i love irony

just taking a moment to pop in and let y'all know that i'll be absent for the next couple of weeks. 

my social calendar is overloaded.

so i'll be spending as much of my free time as i can with my family, especially Peanut.

i'll be posting about the various social events i'm attending when they're all over with.

girl, interrupted

i've been a little too quilty in my blog posts of late, so to change things up a bit i thought i'd share with you a little something special.

look who Peanut got to meet the other day!

another favorite new friend...

it was my youngest daughter's very first trip to Disney and she had an absolute ball.  she loved every single minute of it, even those 60 or so minutes she was zonked out in her stroller, and i can't wait to take her back for more!  (so glad her daddy bought annual passes - one of the few perks of living in florida.)

it was extra nice to be able to go before the thanksgiving week crowds moved in.  the longest line we waited in all day was at the counter of the burger restaurant where we ate lunch.

next week we may try to check out Animal Kingdom since none of us has been there yet. 

p.s. did ya see the super cute mickey mouse pillowcase dress i made for Peanut?  love. it.

a finished quilt and new fabric

i finished my son's patchwork hand-tied quilt a while ago, i just never got around to taking photos of it and, since it was laying on the sofa this morning i thought, what better time than now?

kinda hard to see, i know - cell phone pics - but it's various shades of blue mixed with white squares (this was done in the same pattern as my daughter's quilt); the backing is and blue, white and dark green striped sheet and the binding is a dark green with lighter green flecks - it really brings out the bits of green in some of the squares on the front as well as the striping on the back.  this quilt is already getting used lots :)

these are three of the fabrics that i chose from the fat quarter shop to use as the backing for some holiday pillows for my family room...

and these are the three fabrics i chose for the fronts of the pillows...

and i chose these to cut up and send in for an I Spy swap over at the fabric stash club.



as soon as i get the pillows finished (i'm hoping to get started on them today, but i need to get some trims first), i'll post photos.

holy featured blog post, batman!!

this week really has been outstanding and it just keeps getting better!!!

the ladies over at Quilt Story are featuring my blog post about my first quilt today - how cool is that?!?!




get on over there and check out their blog - it's really fantastic.  all kinds of wonderful work by several different artists from across the globe.  it's a great place for inspiration to get you going, advice you never knew you needed, and eye candy galore!!

thanks so much for featuring me, heather & megan!  you gals rock!

HELP! (of the quilting variety please)

so i'm working on a christmas present for my mom (a rooster quilt) and i'm really excited about it.  i'm not a rooster person at all, but the idea for this quilt is so fun that i just can't wait to see the finished product. 

(again, sorry for the photo quality)

 close up of the wood grain fabric (it's from michael miller's gnomeville line)

the top of the quilt



it looks like a bunch of chicken coops stacked on top of one another - i love that.  inside each "coop" i'm going to hand quilt (using variegated perle cotton in shades of red, green, yellow and blue) a different rooster.

i found some great black and white drawings of roosters online that i was able to enlarge and print out.  i tried printing them on cardstock and cutting them out and tracing them with a water soluble fabric marker - didn't work out.

i printed them on regular paper, layered some dressmaker's colored transfer paper under them and traced around the image with a pen.  the image shows up in much more detail but it's so faint i'm not sure i can quilt 12 roosters that way - my eyes might give out on me.

my free hand skills are so-so; i wouldn't dream of trying to recreate each rooster by hand.

so does anyone have any suggestions for getting the image from my computer or paper onto the quilt top so that i can quilt over it?