May journal

SEWING
Quilts, crafts, and clothes. Covered it all this month.

1. X is for X block in the Squared Away Block of the Month. The X was March's block, and I also did April's block. Green done, yellow done. Still working on pink for May.

2. Four more blocks for the Night Sky quilt. I'm trying to get section 2 done of the quilt, but it's not quite coming together yet. I wanted to do more on this project, but at least I hit the minimum.

3. Two pairs of shorts, one of TA and the other for JK. More coming.

The purple speckles was from the remnant bin at Hobby Lobby. The ice cream cones are from Made EveryDay, the Boardwalk Delight line.

I think I resolved my Shorts conundrum. I have the Kid Shorts pattern from Made Everyday but it only goes to a size 10. SM is way out of that now. I was trying to figure out how to size it up, and I probably still could. But I discovered that Oliver+S has a FREE!!! Sunny Day Shorts pattern online, so I printed it off. They're made differently - Kid Shorts does not have a separate waistband, Sunny Days Shorts does. They're put together differently, even though they look pretty much the same when they're done. And hey, I don't know that SM will even fit into a 12 anymore - I've been buying her 14/16 at the store, and even went to the Juniors section when we were shopping for a dress for her last week. So we'll see. But at least I have one more size up after the Kid Shorts 10.

4. On Sunday night this week, I got a sewing bug, and in just a little while, I made a swim cover for JK. Adam asked how this dress is different from any other dress ... it's not. It's regular fabric. But the top is too loose to be modest so we'll call it a swim cover. JK found the bow in my basket of random items and asked me to add it.

She's ready for the pool! Bring on the summer!

5. I started ... another ... WIP ... a fabric pennant garland for summer camp. I'm going to our church's youth camp with SM as one of the adult chaperones, and this is girly in that campsites are "decorated" somehow. So enter a pennant garland. This is just getting started so no photos yet.

It has the typical triangles but also flowers scattered randomly in between. I made a bunch of flowers as a hand-sewing project (and one was even swiped by JK - she had me stitch it to a hair tie). The gathering stitch would be MUCH faster on the machine, but I wanted a hand project to carry around and knocked out over 20 of them just while sitting in a women's church conference. This particular version of a pennant/flower garland is from the book Sewing Bits and Pieces by Sandi Henderson - I got it from the library for a different project, but this looked cute too.

This has been a great way to clear out blues that quite frankly, I'm not going to ever use in a quilt because the fabric is too rough, doesn't go with anything else, or I just don't like it. Putting those fabrics in a garland that's going to get the crap beat out of it by being outside!


THE HOUSE
We have a baaaaaaaack-splaaaaaaaaash!

This was the last major piece of our kitchen puzzle, and kind of on a whim, we just got it done. I wanted glass tiles in some shade of blue. When I was running errands at Home Depot once, I went through their entire in-store selection and really wasn't happy with it. It's mostly brown-toned, which doesn't not work with our gray/black counter at all. I found a couple of things and took samples home but nope. So we tried Lowe's and hooray! They had a lot of blues! We brought home a bunch, and the all-white that Adam liked and grabbed at the last second was the winner. The blues didn't look right with the counter - that was a hard match. The white/gray was also the cheapest - score!

I went to a Saturday night book club and when I got home, Adam had most of it up. (I need to leave him unsupervised more often.) I just had to come through behind him for the wipe-down of the extra mortar. (Typical. He makes a mess, I clean it up.) It still needs the grout and to be polished off, but the tiles are up! Hooray!

what we're doing besides posting online

Holy. Cow. 5 months of the year already gone! The blog has been quiet because our lives certainly are NOT!

We decided in January to renovate our kitchen and Adam has been working pretty much nonstop since then. He built all the cabinets in our garage in January and February. We bought a new fridge so he could custom build cabinets around it. He did all the wiring to reroute the electricity here and there. He did plumbing with the sink and water hookup for the fridge. He retiled sections of the kitchen floor and it blends in really nicely - you can only tell where it is if you know what to look for in the grout. With moving a doorway, he learned how to make his drywall patching blend a lot more nicely. He's been a busy guy!

JANUARY KITCHEN:

TEARING IT OUT: Except for 4 days in April when Adam had to fix a sink plumbing issue, the kitchen has remained functional the entire time. My kitchen project job has been to clean up after him, occasionally hold something in place while it gets nailed in, and keep the kids out of his way.

GOOD RIDDANCE to the counter tile!!

Our friend Andy came over to help Adam with the final breakdown

A WHOLE NEW SPACE:

Current status: all cabinets and appliances are in place, and now Adam is doing the detail work like the cabinet facings and drawers. The counters are plywood with contact paper stapled to it, and will probably remain that way until the fall. We want an entire granite slab (rather than a teeny sample square like at Home Depot) and are trying to pay cash for the whole thing - so far, so good, but our budget got thrown off this spring from some kid-dental work. In the end, we should have a $40,000 kitchen for $10K or less. But that's still a hefty chunk in one year!

My house part just started this month - I'm the painter. So far, I've done the reading room in a light blue-gray with ultra white for the window trim. I started on the trim in the front hall area. There's a lot of blue edging tape up! We're testing paint colors for the kitchen. The blue-gray will carry into the kitchen, with an accent wall. Adam wanted it to be "cranberry." We played around with shades and ended up getting "Sugar Beet" from Home Depot. Adam was painting up the sample when JK (age 4) came running in. "Oooooo! Magenta!" HA HA HA! The hall from the front door all the way to the back bedroom will eventually be some shade of gray, and the girls want their bedrooms painted lavender. Still very much at the beginning of my part.

the old yellow getting covered with the blue-gray. The front door and hall are slated to change color as well.

I've done quite a bit of sewing here and there but nothing is done yet except the girls' bedroom curtains. Only one set is up because Adam stole the other curtain rod for the living room. I bought a new living room rod but we haven't swapped them yet. (Kitchen.) Photos of the curtains haven't turned out because of being backlit by the sun coming through the window ... still working on it.

In January, I made the first block for SM's Night Sky quilt - I saw a picture on a Google search for quilt star shapes (sorry for no source - I can't find it again), and figured out on graph paper how to make it with half-square triangles (HST). This is 16x16 inches - the starting squares were 5 inches. When made into the HSTs, they sized out at 4 1/2 inch squares to allow for a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides to finish at 4 inches. Yes, actually, it did take me awhile - and some pretty botched up blocks for another project (if you want 2-inch HSTs, you start with 3-inch squares) - to figure that out.

Then sewing came to a screeching halt, because my iron died in February. I just replaced it.  I'm now in process on a dress for JK (with 3 more clothing items waiting for action), and have done 3 more blocks for SM's quilt. I've also started some strip piecing for RG's quilt, and fiddled around with some fabric for a 3rd one. I've been bookmarking specific block ideas for the little girls - TA can't make up her mind which type of quilt she wants. I have about 4 ideas for her.

On a whim, I made a heart garland from felt and a ribbon for the windows in our front hallway for a Valentine's Day decoration. Felt doesn't require the iron.

I received a template of a map of Washington DC as a gift from my good friend Sarah - it's supposed to be all embroidered into a quilt that's about 36x42 inches. SM asked me who will get it for their bed - no one. It's going on the wall. I started working on it at the beginning of April. It's slow going and this is going to take me a LONG time but there's no rush. It's just for Adam and me, for sappy nostalgia. And yes. Yes, I am adding pink French knots to represent the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin.

The garden went in the last weekend in April. It's a lot less than we normally do, but it's all we can manage this year. We're not trying to feed our family for 6 months with it - it's just a delicious supplement. So we're not worried about the quantity of plants we put in or the harvest we get.

TA helped me put in the dahlias and canna lilies

And all of this has been in between Adam's job, homeschooling, dance classes, a ridiculous number of doctor appointments (2 kids in weekly therapy and dental stuff, plus everyone recently got checkups all on top of each other), regular chores around the house, church assignments, and just ... life.