Christmas and Crafting

Seven quilts gifted at the greater family gathering on Christmas Eve.  (I made sure to say not to expect this every year.)  At least two of them have been slept under - Wonderful Husband actually napped under his Minecraft quilt, and Squiddle now has his rainbow quilt on the bed.  Jazzy was irked when he realized his dinosaur quilt is much too big for his toddler bed, but he decided that he wanted it on the sofa instead so he can cuddle under it when he's watching TV.  (Side note: Jazzy's speech is improving by leaps and bounds the last several weeks!  I actually literally physically cried with happiness a few days ago because he said "eight" and pronounced the "t" at the end, which he has never done before.)

I hosted Christmas Eve dinner this year, and pulled off the smorgasbord fairly well, I think.  My mother brought her potato salad and my sister brought the kottbullar.  And all three of the kids actually ate some things from the spread!  (Also, parts of the downstairs got a pretty good cleaning.)  One of the funniest parts of the evening was my sister giving Jazzy a drum set.  Backstory: when I was three, my grandparents gave me a drum set.  My mother never forgave them, and spent the next forty years swearing she was going to pay it forward on my children.  And did she?  No, she did not!  So my sister took it upon herself to fulfill that promise. ^_^  And I'm actually pleased about it - thus far, at least, the boys like it but in a less volumetric way than Niecelet was doing.

So, having done all that quilting leading up to Christmas, you think I'd be burnt out on it, wouldn't you?

No.

I went out into the garage this morning to find my bodkin to repair a few of the drawstring gift bags whose strings had been pulled through.  I also found a quilt top I'd been looking for, a round robin I did with the Orange County Quilt Guild a couple years ago.  I was thinking it might be a good baby quilt for my cousin's daughter, born in March.  (I know, I know.  But I lost a lot of mojo this year, like many other people.)  Except now that I look at it, it's so sewing-themed that I want to keep it for myself!  But I also found a purple mermaid-themed fat quarter, and realized I could use it to do a kind of reverse of Squiddle's rainbow quilt, and that would make a good baby quilt.  (Need to get more green, but I have enough of the other fabrics to whip it up.)  And I pulled in three projects-in-pieces.  One's a bundle of patriotic Friendship Stars I haven't looked at yet.  One's a Christmas wall hanging I'll blog about tomorrow.  And the third one looked like this:

It's 25 yellow churn dashes on black and white backgrounds, set on point and already pieced in rows with the setting triangles.  I have a vague memory of this - these were swap blocks.  Were they from Block Lotto, though, or the Orange Grove Quilt guild?  Or maaaaybe Orange County Quilt Guild - I never put my name in, but on the rare occasion someone else ran block party for me, they did.  But why did I get halfway on this and stop?  So I pressed all the creases out and seamed the rows together.

Not what you'd usually think of for a baby quilt, but given that babies rely on high contrast more than anything for their first few months, I think this would be good for an infant.  My friend Jamie from Orange County Quilt Guild was due to have her son late this month, and I think she might like this....