Mama and baby. This table also had a photo album with baby pictures of Teresa, and some assorted pictures of her husband as a baby.

Picture frame

I made little rosettes for the grandmas and guest of honor. They were really simple, actually! The rosettes came pre-assembled from Michael’s. All I had to do was attach a pin to the back and write the sentiment on a sticker and put it on the front. I also added a ribbon to the Mom-To-Be’s.

Mom-to-Be and future grandma!

After playing ONE game (it wouldn’t be a baby shower without at least one game of baby bingo, right?) and opening presents, we called it a day. My sister had a wonderful time (and got a little teary eyed when she opened the baby quilt I made for the baby) and all of the guests had a good time as well. I loved seeing everything come together and I loved how the theme carried throughout the shower!

I used the same book as before, Quilts for Baby: Easy As ABC by Ursula Reikes, but a different pattern.

Again, I went to Joann’s again to buy my fabric. I tried to get some better fabric than the last quilt, I felt like the patterns in Jason Jr.’s quilt weren’t bold enough. These were the ones I came up with:

I usually like to use flannels or equivalent for the backing on the quilts, to give it a cozier feel. For this quilt I used thinner batting, so I was able to machine quilt it rather than having to do it by hand, so the process went by a LOT quicker! I still need work on the actual quilting parts, though. They still end up a bit crooked.

The finished product:

Can you spot which of the squares was put on upside down? Despite that error, the mom-to-be loved the quilt and I hope the baby girl will too, once she is old enough!

I went to JoAnn’s (my favorite craft store) and started in the books section. I ended up buying Quilts for Baby: Easy As ABC by Ursula Reikes. If you know a bit about sewing but nothing about quilting, like me, this is a great book to start with. It tells you everything you’ll need to quilt, and it has lots of simple starter quilts with very clear, easy to understand directions. Apparently the design I chose was one of the harder ones, but it didn’t feel like it with this book.

Fabrics I chose for the quilt.

I thought my sewing machine wouldn’t be able to handle machine quilting the blanket, so I ended up quilting it by hand! You can see here in the picture that I mis-cut the backer for the quilt, so I used some scraps I had to supplement the width.

Finally the quilt is done!

The quilting lines are a bit crooked, but that can be solved by using a quilting frame that I ended up buying after this project was finished. I was pretty satisfied with the outcome, especially for my first quilt, and eager to start the next one.

On Mother’s Day, the sibs and I went over to my mom and dad’s house for breakfast. I was dogsitting Chico at the time for Mike’s mom and dad, so I brought him, and Chris brought Lizzy over. After breakfast my dad let Lizzy and Chico out in the backyard to go potty. Chico darted for the bushes and emerged with a field mouse in his mouth. Before my dad could stop him, he ran inside the house and dropped the mouse at my feet. It was still alive and ran under the couch. Pandemonium ensues. We try to get the mouse out from under the couch, but to no avail. He has made his home under there. Eventually we send Chico in to try and scare the guy out, so we can throw him back in the backyard, but instead he catches the guy again and breaks his neck, and leaves him on the carpet and prances away proudly.

Happy mother’s day!

Emo Chico

Lizzy looks very apprehensive about Chico.

Awww.

Maz came over last night and helped us take pictures for our save the date postcards. Here are the results:

The plates have “Save the date January 17, 2009″ on them written in chocolate syrup. That was my original idea, hehe.

This is the one I ended up using.

After the inside ones, we went outside and took some pictures.

This one is trippy lol.

I really liked the outside ones, and I think I may still find a way to use those. Thanks to Maz for taking such awesome pictures.