Gettin' my Swoon on

I have had the Swoon quilt pattern by Camille Roskelley for a long time. I have been rather intimidated by it, but I finally gave into the Swoon.

A Flickr group was started awhile back for a Swoon-a-long by the lovely Miss Katy. Seeing all of the finished blocks and beautiful quilts gave me the push I needed to get started. I have a big empty wall over my stairs and I thought a smaller version of the Swoon in bright, happy colors would look great there. This pattern is great because it gives you the number of pieces you need for just one block. Most quilt patterns just say to "cut _ pieces of color #1" etc... to make the whole quilt.

I got out a couple of fat quarters and decided to make a practice block first just to see if I could do it without too much frustration. After a few hours (yes, it took me that long) I had this beautiful block: 

It was time consuming, and I did get confused quite often with the color 1 and color 2. But that was my fault for not paying close enough attention. This block is huge. Each one measures 24" square. I'm going to use this practice block as a mini quilt.

I gathered together my bright, cheerful fabrics and I'm all ready to go!

Pillow!

I love Heather Ross fabrics, but I usually can't afford to buy any. A few days ago I found a pretty amazing deal at my LQS. I was browsing their sale fabrics and I found two Heather Ross prints from the West Hill collection! Of course I snatched some up...

Last week I had a special treat come to me in my mailbox. Miss Tula Pink has a new book and, being her #1 fan, I had to have it. There are 20 awesome projects in here (10 quilts and 10 smaller projects) and I have been dying to make something. *Sorry! I can't get my picture to turn!*

I decided to make the Vortex Euro Sham using my new Heather Ross fabric mixed in with a bit of Lizzy House.

This is the top after I got it all pieced together. I used a light peach perle cotton to hand quilt it.

And here is the finished pillow! I really love it. The colors of the fabrics go together really well, and it  matches my couch perfectly. I'm thinking though, that I need some bright colors in my life and I may need to make a ton of these to throw all over my living room in cheerful springy colors.

Making

This post will be a bit picture heavy, as I have been sewing quite a bit, but not blogging. I'll just show you what I've been working on with a little caption under each photo. Deal?

This is a mini quilt I made for Lizze for Christmas. I used Parisville fabric in a Dresden plate pattern.

A Kindle cover I made for the shop, but I fell in love with it, so it's now mine.

Here's a few more Kindle covers. These ones actually will end up in the shop eventually.

And two custom Kindle covers I made for my friend Christine's mom. She chose these fabrics from what I had on hand.

This is the pincushion (plus a few extra goodies) I sent to my partner for a swap. I got mine in the mail a few days ago, along with another pincushion for a swap I did with Lizze. I'm saving those for their own post though. I'll show you soon!

I loved the cathedral window pinnie I made for my partner so I decided to make one for me.

I have wanted to knit socks for a long time. I found this gorgeous sock yarn at a local yarn shop here and couldn't resist.

Since I had never made socks before, I decided to try with a cheapy yarn for practice.

This is my sock progress so far. It's slow going because I have so much to do lately, but hopefully I'll have a pair to wear very soon.

Settling In

We moved into our new home 3 weeks ago and we are settling in very well. It has been so great to spend time with friends and family. I have gotten to spend a lot more time with my husband too, since he isn't spending 2 hours a day commuting. His work is now less than 10 minutes from our house. The sun shines here, even when it's cold. The sky is a color of blue I haven't seen in a very long time.

This was the weather on moving day. If I ever move again, will someone please remind me that winter is not a good time to do it?

The kids and the dog were pretty cozy in the car though. The bad weather didn't seem to bother them too much. Of course, they just had to ride along.

It took a few hours to get over the mountains and into central Washington. When we left Puyallup the skies were grey and dreary. As soon as we got over the pass, the sky became blue and there was a huge bright ball of light in the sky.

This is what the sky looks like everyday where we live now. It was the kids' first day of school here and there was a rainbow! Can you spot it? Can you spot the cute little boy too?

My favorite room in the new house is the living room. It is so bright and cozy. I love sitting on the couch in the morning with my coffee.

There really has been a lot to do here so I need to get back on a blogging schedule. I have been sewing so much! My new sewing room/closet has been getting quite a bit of use. Everything is organized and has it's place. It kind of has to be that way when you have a smaller space. But it makes it more enjoyable to sew because I'm not spending half an hour looking for a specific fabric or a pair of scissors before I can start making something. I share my sewing space with my clothes and that's okay because I don't have many of those.

The next post will be FULL of tons of sewing and knitting stuff! I promise! No more talk about moving. Let's get back to the making =)

Bee a {modern} Swapper

Against my better judgment, I signed up for a year long swap/bee. It looked like a ton of fun so I decided that even though I didn't really have time for it, I'd make time. The sign-ups are closed for this round, but you can always check out the photos and see when the next sign-ups will be HERE.

February is the first month and we are doing a pincushion swap. I have only ever made one pincushion and I hate it. I was so excited about this because I really, really need a new one. I wondered about what to do for my partner. That's the tricky part about swaps; you don't know your partners likes and dislikes very well. They try to tell you a few key things in an e-mail, but mostly you have to do a lot of stalking, ie: sift through their flickr favorites, their blog, their twitter account...

I was looking for online pincushion tutorials and I found this one on the My Go-Go Life blog. I have never made a cathedral window. Never even wanted to. I have always been intimidated by them, but really, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

I poked around through my scraps and found some Parisville by TulaPink in there (of course). My partners first favorite color listed was purple so this seemed perfect.

This is where I started. I was pretty pleased with myself at this point because I could see that I was actually doing it!

Here it is finished, before adding the stuffing. I wasn't really happy with it here. It just didn't look right. In the center where the points come together, only one point was correct. I didn't fold the white fabric correctly, I think. I was going to start a new one, but I figured I may as well finish it. So I stuffed it and added a button to the center.

The button completely covered the center and I love the way it looks now! I think this will be a good pinnie to swap, but I'll post it on Flickr to see what my partner thinks before I send it out.

My Favorite Room

I'm linking up with my friend Sharon's blog for her weekly "For the Love of" post. I missed out last week because the topic was books. I love books, a whole lot. And I have massive amounts of them. But unfortunately they are all packed away in boxes buried beneath other boxes in the garage of my new house, in which I am not currently living.

Which brings me to the topic for this week... My Favorite Room. I was at the new house not too long ago and I thought to take a few snapshots while I was there. I really do love it and am very excited to finally be living there a week from today! Can you believe it? You're probably relieved because very soon you will no longer have to hear me talk about it =)

Anyway, here is a peek of our new digs:

Isn't it cute? I normally can't stand split level homes, but I actually like this one. Plus, the exposed brick kinda does something for me. Now as I'm sure you could guess, my favorite room in the entire house would be my sewing room. Of course. Although it isn't as much a room as it is a closet. My bedroom has a walk-in closet (never had one of those before!) and I don't have nearly enough clothes to fill it. So my clothes live on one little hanging rod and the rest is for sewing!

It's not all set up yet but it has a big window that lets in lots of natural light which I love:

And there is just enough room on the far wall to set up a table for my sewing machine:

I plan to have that wall covered in mini quilts soon. I hope you have enjoyed the little peek into my home. I'll definitely be posting some more pictures once we get moved and settled in.

If you have a favorite room of your own, hop over to Sharon's blog and join in on the party.

Ooh, and in case you're wondering, I finished the kids quilts today! Bet you can't guess what my next blog post will be about...

Dessert of the Month

No, I'm not getting delicious fattening chocolatey goodness delivered to my door every month (although that does sound like a pretty great idea). I signed up for the Dessert of the Month cross stitch sampler from The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. Every month I get a PDF cross stitch pattern sent directly to my inbox. The first month was a darling little truffle. And this month it's a devil's food cupcake! I know it's only been 2 months so far, but I am really loving this. I don't see the novelty wearing off anytime soon.

Here's my sweet little truffle. I still have to stitch the month names below them, but I plan to finish that part in the next few days.

And here's my devil cupcake. I love this little guy! As soon as I saw the pattern I knew I had to get started right away. We get the patterns on the first of the month and it is now the second... so, you can see how excited I was to stitch him up.

As for progress on the kids quilts, I have 2 completely quilted (still waiting for binding to be attached), one is pin basted and ready to be quilted, and the other one is still just a top. I have 2 weeks to finish them up so I may end up machine stitching the binding. It's definitely not my favorite method, but I don't think I'll have to time to hand stitch all four of them. Good thing I got the cross stitching out of the way for another month!