Adventures in Paradise

Belated Christmas Present

This year my brother had no idea what to get me for Christmas...a problem all of us had for each other for some reason. I told him to make me something. As some of you may recall, he decided to start knitting last fall so that he could send hats to my ship for Christmas. I requested that his first hat be set aside for me, and it was...you can see it here. He decided that since I got his first hat, I should get his first scarf, too.

And here it is, delivered shortly after he finished it during our weekend in Oregon. What I love is that you can see his progression...he's only made hats before and his tension is lovely, but flat knitting has it's own challenges. The scarf has lovely character and you can see his improvement over five feet or so of knitting. It's the perfect length to wear doubled or draped and it works with most of my winter coats. It's warm in San Diego lately, but I'l be back in DC for next winter, so I'll get lots of wear out of it then!

Little Pants

Back when my friends were expecting Little Girl #1, I looked high and low for pink camoflauge fabric to back her quilt since her Dad is a West Point grad and even her Naval Academy Mom would have loved it. But, fabric stores in three different states and every online I looked were absent of pink camo. Two weeks ago I was wandering around the local quilt shop trying to figure out how to fix my color conundrum and there it was...

Just in time for Little Girl #2. But, Big Sister needs a gift for becoming a big sister, right? And little pants as soooooo cute!

There isn't any elastic in them because asking Mom to measure a wiggly two year old waist a week after a C-Section wouldn't be very considerate. Luckily, I will be in the area at the beginning of March and will be able to deliver both gifts at once, with a fitting included.

Just Because I Can

No knitting or sewing today, just handstands and stretches that end with me being able to feel the ball and socket of each hip moving against each other for at least two full days. (You can't handstand for an hour, so in between each set of handstands we do core work and hard core stretches. He teaches contortion, too.)

I did however, spend a fair portion of my non-occupied work day exploring the Free Motion Quilting site that Teresa pointed out in the comments on yesterday's post. Thanks for the tip and the push towards the next great time sucker that I've been drawn into!

Final Answer

Put the finishing touches on the quilt this evening - the dark purple makes me happier.

I do need to learn to do free motion quilting, because I think I might have been even happier with an allover quilting pattern. It will have to wait though, the tiny space I have allocated for sewing here isn't enough to work with and I haven't figured out how to drop the dogs on my machine yet. (I do have the manual but it doesn't say anything about dropping the feed dogs, so it may not work...it wasn't a high end machine when I bought it ten years ago.)

I also whipped up a couple of pairs of Huck Finn Pants from Heather Ross' Weekend Sewing for the big sister, one pair in light blue flannel with a butterfly print and one in the pink camo fabric that I used to back the quilt. I'm thinking I need to make a little bag or something since the little pants will likely be passed down in a couple of years.

Re-do

I took Mom's advice and that of a few others and decided to get rid of the white, both the sashing and the pink print on white.

About the same time mom was posting that I should get rid of the white, I'd been considering doing that very thing, and using the dark small scale purple as sashing instead. I'd have to go buy lots more fabric though and I wasn't sure that it would work well for a child's quilt. I do have this lilac in the stash and I rather like the colors together now. I honestly couldn't find any more pink prints that read more as a print AND in the tones that I needed. It's amazing how very specific those purple minarets turned out to be...it took me hours in the store just to find a few that worked. No wonder I prefer to work with clear, pure tones.