Paper Starfish

In the past two weeks we've had:

five doctor appointments
three filled prescriptions
2 rounds of blood work
one allergic reaction to amoxicillin

I'm not wishing illness on anyone but it's someone else's turn. Do I have any volunteers?

It's awards season and I've been hearing a lot about Downton Abbey.

Season 1 is streaming on Netflix and I'm hooked. I love Maggie Smith in anything but everyone on this show is fun to watch. Great cast, great clothes, great accents! Who else is watching?

Okay now.... I don't want to be all negative here. This is a generally happy post. With that being said, I will never quilt a throw-size-or-larger quilt on my home machine again.

I went into 2012 telling myself, "Self, this year you will branch out from the meandering stitch on the longarm machine." And I have. I love the look of slightly wavy, organic lines a la Tallgrass Prairie Studio. A Flickr search offered lots more examples and I decided that I like the look of lines that are spaced more and at random intervals.

The picture above is the back of my confetti quilt and I think I'm going to love it. I'm proud of myself for trying something new and the randomness of the lines matches well with the randomness of the confetti pieces. But the process of basting and wrangling that thing under the machine was not pleasant at all. It's back to renting time on the longarm and investing in help from the pros for me! I hope to finish this quilt this weekend and get some pictures up.

It's finished and I love it!

It's been cold and windy this weekend so it was hard to get photos. I'm pleased with the wavy quilting lines and everything overall. It's my largest quilt yet at about 59" x 72".

I know it looks strangely shaped in the picture (above) but it's just the way it's hanging on the fence.

We have a quilt guild meeting on Tuesday so I'll take it with me for show and tell. A lot of my favorite fabric lines made it into this one - Mendocino, Picnic and Fairgrounds, Prince Charming, Tufted Tweets, Sherbet Pips, etc.

In knitting news I finished the first Nalu mitt. I don't love it. Kid Starfish has actually been using it as an Iron Man super hero wrist weapon-thingy. Not sure what will come of this project.

Jennifer of Ellison Lane is featuring me in her Follower Spotlight today. I love her blog and she's doing a really fun mini quilt challenge right now. Please check it out and tell me if my answers are dorky!

Does anyone know what movie that is from? "I'm Sailing!" It's from a silly movie called "What About Bob?" with Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss:

Anyway, I've been daydreaming about a little boy sailboat quilt lately. I pinned a few on Pinterest and favorited a few on Flickr. I even thought about making my first leap into paper piecing for a sailboat block but in the end I went with a traditional block with half square triangles:

They are 16" blocks and I think I'll make four of them. I've seen some cute quilts with four sailboats all in a different color.

I'm going to start a cardigan sweater for Baby Starfish who turns two in just a couple of weeks using the MacLir I've been hoarding:

Mr. Starfish and I went for our first overnight sans children last weekend. Yes, our older child is going to be seven this year. Yes, I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I've been too nervous to leave them over night. But I digress. One of our favorite close-by places to visit is Asheville, NC. We got engaged there, went on a "we're pregnant let's celebrate!" trip there, lots of good memories. We went to the yummiest place for breakfast on Sunday morning (Early Girl Eatery) and saw a yarn shop right next door!

They didn't open for several hours since it was a Sunday and we were getting on the road but I have it mentally bookmarked for next trip. I did find a quilt shop that was open and got a half yard of a Terrain print we didn't get here in town.

I got a little bit of work done on Baby Starfish's zippered cardigan. I love the colorway. 2 year olds can get away with wearing wild colorways like this:

It should be finished this week!