Adventures in Paradise

Lasts and Firsts

I've had a hard time coming and updating lately. Part of it is the pace of life, part of it is the immediacy of Facebook as opposed to blogging and even more of it in the impending end of my tour in DECATUR. It's hard to maintain daily life and figure out how to detatch gracefully without hurting anyone (myself excepted, that's just a fact of life) or anything. I'm probably not doing it as gracefully as I'd like, but hopefully in a way that people will remember me well.

A few weeks ago was my final return to San Diego in command.

It was a tough one, but I made it through. There are still two more sea details, one leaving San Diego and one entering San Francisco in my future, and one final Underway Replenishment. It's hard to believe after what will be 19 years (next month) those may be my last big moments on a ship. There's always another possible command, but I'm not sure anything will ever top this tour.

I'm slowly beginning the transition to my next tour, which will be at the National War College in Washington, DC. I'm headed out to do some househunting, hopefully to find a place close to the school for the year I'll be there (maybe longer, maybe not...that's left to be seen.) I'm looking for a two bedroom place because I've gotten used to having a place to work.

I don't think I showed the final results of the last baby quilt I made, but now that it's been delivered, I can:

I'm pretty proud of myself for having managed to work all of her color choices into the quilt, from soft and pale to vibrant. I'm even more proud of myself for finding the perfect backing fabric online.

Actually, by some freakish coincidence the stylists of the world have decided that giraffes and other safari animals are in this year, (I don't remember seeing this number of giraffes for the last three kids that have come along),  just in time for the arrival of the first-born of a giraffe-loving friend. It's perfect, isn't it?

And I've also decided that the only way to learn how to free motion quilt is to actually do it. And so, my first attempt...

I had practiced on some scrap until I figure out that I needed to be moving my hands more slowly and my feet faster. The bit above is the first free motion bit I did on an actual quilt. I've been slowly improving as I work through each of the segments...

I have more improving to do, but I've run myself out of the purple thread, so I need more. I sort of wish I'd used a solid lavender instead of the variegated purples, but that's a lesson learned for later. I showed this to a friend and she really loved the colors, so it will probably go live with her almost three year old when I'm finally done.

You're Yella!

The blocks for the purple quilt are done, or most of them are. I've some extra strips and ran out of purple. The LQS didn't have any in the right shade, so I ordered some more. Because it totally makes sense that I ordered more fabric to finish a quilt that I started in order to use up the scraps from another quilt, right? (To be fair, I only ordered half a yard and I'll use it all.) In the meantime, the quilt shop did have yellow, though in a slightly darker shade than I'd used for the test picture. I used about half of what I bought, but I am happy nonetheless.

I took a silks class on Saturday and flew on the trapeze today, but despite the incredible soreness, I put the time during the Red Carpet walk and Oscar ceremony (which I have never before watched in it's entirety) to good use. I did a lot of twitching around and I now have enough of these fabrics (and some that I thought might work but didn't, darn online ordering) to make several more quilts in this color scheme. I've got the backing fabric already, but I'm going to work on that later. Now, I'm going back to Hanami, which has been ignored for days.

While I'm Waiting

The new fabrics arrived yesterday - the large scale bird print on yellow, a yellow diagonal, birds and trees on white, and they're perfect. Now I need the yellow, which I'm going to go get this weekend at the local quilt shop, which I do like to support. As I've said before, they're heavier on traditional prints and I lean in a different direction, but they've got a great selection of solids and batiks.

In the meantime, I had a bunch of scraps from the last quilt I made and I was getting really sick of the string quilt I'd started with them. I like the look, but paper foundation piecing isn't really my thing. And then I saw something online that I figured I could do without nearly as much fuss.

So I did. And the scraps from that quilt will make a second since I had so much of the solid. My iPhone takes crummy pictures, I think since I went running with it and sweated all over the darn thing. Son't sweat on your phone. Anyway. The two blocks in the left-most column are done and squared up, the others have been strip pieced to get the scrappy columns but haven't been sewn to the solid yet. I like it. And there's a little girl who has a knit blanket from me, but not a quilt and she's about to move into a big girl bed. I think she might like this.

Waiting

While I'm waiting for new fabric to arrive (the local quilt shop is a bit of a drive and my working hours are such that it's easier to buy online than in person, especially if I'm looking for something in particular), I decided to change things up a bit...

This is the quilt as it stands on the wall...the white is stuff I had in stash, some of it already in 2.5 inch wide strips. I'd need to cut more to the right length and cut some of the longer ones down to five inches from 8.5 inches to fit the short ends. But I think the quilt needs more yellow and I wondered if a pale yellow instead of white might be a nice contrast to the bold colors, while keeping with K's color scheme.

I pulled a solid fat quarter out and played with a layout. I think I like it better than the white - it softens things without taking away from the energy of the prints. Anyone else like this better?

In the works

The last three or five weeks have been crazy - life is much easier on deployment with a regular-ish schedule and not a lot of distractions. After the maintenance phase, things come fast and furious. In the five weeks since we're returned from the holiday leave period,  we've completed navigation, seamanship, engineering and a set of combat systems qualifications. We're about halfway to completing all of our pre-deployment qualifications and we leave in about five months. It doesn't get any easier that the last few weeks, but this long weekend has been nice.

To begin with, I spent all of Saturday and Sunday cleaning the house, which was beginning to resemble The Black Hole of Calcutta. I did the kitchen, three loads of laundry, and a ton of other stuff. I made some strawberry syrup to add to soda, and pea shoot pesto, half of which I added to some quinoa and the rest of which I'll freeze.Saturday evening, two of us invaded the home of a third friend with food (hence the pesto dish) and a wheel of quilting cottons and worked out some color schemes for her due-in-June daughter. Or at least we tried.

Moose thought we were laying out a new form of blanket for him. This is the Moose I saved at the end of the year, now fat, sleek and utterly content in his new home. He is happy to be snuggled for a bit and then just hang out in the room. We did get him moved from the ottoman off and on and long enough for K to make a couple of choices color scheme-wise...one is sort of sunny...(no idea why the size is weird.)

And the other is light but not quite Easter Egg/baby pastel.
I made sure she knew this was just color guidance because I wanted a general idea of the colors she really likes - she'd have been happy with anything but the theme I saw while she was picking and choosing was really focused on the yellows, oranges with bits of pink and green. So, one NCIS marathon later...

We have a beginning. This is pulled from fabric I had in stash, but the print I really liked was just a fat eighth and I need a little more green and pink for balance, and nothing in the stash works with these shades. The colors here aren't very accurate - the tangerine of the large dots and a set of small flowers seems to blend with the dark pinks, which they don't do in person. I'll have to get a picture during the day. I need to replace some of the diagonals, too.

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.