We had a really lovely time celebrating Emma’s birthday on Sunday. Her party isn’t until this weekend, so we spent the day as a family indulging her with a lot of fun activities. We had waffles with blueberries for breakfast, then went to Main Event for bowling, putt-putt and video games. We had a late lunch there before heading home for the afternoon. We had tacos for dinner, and rainbow sprinkle cake for dessert! She was so excited to be the birthday girl, and is very much looking forward to her party on Saturday.
Five years old! Wow.
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I seem to have lost my sewing motivation lately. I’ve been doing a bit here and there, but nothing like the pace I was maintaining throughout spring and early summer. I planned this, to an extent, but it’s still a weird feeling. I’m not sure I ever posted anything here about my finished Long Time Gone quilt top? You can follow that link to see it on Instagram. Since then, I’ve gotten it basted and quilted. I had several different thoughts on how to quilt it, but in the end I went back to my comfort zone and did a pretty simple grid of wavy lines. I do want to start pushing myself a bit more with my quilting, but decided that this wasn’t a quilt that I really wanted to take risks on after all the time and effort invested in the piecing. (Not to mention that the crazy scrappiness of the quilt seemed to cry out for simple quilting.) I’m happy with the result and hoping to get the binding on by the end of the weekend to bring it to an official finish!
Other than that, I’ve been pretty scattered in my sewing efforts. I’m working on-and-off on a baby quilt, just a few blocks at a time. I need to make a barn quilt block for August. I also decided to jump into another Jen Kingwell sew-along to make her Gypsy Wife pattern. After going scrappy with Long Time Gone, I’m using a more structured approach for Gypsy Wife. Fingers crossed it will turn out well.
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Every morning at work, all employees get an email about various happening around the space center, and there have been a lot of interesting creative class offerings lately at the rec center. (The rec center is primarily for Johnson Space Center employees, contractors, and their families — but that’s tens of thousands of people, so they actually are able to offer quite a bit of stuff.) In early July, on a whim, I signed up for a relief printing class! The instructor is local printmaker Amber Kaiser. It’s a 4-week class and we’ve already met twice, so I’m halfway done.
In the first class, we learned how to carve a block and got to play around with the tools. This past week we worked on printing technique and I made my first official prints! I sketched my image from a photo I took in July at Seattle Center of an art installation called Sonic Bloom by Dan Corson. I thought it turned out pretty darn well for a first try! The gold ink on burgundy background was actually the last of these three that I made and it’s definitely my least favorite, but it was still fun to try.
Your Long Time Gone quilt is beautiful! I like the color scheme – it looks fun and scrappy without being too crazy.