Christmas on my mind

After watching the Missouri Star Quilt Co tube tutorial, I had an itch to try my hand at making a few blocks. Thankfully, I had the sense to start off with one strip's worth, instead of an entire quilt! The bias edge is very strong on the white fabric.

Not directly Christmas fabrics, but definitely Christmas colors. I like how much work it looks to get all those slanted angles, but it was easy cuts with no trimming.

I think I'll go ahead and make an entire quilt! For no reason other than to avoid the real Christmas gifts I should be working on. ;)

Leah

Update On Me

I had a midwife visit last Wednesday, and it went very well. I really appreciate that they take all the time they need (1.5 hours this time) and are very friendly and patient with my deafness. I got to meet another midwife-in-training, and I hope she's able to come for the birth.

They gave us some paperwork. Foods that have protein, emergency list - if I should call the midwife NOW or within 24 hours. A consent paper and then a financial agreement. Everything is in order and we made the first payment of $500. I do need to work harder on adding dark leafy greens, but they're pretty happy with my water intake and protein consumption.

My blood pressure was 111/74, a number I'm happy with. The assistant actually took my blood pressure twice because I was laughing about something else during the first take, and that can raise the numbers a bit. I can't imagine that happening at a doctor's office - a retake or laughing. :P

We also got to hear the heartbeat. They weren't sure how they could make me "hear" it. I could hear the sounds of the doppler machine... but how could I tell what was what? Well, the assistant brilliantly thought of tapping my arm when the machine was actually catching the beats. It worked great! It's just a little under 150 beats per minute.

They also felt for my uterus bump. The assistant started below my belly button and was working her way down without finding it. So the midwife took over and found the baby nestled very low, as you can see in the above picture. Most of my belly is NOT baby! :P

I'm officially at 17 pounds lost, but it didn't raise any flags with the midwife. I'm doing my best to eat all she wants me to, there's been no puking, blood pressure is good, heartbeat is good. The baby diet... how come nobody ever told me about it? ;)

And as you can see from my arm, I had to go in for a blood draw. I think I'd rather go through labor than do that again! After talking with some friends, I realized my issues stem from when I was 5 years old. I had to get a blood draw and I only remember them pinning down my arm and inflicting pain on me. Now that I have a more adult perspective, I'm willing to bet my parents had the blood draw done because I had suddenly lost the hearing in my right ear, when before I was only deaf in the left ear. I basically woke up one morning and complained to my mom that everybody sounded like they were speaking Spanish. So you have a little girl who can talk, but no longer understand what everybody else is saying... how do you make her understand what's going on with the blood draw? Plus my mom was trying to juggle a 3 year old, 1 year old and was pregnant with my brother. Realizing the big picture helped, but I was really emotionally drained for the rest of the day.


In other news, Pops is in the hospital with pneumonia. They're going to try to take him off the ventilator tomorrow. And thankfully it doesn't look like his heart is complicating things.

But I realized that even if he does die... I have no regrets. I have the sentimentally dear things, the quilts made by my great-great-grandma and my great-grandma's sewing machine. He's got a quilt from me, he's gotten to meet and know my husband. He knows about the baby too - I'm glad I didn't wait to share the news.

He better pull through... he's got a great-grandchild to meet next year! :)

Leah

Celebrating

There's quite a few things to celebrate this week. Like, this is my 400th post! I didn't get my act together to have a giveaway though. Who cares, I can always celebrate my 461st post. ;)


I just had my 27th birthday. I was looking forward to it because the 12th of November also marked 12 weeks of being pregnant. Alas, the gas and food fickleness hasn't disappeared. I should wait until 13 weeks, when I'm actually out of my first trimester, eh?

I also celebrated my birthday by starting a new quilt. :D


I got lucky enough to snag a spot as one of Ann's mystery testers for the New Year's Eve Mystery. It's a really easy one! There's lots of HSTs, but thankfully it's a pre-sewing clue, not something you need to do on the actual mystery day.

The requirements are a focus fabric and 4 coordinating pieces. Since there's babies abound in my husband's family right now, I figured I better whip up a couple more crib sized quilts. :)


I also received a piece of rush mail from my parents - my birthday card with a generous check included. It's all going towards the midwife!! And then there was this picture of a totaled car enclosed.

I was thinking my dad had taken a picture of some car on his way to a job site or something... but no, it turns out the car was my brother Ben's. You'd think he would learn from his New Year's Day experience... but if you look at the last sentence of that post, I think we're going to have to go with "perhaps not." :P

I don't have the full story, but what I gather, he bought the car less than 24 hours before (I'm gonna guess he sold the Mustang), was going down some hill with a friend and obviously lost control. I wonder how that phone call to my parents went... "Everybody's ok. I kinda scraped up my new car."

I'm not worried - Ben text me on my birthday saying "happy bday!". That he got the right day tells me that he's ok. :) And if he applies himself, he can earn all the money he needs for a new car in a couple of months. And whatever the new car is, it'll be #6 for him. He goes through cars faster than I go through sewing machines! :)

Leah

Baby Update

On Halloween night, my husband's sister Sarah and her husband came over to pick up our old green couch. Which I was so grateful for! I didn't need to help carry the couch down the stairs, nor deal with getting it to Tucson to give to another one of Chris's sisters. (He has three!) Then Sarah and James gave us their news - Sarah's expecting a baby!

(Nope, not her baby, some cousin of her husband's or something.) Sarah is due May 20, 2010 - exactly one week before I am. May's gonna be a busy month! She's planning on finding out the gender of the baby, and lemme tell you, if it's a boy, there's going to be a ton of pressure on me to produce a girl! :)


Actually, I'm feeling more pressure about the cost of having a baby. *gulp!* I went to Amazon.com to see what kind of baby stuff is out there, and it was just so overwhelming. I promptly chickened out and went to Costco.com and found it a lot less cluttered.

They've got this car seat that's good from birth to 65 pounds. $200. And this would also mean having one dedicated car for the baby, instead of using two bases and just snapping in the seat in whichever vehicle we were taking. I can live with that, especially since we wouldn't have to buy 2 or 3 carseats over the child's lifetime.


I'm planning to skip out on a crib completely and go with a portable option. I just need to find out if I can collapse it, as it's 29.3" wide, and our doorway to the bedroom is 27.5". It'd be nice to be able to port it from the bedroom to living room or sewing room as needed.

It's $90 at Costco and apparently Sears and Target carry it too (for $100), so I'll swing by one of those places and figure out if I can collapse it. If not... the hunt begins again.


Lastly... I'd love to do cloth diapers. Tell me I'm insane. I don't have a washer, I do my laundry once a week at my in-law's house. I'm sure my mother-in-law wouldn't mind seeing me twice a week, so long as the baby is in tow. :)

And cloth diapering isn't exactly a cheap start up. The 6-pack All-In-One's from Costco are $90. Or $15 a diaper, which is reasonable for AIOs. I'm not so insane though, I only want medium and large cloth diapers. The first few months will be crazy, and I'm just going to take the pressure off of me and go with disposables until the baby can fit into medium cloth ones. Maybe I can get my sister to make me diapers, as she'll have access to my mom's sewing machine and serger.


I'm not really showing yet. Just getting a thicker waist. I've already had to ditch out a pair of jeans. They made a big gap in the back, but was pinching in the tummy.

I stand at 13 pounds lost and 3 inches gained on my waist. Most of my morning sickness is gone and I'm able to eat breakfast when I wake up.


I can't wait until I'm in the second trimester with more energy! I'm itching to get back to quilting, and it's crossed my mind to fund some of the baby stuff with the sale of quilts. Cuz you know, my luck at winning the lottery is really small... apparently you need to buy tickets? :P

Leah

Didn't win

I have no idea if I was even close or not, but I didn't win the challenge. It's ok though, I had about a dozen ladies congratulating me on the baby. Yes... I tried to sway things in my favor by saying on the description paper that the real challenge for the quilt ended up being able to finish it in time with morning sickness. Then I added my due date. :)

And oh yes! It was a challenge finishing it in time. I was THIS close to being done with the quilting... and I ran out of bobbin thread.

And I already used my "back up" bobbin, so I had to unthread the machine, wind up a bobbin for a mere gap and then finish it. Next was 2 hours of binding. I got it done in time... but not before dinner was made. Bad choice there, I ended up feeling rather light headed towards the end of the meeting. That prompted me to stash some carbs in my purse, in case it happens again.


Here's the quilt hanging with the rest. I think there was a total of 37 or 38 in the final submission.

The placement was pretty random by number, but somehow my quilt ended up next to a gal's quilt that popped even more than mine.


There's a total of 7 bobbins of thread in the quilting alone. The blue and green pebbles took 3 bobbins. I was kinda hoping if the design didn't cut it, all the quilting would. ;)

My original plan was to make water-like ripples in the blue and green sections, but I chickened out after a few inches of stitching. What my brain saw and what my fingers were doing were two completely different things! So I looked at some of my other completed quilts, and ended up getting inspiration from a wall hanging I did two years ago.

I'm planning to have the quilt hanging in the quilt show next February - I promised at least 2 people last February that I'd have something in the show for 2010! But it might be my last challenge or show quilt for a while, I'm expecting my hands to be very full after May. :)

Leah