Sick!

Ugh.  I spent yesterday sick, with congestion, a sore throat, and a generalized all over ache.  I did not get a single blessed thing done except repairing one of our umbrellas, hand-stitching the canopy back on where it had come away from three of the spokes.  Fortunately Wonderful Husband was able to deal with meeting the boys' buses.

Better today. I hope.

Guild!

Yesterday, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I was sitting at my desk and heard a CRACK.  I looked out the window in time to see half of a tree fall on the other side of the road:

You can see the remaining half of the tree on the right, with the break point in the upper right corner of the picture.  This happened directly opposite our driveway.  I'm guessing the tree had been dead a while; there were no green branches on the part that toppled.  There was no wind and no rain at the time, so I've no idea what made the tree decide it was just too much and time to give up now.  I went out a bit later with the push broom and cleared it all off the road.

And!  I finally got to go to a quilt guild meeting again!  So I'm now a member of the Quilters by the Bay as well as the West Sound Quilters, the Orange County Quilters Guild, and the Orange Grove Quilters Guild. ^_^

The meeting last night was a "Four Corners" meeting, which turns out to be four mini workshops, one in each corner of the meeting room.  So I got a refresher on spinning four-patch seams, as well as a quick tutorial on how to machine piece Y-seams; an introduction to designing pictoral quilt blocks; a refresher on Danish fabric stars; and a lesson on how to make an origami bag.  If I teach at Costume College next year, that last one may just be a class I can offer.  (I still need to work out if I can go this year.)

The guild members liked my rag quilts (I got a couple questions on them) and they definitely liked the minis I made from the scraps I took from the November meeting.  Next month will be making more string-pieced blocks for charity quilts, and in April there's going to be a field trip to Warm And Natural that I'd rather like to go on....

Busy Day!

Wednesdays are my busy days.  The boys' school starts an hour late on Wednesdays, which they like because it means they get to sleep in (and Jazzy did NOT kick up a fuss about getting on the bus this morning, hooray!), but which means I have to hustle and bustle and run about to get laundry-dishes-grocery shopping done and be back at the stop in time to meet Jazzy's bus!

So, a slightly late post today.

Tonight is the Quilters by the Bay meeting over in University Place.  I have my money and I'm ready to join!  I have two minis and two rag quilts for sew'n'tell.

I had hoped to be quilting by now, but before I switch over to that task, I want to oil my machine as well giving it a good cleaning, and instead of sewing machine oil, Amazon sent me nebulizer tubing.  Sigh.  So back that went and theoretically my sewing machine oil is arriving on Friday.

Meantime, I pulled out the other two Christmas pillowcases to show you!

This one is Wonderful Husband's.  He sometimes makes hand-spiders and creeps his fingers up the boys' legs to tickle them.  A few months ago, Squiddle told him he wasn't allowed to do any more spiders until Christmas.  So he got "Christmas Spiders"!  The orange is a left over bit from Squiddle's pumpkin costume for Halloween a couple years ago.

Jazzy, meantime... well, I found the blue pirate fabric at Savers, down in Fountain Valley, California, months ago, and knew it had to be a little boy pillowcase.  The striped fabric was in my plastic shoebox of bright fabrics.

A Quick(?) Quilt

I needed another project like I needed a hole in my head.

Nonetheless, while digging through a box of strips the other day, I found twelve 8.5" Disappearing Four-Patch blocks done in muslin and two different greens.  They're definitely blocks I made, but I can't remember what for.  Block Lotto (RIP)?  Guild Block of the Month?  And why didn't I turn them in, if so?  So, call them probably four or five years old at this point.

As I was tidying things up to put away, my eye kept resting on them.  And the stack of green fabrics I'd pulled out to audition for Evergreen blocks.  And the stack of fabrics from the thrift store.  Finally I caved and did a quick layout to see what I thought:

Sometimes your creativity is limited by what you have on hand.  I knew I didn't have any more greens available without extensive digging.  And while my first thought was a one inch border of the lighter green, I didn't have enough of that either.

Next came cutting alternate squares and setting triangles:

My go-to tutorial for figuring out setting triangles, BTW, is Bonnie Hunter's On Point Quilts.  Always round up just a smidge if you end up with numbers with an eighth measurement in them.  Better safe than sorry!

Since there wasn't quite enough of the lighter green for a border stripe, I cut it narrower (1" instead of 1.5"), pressed it in half, and used it as a flange for just a pop of color:

The finished quilt top is 40" x 51".  A little large for a true baby quilt, but I like to give toddler sized quilts as baby gifts anyway.  Babies grow.  And this is a size that my six-year-old (who is like 90th percentile, size-wise) would still use.  So there will be much more use gotten out of something like this than something merely crib sized.

I was kind of tempted to name this one something like Emerald City, but I think I'll go with Cloverleaf.  Not quite what the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is intended for, but given that it used up a fair bit of green fabric, I'll count it for the month?

Monday, Monday

Ugh.  Wonderful Husband stayed up a little late last night playing Minecraft, so getting the boys up and dressed and fed and to the bus this morning lay entirely on me.  Which actually went mostly okay!  Except for the part where, when his bus arrived, Jazzy threw an absolute fit and didn't want to go on it.  Which is a first.  Ah well.  Between the bus driver and myself, we got him boarded and buckled.

Happier things!  Yesterday we went to Sehmel Homestead Park for a bit, and left when it started raining.  But not before we got a rainbow out of it!

And I've got all the bits and bobs I need cut, so fabric goes back into the garage now.  But since I found some 3.5" muslin strips, I wrote out labels for both the boys' flannel rag quilts, which I need to sew on.  Here's the one I haven't posted here yet, Squiddle's, which I made back in November:

The Inanity of Me

So in kitting up the Evergreen blocks for Friday, I maaaaaay have miscalculated.  4.5" + 5(1.5") does not equal 9"!  So one of the strips of green I had chosen, I ran out, two 1.5" squares shy!  There was no more of that particular green in the box of 1.5".  Nor the 2", 2.5", or 3.5" boxes.  So in desperation, I dug through the boxes in garage, looking for my 1.5" squares project bags.  I located the bag!  Success!

...Except there was only one more square in the bag.

But wait!  There were also seven Idaho Square Dance blocks (which, hey, Bonnie Hunter blogged about yesterday).  And one of them had the green square I needed on the outside.

Saved!

So now I just need to sew one replacement green square back onto that block.  And it's just as well I found those blocks anyway, since I like the Idaho Square Dance blocks for baby quilts and one of my cousins is expecting a baby girl in March.  (Said cousin is, wow, twelve years younger than me.  Not that I have any close-age cousins; after me and my sister, the next relly in my generation is eight years my junior.  Which is part of why I wanted my boys to live closer to at least one of their aunts and her daughter.  I'm pretty much strangers with all four of the cousins and the three spouses among them on my dad's side, and I'd like my children to have more family than just each other someday when I'm gone.)

So as I'm putting things back in the garage, these get to stay out:

Even if I'm not close to my cousin, I want to make her baby a quilt.

AND I finally got around to sewing on replacements of the seven buttons Jazzy popped off one of the duvet covers last summer.  He just tucked his feet inside, looked me dead in the eye, slid down off the edge of the bed and they went flying!  As most of them were ripped right out of the fabric, there were holes, so I had to sew two buttons on, one on the front and one on the back.

Kitting Up and Thrift Store Haul

I've decided to biggify the Tiny Tree block into a proper wallhanging, so a some of yesterday was spend picking out and cutting up green and brown fabrics from my bin of 1.5" strips.  And this morning I started cutting up the background fabric I'll also need for the seventeen Evergreen blocks.  Wonderful Husband successfully argued that the top center block should be a star, so I'll need to figure that out.  But, basically, I have a sewing date planned with Kathy from the West Sound Quilt Guild this Friday, so I'm kitting this up to take with.

Which means that I should probably reconfigure my machine setup and get to work quilting the Disney Star quilt between now and then.  Sigh.

Whilst I was running to Joann's up in Port Orchard earlier this week, I also popped into St. Vincent de Paul, since it's about a quarter mile away.  (So is Goodwill, but in another direction.)  And St. Vinnie's isn't usually a great place to score quilting stuff, but every once in a while a quilter or their family clearly donates a lot.  And since the price for fabric is a dollar a yard, I ended up with this lot:

The fourth fabric down I want to use as background for a Valentine's day wallhanging, and the fifth fabric will be backing for this tree wallhanging.  (The sixth fabric, I actually cut and used a little bit in the Tiny Tree block itself.)

I also got four books and two magazines:

Tiny Tree

Well, I got two scenes edited yesterday (shifting PoV helped) but I need to go over them again and decide if there should be something in between or not.  And I went to Squiddle's award ceremony at school, where about 8-12 students per grade were named Responsible Students.  He didn't know I was there until after the assembly was done.  And!  He read me Green Eggs and Ham all by himself last night, needing help with only a couple words. *proud parent moment*

I also finished the Tiny Tree block last night:

I like how the background fabric I chose looks like falling snow.  Even if I did have to recut the side triangles because the original size was just too small.  And something about the blocks in the tree reminds me a little bit of the It's A Small World ride at Disneyland.

I'm debating, though... do I want to quilt it up as it is, or do I want to make some of Annette Plog's Evergreen blocks to go around it and make it more of a wall hanging and less of a mini?

A Tiny Tree

Me: *gets halfway through basting the Disney Star quilt*
Me: *runs out of basting spray*
Me: I could run to JoAnn's and get more.  I might not be back in time to meet Jazzy's bus.
Wonderful Husband: *has a meeting when the bus is supposed to arrive*
Me: Right. I will take the car, meet the bus when it arrives, and take Jazzy with me to JoAnn's.  Which leaves me an hour to kill.
Me: *dives into Temecula Quilt Company's Tiny Tree blocks*

I had only intended to finish blocks 4-6 yesterday, but with the extra hour (not enough time to really dig into novel editing) to play... well, by bedtime I'd finished them all!

The blocks are 2.75" right now.  I rearranged them some for color distribution purposes, but obviously the star has to stay at the top!  Now to dig out some larger bits of green for the side triangles (I was working from my bins of strips yesterday).

And I did get the Disney Star quilt basted, but forgot to take a picture of it. :/

In about twenty minutes I'm off to the boys' school.  There's an assembly today and Squiddle (unknown to him) is getting a Responsible Student award.  So not sure how much sewing or editing I'll get done today.

Disney Star Quilt

So!  Jazzy rode the bus to and from school for the first time yesterday!  And as far as I could tell, from helping him get on the bus in the morning and off in the late morning, he enjoyed it. Hooray!

With the extra hour of time this gave me, I finally started in on editing Queen's Choice, which is the first novel I wrote, many moons ago.  Ten pages rewritten and smoothed out!  I also did another load of laundry because of another damp bed, got caught up on my stack of things-that-need-to-be-glued-back-together, made a sewing date for next week, cleaned up the workroom, and pulled out the next quilting project to check off the list.

This was intended to be Niecelet's Christmas or birthday present.  Well, both of those dates have now passed!  But the four strips were rolled up and at hand, so I might as well get on with it.

I found all of these fabrics at St. Vincent de Paul last year, as well as 4.25 yards of a Disney Villains fabric to be the backing.  I knew I needed to make something for Niecelet out of them.  I decided to use the Giant Vintage Star pattern. Even though it's relatively fast and easy, I'm not sure I'll be returning to it.  The seams are long and flip too easily, and mismeasurement (when you don't have a long enough ruler, which I do not) is all too easy.  My other niggling complaint about this quilt is that I have decided I don't actually like the Premium Muslin from JoAnn's that I used here.  It's a very smooth hand, yes, but it just doesn't feel right next to the quilting cottons.  *shrug* I have more, so I'll use it up.

Anyhow, I got that quilt top sewn together and pressed, and found the backing fabric in the garage in box #4 that I tried (because, really, why would I ever put it into the box of backings?  That would make sense, Past Me).  And I got the backing sewn together.  Next, to use a bit of floor space and get it all basted together.

Beds and Pillowcases

Yesterday was Niecelet's third birthday, which was a good way to fill up the afternoon for two little boys who didn't have school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Mummy, OTOH, got to fill up her morning and evening with four loads of laundry.  In part because Jazzy woke up half an hour before the alarm, very unhappy, because he had soaked himself and his bed.  So beds got remade as well, and I thought I'd show them to y'all.

This is Squiddle's bed.  It used to be mine, from when I was maybe 12 up until I got married.  When we were upgrading him to a big boy bed after moving here, he had the choice between converting his crib to a double bed, or using this bed.  He chose this one.  Currently it's actually got two quilts on it, both blue.  The upper Galaxy quilt is Jazzy's, but I wanted one with a flannel backing for warmth when I was changing Squiddle's bed last weekend after the vomiting incident, and this came to hand.

This is Jazzy's castle bed, which after two moves is showing a bit of structural damage, but it's sound enough to last until he gets upgraded to a big boy bed in a couple years.  The Dinosaur Crossings quilt on it is, I think, actually Squiddle's.  We live in a sea of shared quilts.

This is one of the pillows on Squiddle's bed, and is actually his Christmas pillowcase from this year, which I sewed up while in England.  I use the Roll It Up pattern and just insert a 1.5" width-of-fabric strip, pressed in half the long way, between the layers for a flange.  The alphabet fabric, chosen because Squiddle is learning to read and write this year, was actually printed slightly askew, so I had to twist and nudge it a bit to get it to line up. I think it turned out pretty nice.

Jazzy got a Christmas pillowcase too, but as his bed is still using toddler pillows, neither of these are it.  Though I did make them; two of the sets of these pillows are matched, where this particular set is only matched in that they're both "star" pillows.

Rag Quilt Progress

Well, I got the rag quilt sewn together and bound yesterday:

In hindsight, maybe I should have swapped around my choices for brights?  Because those two plaids touching diagonally in the center are a wee bit distracting.  But I suppose I would've had two plaids kissing each other like that no matter where I placed them.

The binding is another scrap of flannel, one that wasn't wide enough for me to cut any 8" squares out of, and the pale blue backing with yellow stars is (a) consistent throughout, and (b) something I've actually already backed a different quilt of Squiddle's with.  I got about half the clipping done yesterday, being careful to quit when it would've hurt my hand, and I'll try to get the rest done today.

I'm also currently considering Costume College.  I really would like to go again this year, but we're no longer living in California, and depending on when my parents move up here, there's the question of am I taking the boys with me to visit them again?  Am I staying with them and commuting, or entering the roommate lottery and paying for hotel as well as flights?  Plus, costumes.  I have two inside my head that I'd like to do, but who knows where the patterns and fabric are....  (Well, I know.  In boxes, in the garage, probably labelled.)  And I'd like to make Leia's costume from Rise of Skywalker, but that will have to wait until I have the movie and can freeze-frame and analyze.  None of the screencaps or costume images I can find online show it from the back, and I remember there was something interesting there.

Christmas 2.0 and a Rag Quilt

Wow.  It's almost 8am and yet no one under the height of 5' (or, for that matter, over the height of 6') is awake yet!  I have the house to myself!

Yesterday we went over to my sister's house for Christmas 2.0 (and her belated birthday).  I definitely need to practice more on making the family Swedish meatballs recipe.  They weren't inedible, but neither were they perfect.  A good time was had by all, and I think everybody was largely satisfied with their presents.  I got a Hang It Dang It for hanging wall quilts!

And!  I also managed some crafting yesterday.  I now have this stack of flannel squares quilted and ready to sew into a car quilt for Jazzy:

At one point while in California I took all my leftover bits of batting from quilt trimmings, etcetera, and cut them into 7" squares.  And even after making these two 5x7 layout quilts for the boys, I've still got a ton of them and a ton of flannel, so I'm thinking something bed-sized with the rest.

To make these rag quilts, I sandwich those batting squares between two 8" flannel squares, sew an X across them, and then sew them together with 1/2" seams, all the raw edges facing toward the front.  The raw edges then get clipped every 1/4"-3/8" up to the seam, and they fray and fuzz and curl up nicely in the washing and drying process.  For Squiddle's quilt I sewed all the way around the edge and ragged that too, but Jazzy doesn't seem to like the rag texture against his neck, so I'll likely sew a traditional binding around the edge of this quilt instead.

Anyway, on to sewing while the house is quiet!

And as soon as I type that, Squiddle is up. :)

A Pictureless Post

Ugh.  Yesterday was one of those days where nothing was going right.  The glasses place couldn't fix Squiddle's favorite pair of frames that broke. My phone case snapped. Apparently there was an issue with an Amazon order so the birthday and Christmas gifts didn't ship for our belated my-side-of-the-family party today.  By the time evening rolled around, I declared it was a hungry-people-get-to-forage-for-themselves-(small-ones-getting-help-from-their-parents-of-course) evening meal.

Bright spots: Jazzy is now confirmed to be going on the bus to and from school, starting on Tuesday.  His pickup and drop-off location is the same as Squiddle's, and his pickup time only six minutes earlier.  (Drop-off is about four hours earlier, because preschool has a really short day.)  And I found some canning jars at the thrift store, along with a couple skeins of cotton yarn for my mother, and a couple fat quarters of fabric that are making me want to participate in a sew-along.

And, it now officially being The Depths Of Winter, I've been looking at seed catalogs and perusing the future fruit tree offerings of online nurseries.  I'm considering a persimmon tree to complete the apple/apple/quince square.  And maybe a combo plum tree and a combo cherry tree along the part of the back fence that doesn't run afoul of the septic leach field.  (A combo apricot/nectarine/peach would be glorious as well, as would a pie cherry tree.)  The part of the fence near the leach field I have mentally tagged for blueberries, lingonberries, and grapes, which are theoretically all shallow-rooted enough that they shouldn't grow into the septic pipes.  Whenever we get a greenhouse, I'll add potted pomengranates and citrus to that list.

For seeds, well.  I've had cardboard laid down over part of where I want a bed around the back of the house, hopefully starting to smother the grass there.  And I want it to be a flower bed.  But given the rampant rabbits in the neighborhood, it will be a flower bed with a nice thick border of chives.  And I want to put some rhubarb and asparagus plants in it too, since they'll need at least three years to establish themselves before I can start to harvest.  And asparagus is a pretty backdrop anyway, once it gets past the edible spear shape.

For a fenced-off veggie garden (the beds of which will need mesh on the bottom too, because voles), I'm thinking small and basic this year, to be expanded in future years as needs grow.  Strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, carrots, radishes, parsnips, and maybe zucchini if I can trellis it.  Maybe greens to overwinter next year, if I finagle up some hoop houses.

I look wistfully at the roses in the catalogs, but unless I can fit any in that along-the-house bed, that may not be this year.  I'd love to replace the overgrown shrubs in the front with roses, lavender, and tea bushes, but I'm already in for a lot of work as it is.  And we're planning on staying here for years and years and years, so I've got time, right?

Runner Embroidery

Woohoo!  I've kept up with a daily post for a whole week now!  Which was not actually a New Year's resolution (that was to stop reading the news, because it only sent me into depressive cycles), but is still a good habit to keep up.

Here's the table runner I've started working on:

It's a WonderArt Creative Needlecrafts kit.  It did not come with the embroidery floss, and since dusty rose isn't really my color scheme, I pulled out a deep blue and a turquoise to embroider it in instead.  It's a poly/cotton fabric, and a really tight weave.

Here's as far as one working length of floss gets me.  The stamping is fairly light, so I have to have good light to work on it.

Snow and Scraps

We got another couple hours of snow yesterday afternoon, which left our lawn looking like this:

Sadly, it warmed up and rained overnight, so all the snow is gone again for a while.

Among other things, I pulled a couple of embroidery projects out of the bin yesterday and got them started.  Well, sort of started.  Started on the stamped runner; the counted cross stitch project I'm still gridding, ugh.  But here's a finished project, Scraps I!

It is 9.5" x 10.875". The free-motion quilting in the black border isn't the smoothest, but then I hadn't done FMQ in a while, so *shrug*.  The gray fabric behind it is the remnant I used for backing both this and Scraps II.

The Quilt Guild Meeting That Wasn't

Last night I went to the West Sound Quilters guild meeting.  Or at least I tried to!  It's now at a new location, so I left a little early, padding on time for figuring out parking and what door to go in, etcetera.  Which unfortunately was useless, because when I got there, the facility staff informed me and about four other cars of quilters that the meeting was cancelled and they were about to close up for the night.  When I got home, I checked my e-mail (as did a couple of the other ladies in the parking lot, finding nothing).  The notification e-mail was buried in my Promotions folder, and didn't include the name of the guild or anything.  Le sigh.

On the other hand, we had a bit of snow yesterday!  Half an inch at most, and it's now all melting away and won't be back for at least a week.  Still, a bit of a nice treat.  Here's my apple trees:

And here's one of the finished miniature quilts I was going to show off at guild last night:

Very simple quilting, and the black I used for the binding is the same as in the triangles.  I have now used up every scrap of that remnant save for a long skinny bit I've tossed in my bag for eventual string piecing.  It's 12" by 13.5".  The label calls it Scraps II (Scraps I to be shown tomorrow) and both are made up of scraps from the November meeting of Quilters By The Bay, which was a string piecing workshop.  Their meeting is next week, and I hope that one won't be cancelled too, as I'd like to join as a member!  (And show off these minis.)

The Embroidery of Night With Moon

Jazzy up at 5:15 this morning, which is at least improving in the right direction.  And it snowed a bit yesterday!  Just enough to speckle our roof, but from turning on the porch light just now and looking out the window, it looks like a little more fell overnight.  Time for extra careful driving!  I have errands to run after I take Jazzy to school, and quilt guild tonight.  For which I am trying to finish up the second of two mini quilts for show'n'tell.

But for blog show'n'tell, here's the project I mentioned yesterday, in which I ran out of brown with like one inch of straight stitching left: Bucilla 40743, Celestial Picture/Pillow!

This was another thrift store find, for $2 at 90% complete.  Which is frankly an insult to the amount of work someone put into this!  I still had a fair amount of topstitching to add to it, as well as that little moon on the bottom left, but there's a reason I put the "Unknown" stitcher before myself when I signed and dated it.  Next steps are to soak it with some mild detergent to get the oil of fingers off, then take it to be mounted, matted, and framed.  I'm thinking it might go in one of the boys' bedrooms?  I need to start putting art up on our walls.   We never had much up at Greenwood, but this is a much bigger house, and I feel the need to display tasteful geekery.

Pink Pinwheels

Up at 4am again.  Thank you, Jazzy.  But he took a long nap after burning his fingertips on the stove yesterday, and kept dozing off yesterday evening so I guess it's not a surprise that he's awake again now.

Ever since I was pregnant with Squiddle and thus spending a reasonably high amount of free time in doctors' offices, I've had a take-along hand embroidery project.  Actually a couple!  They're for whenever I'm in a waiting room (on the theory that as soon as I pull out something to do, someone will appear to interrupt that by taking me back into the office) or when I'm sitting and listening in a quilt guild meeting, needing something mindless to do with my hands.

My latest stamped embroidery project has been this:

It's from a Jack Dempsey Needle Art kit, and I probably picked it up at a thrift story or garage/estate sale or a quilt guild fundraiser, because while the kit was supposed to have six blocks, by the time it came to me it only had four.  They finish at 18" square, and have blue dotted lines where you're supposed to quilt, which will theoretically soak out afterwards.

And I just finished the last one yesterday!  I ran out of the pink with half of one "petal" left to go, so I had to buy a whole 'nother skein just for that.  Still, less annoying than the time I had to buy another skein with literally less than two inches of straight stitch left (more on that project tomorrow).  And after I got the extra pink embroidery floss, it took me less than ten minutes to finish the project.

I know I want to do a 2x2 setting for these blocks, on point, which will give me a ~50" square.  Add a border or two onto that and it'll be a decent-sized throw quilt.  I just have to find the right fabrics to go with the embroidery.  Ugh!  I'm trying not to buy fabric because I'm drowning in it, but I have the feeling that for this, I may have to.

And now I get to pick out a new take-along project from my stash of 'em!  Pillowcase, or table runner...?

Pitch Black and Raining

Ugh. Up at 4:45 with Jazzy this morning!  After getting up twice during the night because Squiddle has got whatever bug Wonderful Husband also developed yesterday.  Poor kid hasn't thrown up since he was an infant, so it was an unpleasant night for him.  Plus he'd had some black grapes as part of his dinner, so his vomit was dark pink, and I had to try and scrub it out of the gray carpet with some 409 and paper towels.  His bedding got tossed in the wash, and I'm hoping we did so promptly enough that the stains will come out.

On a slightly more pleasant note, I've finished two books so far this year!  The first was Tricks For Free, by Seanan McGuire, because somehow I'd read number nine of the InCryptid series before this one, which was number eight.  Now I've got some of the backstory that I was missing filled in.  Though Antimony is not my favorite member of the Price family to read; too much of a chip on her shoulder.  The other book (okay, manga, but it's just so beautiful!) I've finished was A Bride's Story, volume 11, by Kaoru Mori.  I wasn't really expecting to learn about colloidal photography, but it was an interesting diversion.  Overall, though, the story was kind of slow, so I'm looking forward to the next one.  Which just came out in Japan a month ago, so I guess I'll be waiting a while for the English version to arrive....

2020 Reappearance

A month later, I reappear!

Wonderful Husband and I took the boys to England for nearly four weeks over the holidays.  We spent the bulk of that time with his family in Southampton, but also hied up to Cambridge for a week over New Year's to visit our very dear friends Sergei and Morag and see/stay in the new third story of their house.  While we missed one of our traditional Christmas visit activities (riding on the Eastleigh miniature train), we did keep up with others (a post New Year's pantomime in Cambridge, this year Cinderella) and take a stab at making new ones (ten-pin bowling the day before leaving; I am horrible at bowling, and Wonderful Husband is awesome at it; nonetheless, a good time was had by all).  And I had the luxury of getting to see two movies in the theater while we were there: The Rise of Skywalker with Wonderful Husband and his father, and Frozen II with Squiddle and my mother-in-law.  Squiddle's first cinema experience!  I overall liked both films, but also have certain issues with each of them. *shrug*

And while we were in England, I got to give the Scrap Stars quilt to its intended recipients!  Despite my best efforts at obfuscation here on this blog, Sergei and Morag had guessed (or at least hoped) that it was for them, and it was!  Here's the finished object, with its matching pillowcases, displayed on my and Wonderful Husband's queen bed pre-departure (see the suitcase in the background):

And for the sake of the query: do you see dark circles first, or light stars?  Almost everyone's answer has been the circles, but I see the stars.  (And, huh, funnily enough to me now, one of the fifty-two dark fabrics in the quilt was from the first Frozen movie.  Sergei, Morag, a Where's Wally challenge for you: find the one square with a perfectly framed Elsa!)

Our return flight back out of Heathrow was delayed by two hours, but fortunately the airport has a children's play area, and equally fortunately my sister picked us up from the airport and drove us home.  It was raining relatively hard, and it had been a very long day.  Twenty-two hours, by the time we all tucked into bed!  And yet despite that, Jazzy woke at 4am this morning, so so did I, Squiddle wasn't abed much later, and Wonderful Husband got up around 5am.  I'm hoping we can beat the jetlag by Monday, since it's a school day!

Our lovely neighbor Marianne and her daughter Grace came over to feed our cat Sushi each day while we were gone, so he's healthy and wasn't too lonely, but unfortunately she's not as good at plants.  I think I can return all of them to health, but we'll see.  Good thing I gave them all a deep watering right before we left!