Blogger's Quilt Festival

Amy's Creative Side is hosting the Blogger's Quilt Festival and I thought it would be fun to participate. I've never done it before and it sounded interesting .... plus there are a bunch of cool prizes ;)

So my quilt entry is one I made for my oldest son, after he graduated homeschool and boot camp in the same year. I gave him this on Christmas morning.

It is twin sized, and It was made by making individual circles first, filling them with batting, quilting them with an "X" then sewing them together. (The dark blue was the back side and when it got sewn together that part was folded over to the front, making the design you see. Hope that makes sense.)

My daughter stayed up with me all night on Christmas Eve so we could finish this quilt in time for Christmas morning. We finished it at 5 am if I remember correctly. I will never do that again! :)

Creativity

I finally took time to do more sewing. I made this placemat (actually a couple of them, but this is the only one finished so far.) It was a Sew-Along project from Sew Mama Sew. I need to pick up some more handkerchiefs to use as napkins with these. I think they are a fun touch. There was a pattern for coordinating napkins, but I like the handkerchief idea better. I briefly considered putting a small pants pocket on the right hand side in which to put a handkerchief napkin and silverware, but decided it would take away from the design. Besides the placemat really isn't big enough for that.

Anyway, I think it came out pretty well. Eventually I'm going to make somewhere around a dozen of them, to use when we have company. I've been hoarding western fabrics for a long time, and this just seemed like the perfect project to use them on. I'm hoping to make some Christmas ones that look like peppermint candies, and maybe some Thanksgiving ones that look like turkeys - you know, just for fun... in my spare time :) Honestly I probably won't get to the turkeys this year, but it is on my "someday" list :)

There are so many great project ideas available on the internet. I find that if I don't keep them in a specific place I will completely forget about them. So I have a folder on my computer for projects I want to do "someday" (several sub-folders too) and a file for projects to make people for Christmas. The ones that I'm about to do get printed out and placed in a 3-ring binder. The ones that make it to the binder are the ones that are likely to get done. When I did the placemats I had my daughter help me figure out fabrics and placement. She's pretty good at that sort of thing and it makes it something we can do together.

So we took the page with the cutting layout on it, inserted it into the plastic cover of the binder, and she used a wet erase marker to take notes on which fabric she wanted where. I love this method. It keeps the page from getting lost or wrinkled, I can stand the notebook up so I can see the page easily, and the wet erase marker is a bonus. Looks kind of like Algebra, don't you think? I think she had more fun with this than with Algebra though... I hope so anyway :)

Oh, and before I forget again, when I listed all my things I've won, I forgot to mention a $25 gift certificate for printables from Clean Mama. They are pages for compiling a home management notebook. :)

Fun Mail :)

I've had a lot of fun going to the mailbox lately. Until a month or so ago I had never won anything from blog giveaways. Since then I've won several. Here are my latest...

This is a fat quarter bundle I won from Green Fairy Quilts. The fabric is Fiona's Fancy from Riley Blake.

Before it even arrived (in fact, the very day I found out I won it) my daughter laid claim to it. I try to make each of my kids a quilt when they graduate, so I owe her one, but she was never real clear on what she wanted. In fact she told me that she didn't love the quilted look, so I figured I would wait until she did (or until she had a place with a guest room). When she saw this, she loved it. She is planning on painting her bedroom green and brown, so these fabrics fit in perfectly, and the wild pattern is just her thing. She chose the Kaleidoscope pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew, which I wanted to make anyway :)

Then there's this little win. Okay, little isn't the word for it. This is 10 yards of Waverly Home Decorating Fabric... and I got to pick which fabrics I wanted from this line.

I didn't realize at the time that it wasn't quilting fabric or I probably just would have requested more yardage of just a couple of the fabrics, but it's all good!! This fabric sells at Joann's for $19.99 yard, making this prize worth about $200!

We all thought it was comical that this fabric arrived in a gigantic box :) As soon as we brought it in the door, my 2 year old yelled, "My boat!" His seven year old brother always makes large boxes into boats, cars, airplanes and such, and so it was funny that the two year old immediately laid claim to it :)

See how much too big this box was for the fabric?

Then there's this cute Hello Kitty metal lunchbox. This is one of the things I bought with the Old Navy gift card I won from Renee's site. The rest of what I got was all baby clothes I found on the clearance racks. I put this box on the shelf I have hanging by my bathroom sink for now. (If you look to the left you can see in the mirror what the side looks like.) It is destined for my sewing room when our other house gets here. In case you're new to the blog, we are in the process of moving our doublewide trailer from North Carolina to Wyoming. We'll see if it makes it. If it does, I get a sewing room - finally! and my daughter gets a paintable bedroom she doesn't have to share with her little brothers :) It is supposed to be on the road next week :)

Punkin' Pickin'

Friday we went on a homeschool field trip with our county homeschool group. We drove about 3 hours to go to the nearest local pumpkin patch - in Riverton. In Wyoming, everything is very spread out - and we had to drive around a mountain range too.

Pumpkins take about 88 frost free days in a row in order to grow. We're doing good to get half that many here. Literally. We are above 7,200 feet elevation too, so that makes a big difference. Anyway, we made the drive, and took a daycare kid with us. We had a blast :)

My daughter was obsessed with finding the perfect, round pumpkin. She picked a really nice one, but then we decided we had too many so we didn't get it as it was one of the bigger ones and would have been more expensive. After we found out how little we had spent I wished we would have gotten this one too. But then, what good are they really? By the way, this patch had millions of pumpkins. See behind her? That was maybe one-sixth of the field.

They had these oddly shaped flat red pumpkins too. We got one of them because they were so strange. They also had gourds and squash of all varieties. We brought home an acorn squash and a butternut squash to cook, along with several gourds. They had Indian corn too, but we decided against getting any of that.

Of course each kid had to pick their very own pumpkin. And since we had gone such a long way to get one, I told the seven year old he could pick any one he wanted.

He picked one that was so heavy he had to roll it to the cart.

His two year old brother tried to follow suit. :)

It was a bit of a challenge to navigate the pumpkin patch with all the little ones. We had our two year old (who is almost three) and one of our daycare kids who is one (almost two) in the pumpkin cart on the way out.

Of course they got to get out and pick their very own pumpkins too. These are more their size!

But they spent a lot of time looking :) We weren't moving very fast at all... and that was perfectly fine with me. I figured if we were going to go all that way to get pumpkins, we would take our time and enjoy it :)

After we filled our cart with pumpkins, our two year old was pretty upset. He thought that was his wagon, and tried to throw the pumpkins and gourds out of it. Aah, two year olds :) Anyway, we finally convinced him it was okay, and he got to ride on the top of the stroller we had the baby seat in. (You're really not supposed to put a kid there, but we were pretty desperate by this point.)

See our cart full? All that, and everyone through the corn maze only cost us $22! We got the school discount rate by going with the homeschool group - otherwise just our three big pumpkins would have been $18.

We all got stamps on our hands to go through the corn maze. I'm not really sure why. There wasn't anyone there to check them. But it was a highlight for the seven year old.

The corn maze was... well, an adventure. I had never been in one, and it probably would have been very relaxing and enjoyable if we had known our stroller would have made it through there fine. We'll have to remember that for next year.

The baby wasn't a problem. He rode in my baby carrier the whole time and seemed to enjoy it. I finally figured out he could face outward (which he loves) as well as toward me (which he hates), so things worked out well.

This little man was our problem. Our two year old didn't want to cooperate at all. He didn't want to walk. He wanted to swing cornstalks around and pick up ears of corn.

And try to eat them...

This is how he went through pretty much the whole maze. My daughter carried all 35 pounds of him. Oh, and note the heavy jacket. It was much warmer there than we expected. She roasted. The one year old daycare kid (in the foreground) was wonderful. He walked the entire way - running most of it - and never complained. He was so good the entire time.

Before we finished, the two year old was very tired. So was my daughter :) Not sure why he was tired though, since he was carried the whole time ;)

You should have heard the cheers when our group finally located the exit!! It ONLY took us 1.5 hours! Yes an entire hour and a half wandering around a cornfield that couldn't have been bigger than two acres! Wow. It was very well done. But we did have a lot of fun :)

After the big walk, I got the kids together for a picture. We had planned to do this and had outfits picked out for everyone. But we should have done the pictures before we went through the maze. We didn't bother changing the seven year old, and the two year old refused to take his jacket off. Oh well.

About the time we finished with the corn maze there were buses pulling in. I think there ended up being six or seven of them (not all in the picture).

Yikes. It was like a swarm of locusts.

We hurried up and finished our kid pictures.

The daycare kid wanted to be in some of them too :)

After all that, we did a little shopping at Walmart, then headed to Lander to the city park. This is the most awesome park I think I've ever been to.

It has this whole little town that has stairs up on the back side of it, and the kids can stand on the balcony of the hotel or cross a bridge to the slides.






It even has a couple of climbing walls.

There is a "tot lot" playground fenced separately for the littler kids, which has a railroad theme to it. See the horse on the fence?

That was a maze puzzle that the kids can put their fingers into and trace through the puzzle (there are channels - not just paint) and these are all around the playground area.

The fences are lined with these tiles - made with concrete, with etchings in them and then painted to look old and faded. They were all original and hand created.

There were several benches for parents to sit at, as well as this cool table that had a tile checkerboard on it. How fun is that? I want one of these for our backyard - ha.

Needless to say, the kids had an amazing time playing here.

These two - can you believe it - share the same birthday, but are a year apart. The one on the right is our two year old. The other is our daycare kid who is one. They played together so well!

Not sure whose kid this is on the left, but my two year old is in the tunnel.

It was a challenge to get the seven year old to hold still long enough to get a picture. He had a great time playing with all his friends.

The two year old was most interested in running and playing with sticks. Typical boy!

The trees were the perfect golden yellow, and the park was full of them. We enjoyed our lunch and a long time playing before deciding we HAD to load everyone back up for the long ride home.

It was a fun day! We also stopped at a ghost town on the way home, but I'll leave that for another post. This is far too long already!