Purple Ombre Chevron Quilt

Earlier this year, I made Greg this neutral square quilt with anti-pill fleece batting and minky backing. Subsequent to that, and before the weather started to get chilly, I finished making a similar quilt for myself using purple fat quarters that we got at a quilt shop during a road trip a few years ago.

I went with a chevron pattern, and arranged the pattern to go from light to dark to get somewhat of an ombre effect. I also decided - in contrast to the way I did Greg's quilt - to give "real" binding a try on this quilt, and discovered that the hand-stitching part was pretty time consuming.




The minky fabric for the backing is a floral/swirl pattern from Etc. Scrapbooks, Fabric & More (as was Greg's brown striped minky backing). They have a larger selection of minky fabrics that you can't find at JoAnn's, but the drawback is that you can't use 40% off coupons like you can at JoAnn's, so 2+ yards of minky fabric can get pricey.

I'm kind of itching to do another quilt soon, but not sure what pattern or colors yet, although I did come across this self-binding quilt technique that I'd like to give a try at some point.

Neutral Square Quilt for Greg

On a road trip a few years back, we made a stop in Ferndale, CA, which is a Victorian-themed little town. On the main drag, there was the Itsy Bitsy Quilt Shop (which is apparently now closed, according to Yelp) that we stopped by and picked up a couple packs of fat quarters - one of neutral colors and one of purples.

Earlier this year, I tried my hand at a larger quilt using the neutral-colored fat quarters to make this for Greg.




I deviated from "standard" quilting in a few ways:

• For the batting on the inside, I used anti-pill fleece rather than cotton batting.
• For the backing, I used minky fabric (brown striped, in this case) instead of quilting/cotton fabric.
• Instead of normal binding, I sewed the quilt inside out, then flipped the quilt right sides out and machine quilted it.

We got some additional fabric from JoAnn's to fill in the rest of the squares, since there wasn't enough fabric from the fat quarters alone to do this large of a quilt) - it's roughly 55" x 72". I also wanted to end up with a quilt that was a bit heavier than normal, but that also meant machine quilting was perhaps a bit more challenging. I bought both a walking foot and a darning foot for my sewing machine, but ended up using the darning foot for machine quilting because it had higher clearance than the walking foot.

It's a pretty comfy quilt, if I do say so myself . . . I was a bit jealous of it (and sometimes stole it to use) until I finished mine a few months later.

It took me a while to get the quilt photographed because I was trying to think of a good way to take photos of it - it dawned on me that I could use pants hangers to hang up the quilt for photos, so that's just what I did. Having the double doors to the master bedroom helped.

2013 Holiday Cards Using Costco Photo Cards

After several years of going back and forth on whether or not to do holiday cards, I finally decided to do them this year!

We had some family photos taken, then I used Photoshop to combine a photo of the three of us and a photo of Evie into a 6 x 7½ picture. I intentionally left white space at the bottom of the picture, then I had the photo printed at Costco as one of their 6 x 7½ photo cards. The price is hard to beat since it was $14.99 for 50 cards, plus envelopes (which are lined with silver foil! Fancy!), AND it came with four extra photo calendars.

In the white space at the bottom of the photo cards, I did a little paper crafting to personalize the cards a bit more. I ended up going with a design that involved some stamping (Papertrey Ink and Savvy Stamps), patterned paper (Carta Bella), vellum, and washi tape (We R Memory Keepers and mt), with blue, grey, and purple as the colors:


The design was off to the left side, so that I could write a note on the right.

It was a good balance of cost effectiveness and craftiness - I was happy with how the cards turned out and I'm already (casually) mulling over 2014 holiday card possibilities :D. I mailed most of them off middle of last week and even then, I felt like I was cutting it close to Christmas, but I've heard that people in town have been getting them. I still have a couple left to hand-deliver, mainly the ones for my mom and my dad.

2013 Holiday Card Pictures

I recently saw that an elementary school friend of mine, who I honestly haven't talked to in years, but I am Facebook friends with, started doing some photography as a hobby. This was sometime in early November, so then I was like, "Light bulb!" (Think Gru in Despicable Me).

I reached out to her on Facebook asking if she could take some family photos for holiday card (and scrapbooking!) purposes and she agreed. Our original date got rained out, the weekend before Thanksgiving, so we pushed back to the weekend of Thanksgiving.

Taking posed pictures with a toddler proved challenging, but we got some cute pictures before Evie called it quits.

A couple of my favorite pictures of Evie:



I finished our holiday cards and got them all mailed out - whoo hoo! Blog post on holiday card to come - I did a hybrid card so that I could still get some crafting action in on the card.

Lastly, Candice's blog post on the photo shoot: Week 10-Project 52: Family Photo Shoot

Holiday Party Photo Booth

Couple of pictures from our holiday party last Friday night!

The fun picture:


The serious picture:


The photo booth was by Fable Photo and Video and I thought they did a good job.

It's convenient that Greg and I now attend the same work holiday party. :D They were raffling prizes and Greg put both his and mine in for this Mickey Mouse waffle maker, but alas, it wasn't meant to be and we didn't get it. That's all right - regular waffles taste just as good.