Seussical

I keep looking at the word "seussical" and it loses it's meaning (of which it had very little to begin with). However, I think it's the best word to describe the baby quilt that I just finished. I have to admit this was a quickie since we only just realized that the parents' due date was coming up soon and then they had the nerve to have the baby early! Obv they didn't think of me! Anyway, enough selfishness, here are the pics. The front is a big panel with all of the words to the Cat in The Hat book. I just put the borders around it. The back is one big piece of fabric with other pics from the book. I think it's super cute but it feels a bit like cheating.

The quilting was done following the red stripes between the mini panels which you can see in this photo. I also finally got quilt tags done up so you can see the first one attached here. It looks a bit jenky (eric's word) because I had to attach it by hand after the quilt was done since they only just arrived. Normally, I would machine sew it onto the back before I quilted it but I wasn't able to this time.

Here's another Sheldon update. He took a little break while I was working on the seuss quilt but now he's back at the top of the WIP (work-in-progress) pile. Hoping to finish up the top in the next couple of weeks and then I'll have to decide what to put on the back. I'm thinking I might do a quote but haven't decided.

Prezzies!

Hi all! Hope you had a fantastic Christmas. I wanted to share with you a couple of the items that have made an appearance in my house over the break. My darling husband got me a new 40" TV for the living room upstairs. I previously had an old tube tv that was my Grandmothers. It was a great TV for what I used it for but it made weird noises when it turned on and sometimes a high pitched noise at random. Time for it to go! So now I have a lovely new Samsung with AppleTV which will be awesome as soon as I figure out how to use it for more than Netflix.

My other big-ish gift was from my MIL with some accessories from Eric. This is the Go Baby fabric cutter by Accuquilt. I've wanted one for quite a while because I'm terrible at cutting straight lines. I think this will really make quilting more enjoyable for me. Basically what you do is sandwich the fabric between a die (the green piece you see above) and the cutting mat (the white piece you see on top of the fabric above) and roll the whole thing through the machine using the turn crank. You can get all kinds of different dies but I just went with the 2.5" strip cutter and one multipurpose one that has squares and triangles. I think you can put up to 8 layers of fabric in there but I imagine the cuts would be less perfect the more you put in. Haven't had a lot of chances to play with this puppy but am very excited to really test it out.

The last item I wanted to tell you about is an awesome calendar that we picked up when we were in Boston in September. Above is the Jan picture. All of the months are super bright and colorful. Just the thing to put some excitement into a dull kitchen (although our kitchen is bright yellow so it's not really dull to begin with). The BEST part about this calendar is that the back of each page has a template for a different item. You can cut apart the pages and make pillow boxes, square boxes and notecards. Since I am an accountant I will more likely be using the file folder template the most. There's nothing more fun to jazz up some boring files! I love the idea of reusing the pictures since every year I get a beautiful calendar and feel terrible about throwing it out when it's used. If you want to get one for yourself, you can get it from paper-source.com.

What'd you get for Christmas?