Brian's Birthday!

We had a great time celebrating Brian's birthday.  Birthdays are always fun with little kids around -- Tanner insisted on making Dad a football cake, getting party hats, and balloons.  

We had steak for dinner -- first time making NY Strip Steak and it was delicious.  The boys could hardly wait to have Dad open his presents.  I gave him a gift for work (Tervis cup filled with M&Ms), a gift for home (a Utes Puzzle to do with the boys), and a gift for the train (my old kindle that I loaded up with books I hope he'll like.)  Happy Birthday Brian!  We love you!

Fall Reading Quilt

In addition to quilting and watching the kids, I spend a good amount of time reading.  It's been a favorite hobby of mine since I was a kid.  I really love books.  If you need a good book to read,  "Wonder" by RJ Palacio is one of my absolute favorites.  Currently I'm reading "Ordinary Grace" by William Kent Krueger.  It's a sad one.  Very good, but sad.

So of course I like random stacked coin quilts because they remind me of stacks of books.  I decided I'd better make one myself.  I used the instructions in Block Party, a book featuring several improv projects.  It was fun to just be able to cut the "books" to whatever size I wanted, but I did find that a lot more trimming was required and time consuming.  I ended up putting a corduroy "shelf" at the bottom of the columns.  I like it.  I bound it with Corduroy too.  Like the black corduroy in my last project, the brown is also a lint magnet.  But since it's hanging on the wall it probably won't be too bad.

Points I pondered while making this quilt:

• Improv style means that you might ran out of background fabric.  Drat!  I wanted to the columns to be uneven stacks.  I used up all my background fabric, and then I squared up the quilt ended up trimming off much of the background on the left side.   
• A crooked quilt is more obvious when hanging on a wall.  I think that crooked edge might bother me every time I walk down the stairs.  Maybe I can create some diversion by adding some more decor to the shelf.  :)  I will have to look into more tips on squaring up quilts.
• I am planning on creating a quilt for each season for this particular wall, so I found a quilt hanging method that will make it easy to remove/reinstall the quilts.  I found this method on Craftsy which uses corner hanging pockets, a yardstick, and 3M Command picture hanging strips.  It was easy and looks pretty good.  The one problem was that the middle of the quilt still sagged away from the wall.  I fixed this by simple adding some special double stick tape (Hollywood Secrets Fashion Tape) to the top of the quilt and sticking it to the yardstick.  The tape is made especially for clothing, I use it often for my high fashion wardrobe (ha. ha.) and have never had a problem with it leaving residue, so I think it should be fine on the quilt.

So enough of the quilt details.  Thanks for letting me talk it all out.  It helps me kind of cement things in my brain and remember what I can do differently on future quilts.  I am linking to Quilt Story's Fabric Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation.

On a completely different note -- Brian and I went to an Elton John concert last night.  It has been many years since I've been to a concert of this scale.  We actually won the tickets from a newspaper contest.  So that was pretty exciting.  The traffic was horrendous (1 hour to go 2 miles) and put a damper on the evening for us.  We had fun, but I'm not a crowd person and frankly, I'm just kinda boring.  We watched the energetic folks in front of us dance the night away -- and there we sat tapping our feet to the beat, bopping our heads a bit, and both wearing earplugs to muffle the high volume.  ha.  We are awesome. ;)  Anyway, the music was fun, and Elton John apparently isn't getting older like us -- at age 67 he sounded great!  

Tanner is 4!

So my baby turned 4!  I'm afraid he won't admit to it though -- he'll tell you all about his birthday, but if you say something about him being 4-years-old he'll say "Me not 4!"  His excuse is twofold -- his legs aren't big yet, and he doesn't want to give up his diaper.  (We've tried -- they say not to force it, but if we don't I'm not sure he'll ever give up "diapy" without some serious pushing!)

On his birthday, while his brothers were at school and Dad was at work, we went to the park with his "best buddy", Paxton.  I asked him if he wanted to take a treat to share -- he chose a Batman Pez dispenser and some Pringles.  Paxton brought him a donut, too.  A well-rounded snack.  ;)

That afternoon our generous Home Teachers (some friends from Church that come visit us each month) stopped by with a gift.  They gave him some "Cat in the Hat" lacing cards -- we practiced "Up, down, up, down" lacing.  My first sewing lesson with him.  ha ha.

My brother that lives about 30 miles away also had a birthday that weekend.  So my parents decided to drive down and see us both.  It was so fun to have them here for Tanner's birthday.  Tanner loves Grandpa and had to show him all his presents first.  And the boys all love Grandma's loving hugs and kind words she always gives them.  I can tell they just feel good after seeing Grandma and Grandpa.

This year Tanner requested a Volcano cake.  It was simple - but the kids thought it was cool with the candy lava exploding out.

So happy birthday to our ever-changing NOT 4-year-old.  One day he is Spiderman, the next he is a Cowboy Superman, and once in a while he is just Tanner.  I love this fun and fiery little guy.

Solids Sampler

Well, I finished up the Solids Sampler.  These blocks were done in a local quilt shop Block of the Month class.  I finished it in the same setting as the Summer Sampler quilt.

Points I've pondered while making this quilt:

1.  Black Corduroy is a lint magnet.  I used corduroy for the corner triangles.  I knew it would be linty,  but it is even worse than I thought -- and I am reminded of it every time I look at the quilt and the random threads and fuzz everywhere.  

2.  I pondered and pondered the thread color and quilting pattern.  I am not a very experienced quilter so the thought of switching thread colors for all those blocks scared me.  I decided to just use a medium gray thread to quilt some straight lines through the center portion of the quilt.  I don't like it much.  I even contemplated picking it out, but I'm not sure what to do instead.  So for now I'm just letting it be.

3.  I washed this and wish I hadn't, at least not before showing it to the quilt class.  Perhaps because the quilting lines are farther apart (2" or so) the fabric just looks wrinkly rather than cozy and crinkly like quilts that are more densely quilted???

4.  I had to cut 30" squares for the corners -- kind of difficult.  I feel like I need a REALLY large counter and a REALLY long ruler to do it more accurately.  :)  

5.  On a more positive note, I was extra careful each month as I sewed the blocks and so my blocks were (mostly) 12 1/2 inches, just the size they were supposed to be.  

Below is the back corner of the quilt.  I had 3 extra blocks since we made a block each month.  Two of them I didn't really like so I didn't include them.  But I do like this spools block, and I was running out of backing fabric so I pieced it in.  You should see the random piecing on this portion of the quilt...actually, you shouldn't.   It looks much better from a distance.  

And here is a picture of a new project I'm working on -- it is made with fabric from "Bluebird Park." I am practicing "gentle curves" with this quilt.  I don't do curves (on purpose) very often.  So I thought doing some gentle, improvised curves would be good practice.  So far, so good.   

I am linking up to Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation.

I am also linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Up Friday.