Indigo Mouse

Thanks to some super awesome napping on behalf of both kids this week, I actually completed my nursery embroidery project in one day. Well, actually, the embroidery was done during one day’s naps. The planning, frame buying, font choosing and other prep work took place intermittently over the course of a month. Sometimes it’s surprising how quickly a project can be completed once the planning part is done.

The project itself was to embroider James’ name and birth date on a piece of Heather Ross’ Far Far Away 3 fabric I had in the stash. It was just begging to be incorporated into the nursery. (Sorry about the crooked photo–when I tried straightening it just got fuzzy. I did have the foresight to photograph this before framing behind glass though, so yay for me.)

The writing on the fabric reads, “they were a merry band of brothers without a mother to mind them” and it features the dwarfs from Snow White, though for some reason there are only six pictured. I imagine the seventh one is relieving himself behind a tree or something.

Here’s a detail of the embroidery I did. Stem stitch is my weakest embroidery stitch, but I find myself using it a lot. Practice makes perfect, right?

The corners needed something, so I did some fern(?) stitch accents there. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out.

And here it is hanging in the nursery. The furniture in the nursery is a hodge-podge of oak, pine, and maple, so the decorative wooden frame fits right in I think. I found the frame at JoAnn’s on clearance for $9.99, including mat. How awesome is that?

And a wider shot of the “woodland themed” nursery.

This is about as thematic as I get. I’m just too practical to really go all matchy-matchy with home decor.

To not dwell entirely on the baby, I thought I’d include a photo of Alice’s big girl room. I just put the hexagon quilt on her bed a couple of weeks ago, and there was much delighted exploration of the different prints by Alice. She insisted on posing for the photos as well.

I think the white & rainbow color scheme goes nicely with the Wonky Town wall quilt and helps brighten the very deep blue wall color. She certainly likes it, which is what counts!

By the way, thank you all for your lovely kind congratulations on the baby. I apologize that I don’t have enough email time to respond to each comment, but I’m sure you understand!

Wow, exactly one month between posts. Didn’t exactly plan that, but I’m sure you know it’s because a lot has happened in that one month. James Elliot joined us on February 1st at 10 a.m., weighing in at 9 pounds 7 ounces and surprising the pants off all the medical professionals, who guessed he was “about 7 or 8 pounds” mere hours before his birth.

James was only a fashionable 9 days late, as opposed to Alice who was 13 days late and induced. I was able to realize my hope of not having to be induced this time, instead having about 20 hours of early labor before the 14 hours of active labor began. Yeah, so much for the theory that induction made my 21 hour labor with Alice longer. James’ comes in at something like 34 hours with that long early labor. We even experienced the cliche of going into the hospital too early, only to have labor stop and get sent home. Then we went back that night when we were pretty sure it was for real (and it was). I have to brag that that day after being sent home from the hospital I managed to fit in a trip to the fabric store. My addiction commitment to the craft runs that deep.

But enough of the labor talk. I really just want to share the project that Mom and I completed a couple days before James was born. It’s tradition now to do a nursery decoration project as we wait for the overdue babies. Alice’s was the dresden wall hanging (which I just looked for to link and apparently never blogged about), and for James we made a woodland mobile. I say “we”, but it was about 80% Mom. I mustered up enough energy to stitch up the mushroom and help her assemble it. She did the rest, and it’s fantastic. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the foresight to take photos of the embroidered critters lined up before we assembled it. This makes it basically impossible to get decent shots that show them all, since they’re designed to face all different directions. You’ll just have to trust me that they’re cute.

The animal patterns started out as being from Aimee Ray, but then we took some creative license that made up our own. I also made a little felt gnome from Aimee’s pattern, but the dimensionality was different than the critters with the cone shape, so we decided to just leave him off. Alice had already claimed him for her own anyway.

Now I’m working on one more embroidery project and the nursery will be complete. James doesn’t mind that it’s unfinished, since he sleeps in the bassinet in our room anyway. Alice has taken to napping in his crib. A little harmless regression I suppose. Whatever gets her to nap is ok by me. I’ll leave you with a cute sleeping photo of James taken about 1 week old and one I took today with eyes wide open. He started out with the murky gray-blue newborn eye color, but they look bluer and bluer each day.

He sure is a cutie, and healthy with a mellow temperament. We’re so glad he’s finally here on “the outside” (and I’m so glad to have the weight off!).

I would say that I am the last knitter on earth to knit the ubiquitous “Baby Surprise Jacket” by Elizabeth Zimmerman, but I know for a fact that my knitter friend, Alison, has not, since I sought out her advice when I got stuck at a certain part. I must admit that I found EZ’s terse, yet chatty directions to be a bit challenging for this project. Luckily, I found a great video series on You Tube to help me through the little speed bump, and everything progressed smoothly from there.

I knit this with Felici Sport in the “Too Cool” colorway (love that Felici!). I tend to prefer brown/warm neutrals to the recently popular grays for my quilting projects, but for garments I do like gray occasionally to mix things up a bit. This was super fast to knit–I was done in a week. I love how it turned out, and I’m thrilled that I got to use these awesome Basic Gray Glazed Buttons that I also got from Knit Picks last month.

I love that Knit Picks has started carrying cute buttons. These are from the Seaspray set, but I also got the Crimson set.

Five days before DD-Day, I’m tempted to say that this is my last FO for a while, but if I do that, I know I’ll jinx it and he’ll be two weeks late. My mom is coming up this weekend and we plan to work together to make him a woodland-themed-embroidered-wool-animal-gnome mobile, so there is that project yet to do. Aside from that though, I’ve been unmotivated to start any new sewing project. I kind of wander around the house with idle hands randomly putting baby things in order or just sit and do crossword puzzles or read. It’s really strange not to feel the strong urge to make anything.

Ten days until DD-Day (due date day)! Alice didn’t seem to be bothered much by her DD-Day, deciding to come a fashionable 2 weeks late, so we’ll see how her brother feels about punctuality! Last week I completed the fastest sewing project ever: curtains for the nursery. These are the first curtains I’ve ever sewn. Living with two cats, has made me hesitant to ever go the curtain route, but since the cats are middle-aged now, and these aren’t full-length flowey things, I thought I’d give it a try.

(On a side note: I never realize what a pain it is to take a decent photo of curtains. Gee, let’s point the camera directly at the window–the main light source. So I had to resort to using the camera’s flash.)

I’m uncertain if I should add tie-backs or something else to these. I kind of just stuck them up there, knowing nothing about curtains and being out of the home decor loop lately. What do you think? The curtains aren’t designed to be functional, since we obviously have blinds, so it’s really just an excuse to use this awesome fabric.

When I saw Patty Sloniger’s new Backyard Baby group from Michael Miller, I knew I had to do something with this fabric in particular–most of the other designs don’t really fit my woodland theme. I stalked the Hawthorne Threads web site until it came in. I LOVE birch trees, and the colors are perfect. In fact, they are so perfect that the green snail print (below) that I also ordered a bit of is the exact color of the nursery walls, making it somewhat useless for decorating with. It’s still cute though. This was Alice’s reaction upon opening the package of fabric:

“Very awesome! So cool! I love them! Wrap me up in the long one like a blanket, Mommy.”
I guess the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

Coincidentally, I finished up all my WIPs before the year end, and I didn’t start any new ones until the new year. How strange is that? This is what I finished:

A basic newborn hat for my little guy who is due in 20 days (how did that happen?!)…

Funny enough, I think this photo is life-sized. How often does that happen with 500 pixel images? I used Knit Picks Felici in the Botany colorway. I heart Felici–it’s so soft, yet surprisingly durable. These are my exact nursery colors–it’s a boy combo that has been “done” a lot, but it’s my favorite (for any gender, really).

Pooh Bear is modeling it for me here, but the bear of “very little brain” doesn’t fill out the top so well.

I also finished the quilting and binding on the snuggle quilt I made for the boy. I can actually show it to you now because our Wild Ones fabric collection that I used just came out.

Again with the green, blue and brown.

I wanted this quilt to be ultra-snuggly because I’ve noticed that those are the blankets we’ve used and loved the most with Alice. Cotton quilts are great for hanging on the wall or laying on the floor in the house (or at a picnic), but they aren’t always the most snuggly for napping or wrapping around baby. So to make this one soft and drapey, I skipped the batting and normal backing and just used a brown fleece blanket that I got at Walmart for $4 for the backing. I quilted with spaced out straight lines in the diagonals of the on-point blocks. I love that the quilting makes it look kind of like a string quilt.

As you can see, I used pre-packaged satin blanket binding. Man, that was a PitA, and expensive too, since I ran out with 10″ to go, so I had to buy two $8 packages. The funny thing is my experienced coworkers warned me against the satin binding, but I had to try it anyway. The whole time I was putting it on, I was thinking of the episode of The I.T. Crowd “Jen the Fredo” where Jen wants to apply for the job of “Entertainments Manager” and everyone keeps telling her “It’s not for you, Jen. It’s just not for you.” And poor Jen just has to learn the hard way. Ultimately, I wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad I did because I think the baby will love the feel of it, and he won’t care about my horrible corners or uneven stitches.

Artemis agrees that the quilt is definitely snuggly, and at 40×50, it’s a great size too.

And for the girlier things in life: my final FO of the year was a test for work of the Hello Cupcake February block pattern using our Just Desserts collection.

I did this little 12-1/2″ quilt because someone had to, but it turns out that Alice loves it. She’s going through a tea party/sweets/cupcake phase right now. I think I’ll either hang it in her room, or do what my mom suggested and make it a special “birthday girl” placemat for her upcoming February birthday.