4 hours ago
This day before Thanksgiving I'm . . .
. . . making sweet potato casserole. The best Thanksgiving dish ever. At least I kind of think so.
. . . making deviled eggs too. With paprika. Because it's just not pretty without paprika.
. . . hoping Derek and I can resist the temptation to eat aforementioned Thanksgiving Day fare before tomorrow.
. . . cleaning my messy house, or at least attempting to, because I have this thing about my house being clean on holidays.
. . . filing away the last of the photos from Wyatt's first year in a photo album - and maybe I'll get a start on his second year.
. . . starting a project for Baby Girl's room to organize the headbands I plan to buy and/or make her.
. . . thinking it might be a good day to try to watch our childbirth video with Derek as a review.
. . . forming my Black Friday game plan. Which includes buying a new vacuum since ours broke.
. . . thinking it's pretty cool that our church does a Thanksgiving Day service, and wondering if we can go tomorrow if we strategize.
. . . planning for the weekend, when we get out our Christmas decorations.
And this day before Thanksgiving I'm thinking how thankful I am that . . .
. . . sweet potatoes and eggs exist, and we are blessed to be able to afford them.
. . . I have a wonderful husband to swat away from the food.
. . . we have a roof over our heads (and over our messiness).
. . . we've been blessed with our precious son for almost two years now, and for all the memories in the photos.
. . . I have a Baby Girl to buy headbands for, and decorate a nursery for, and dream about.
. . . this pregnancy has been so healthy and uneventful so far, and that my family is healthy.
. . . my vacuum broke right before Black Friday. Could I ask for better timing? I think not!
. . . we live in a country where we are free to gather and worship God as we please.
. . . the reason we decorate for Christmas in the first place is because we're celebrating the fact that God became a baby, Who grew into a man, Who died on the cross to pay for our sins, and Who rose to life again. Who is coming again someday.
Today I'm reminded of everything I've been given, and I thank God for it. And I thank Him for who He is. Because He is good.
So I officially finished the crib bedding for baby girl! Eventually I will post pictures of the nursery so you can see it all together, but for today I'll show you all the quilt.
The finished product! It was really hard to take that second picture by the way - I had to stand on a chair and hold the camera above my head. I need to be taller I guess!
I had no idea what colors I wanted gong into the fabric store - whether I wanted to be traditional or go for an unexpected color scheme. But in the end I put all these fabrics together and loved it, so muted pinks, purples, gold, and white it was. I think it was a good way to go in the end, because with all the different shades of pink and purple, I haven't had too much trouble finding crib sheets and decor items to go with the color scheme!
I got the idea for the pattern for the quilt from a design by Hillary Lang in this book:
It was a pretty simple patten to follow - basically you start out with a base piece, cut out a bunch of squares, arrange them on the base piece, then pin them into place and sew with an appliqué stitch around all the edges. I changed it up a little bit from what the book suggested and added the borders around the edges, with the pieces overlapping onto the border.
One of the out-takes from my attempt at getting a picture of the whole quilt, but you can see the edge better in this one.
One thing I might do differently if I were to do this quilt again would be to place the pieces one at a time and sew them down before adding more squares on top. The advantage to doing it that way would be that the pieces would all lay flat - it was hard to keep all the pieces exactly in place while I was sewing, since I don't have a quilting table, so some of them ended up a little puckered.
The disadvantage to doing it that way though would be that you can't really get a full picture of the placement before you start sewing, which is why they probably suggest to arrange all the pieces from the start. And I'm happy with the way it turned out, puckers and all - it may not be perfect, but a lot of love went into it, and that's the whole point of making my baby girl a quilt myself.
When I make baby quilts I like to pick simple designs with large squares - I'm not a die-hard quilter, not yet anyway, and I need something that I can start and finish rather quickly. This quilt probably took me probably 10-15 hours all together maybe? Including cutting the pieces. I don't think that's bad for a quilt.
I did not, in fact, do the actual quilting part myself - once I had it pieced together I took the back, front, and batting over to my old neighbor, Debbie, who has a professional quilting business and a big, fancy machine to do it with, so she did that part. If I didn't have Debbie to do the fancy quilting for me, I'd probably just tack it down in several places or do simple lines instead.
I love the meander that Debbie picked by the way - see the little hearts in the stitching? It's perfect!
When I got it back I did the biding around the edges by just rolling a bit of the backing around the the front, then pinning it and sewing in place.
And that's it! I also made a crib skirt to go with it, and I'll show you all of it together once we have Mr. Wyatt transferred over to his toddler bed and I get the crib set up!
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