Adventures in Paradise

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.

Color Uncoordinated

I don't know what's going on these days, but my color sense has gone down the tubes. I've got a friend who's little girl is due in a couple of months and I finally got around to putting together a quilt top for her.

And I hated it. The light green didn't read green at all and the purple and white print was just weird. I pulled them off, consulted some of my color gurus on Facebook and spent a frustrating hour at the local quilt shop, which is nice but tends towards traditional rather than modern prints. They do have a great batik section, and I found a pink, and green and a couple of purple prints that I think work better.

I'm still thinking of tossing everything but the purple minarets and starting over, but I'm not sure what direction I'd go.