Babies & mojo

Please welcome Mark Jerome Goodale, born yesterday afternoon to his parents Melissa & Grant. From the very tired-sounding message we got last night from Grant, both baby and mom are happy & healthy and doing very well. Congratulations! I couldn't be happier for them. They are going to be great parents.

On a completely different topic, I have been feeling like I've lost my crafty mojo. This happened to me in my last pregnancy, too, and I just felt uninspired and unmotivated to knit or crochet at all. So instead of sitting on my butt eating bonbons, I've decided to focus my craftiness on a different skill: I'm going to make Pumpkin a Hawaiian-style baby quilt. Hawaiian quilts are beautiful applique quilts that are designed like those snowflakes you made in grade school, by folding a piece of fabric 3 times and cutting a design out. The design is sewn to another piece of fabric and then the quilting is done in lines that repeat the design of the applique. I'm probably not explaining this well, so here is a photo:
I've made a Hawaiian-style quilt before, for my sister Teresa's wedding. It was for a queen-sized bed. It was my first quilt ever. After finishing it, I said I would never make another one again. Well, now it's been a few years, and I'm ready to try again, albeit with a baby-sized (42"x42") one. But this time, I think I'm going to try to do it all by hand. With Teresa's, I did it all by machine, and since I don't have a quilting machine, I just used my trusty Singer. All the turning was very difficult and I wasn't able to get the degree of precision that I wanted. Hand quilting will take longer, but hopefully, I have another 25-26 weeks to work on it. Hopefully, that will be enough time.

I've already cut out my design, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's based on pumpkins and vines, and now I just have to decide on a color scheme. Hawaiian quilts are traditionally done with a single color applique on a single color background, but I may want to break it a bit by piecing the pumpkins seperately in orange and the majority of the designs (the vines) in green on a white background. That's what I'm leaning to now. I'm actually really excited about this project. And now that I've posted about it here, I can't wuss out.