Chispas

I always loved the Spanish word "chispas."  It's a lot of fun to say:  "Cheese-puhs!"  It means "sparks" (like little electric sparks).  I finished up the large boarder quilting today and it has little chispas in it.  The design is Electric Storm.  It's a really fun design for a boy quilt.

I also finished up the last of the blocks.  This center-focused design is called GrandDaddy Longlegs, and it's great practice for back stitching.  I really liked this one a lot.

Reminiscing

My dad has been circulating some fun, old pictures of his family lately.  Here are a couple:

This is my Grandpa Stuetz (on the far left) hanging out on the beach with Shirley Temple.  My sisters and I watched just about every movie of hers growing up, so we particularly love this picture. 

This is a picture of my dad and Aunt Sherry in 1957.  We've been commenting on my father's lovely attire.  :) 

FMQing Along

Since I have a baby quilt ready to quilt with the baby not coming until November I thought I would take my time with the quilting and really have some fun with a lot of different designs.  There are 6 blocks, so I chose 3 center-oriented designs and making them each twice.  I've been doing one design a day and it's helped me feel like I'm making progress without being too unrealistic about having a whole day to quilt.

Yesterday was the Sea Oat Flower:

Today was the Sea Weed Flower:

The one thing with center-focused designs that I've found is that it requires quite a bit of travel stitching.  It had been a while since I quilted a design with so much travel stitching.  The first block was a bit rough, but after just one day of working on it I already feel like it's a lot easier to work with.  I have one more design to quilt tomorrow and then it's on to the borders. 

Inverted Quilting

Since these Skill Builder blocks are an inversion of each other I decided to invert the location of the quilting as well.

Block #1 has Bubble Path in the center and Trailing Spirals on the ends.  It was my first time stitching both of these designs.  I'm not a huge fan of how skinny my stems on the spirals turned out, but I was concerned about not having enough room.  I think I'd prefer this design where I had a bit more width to work with.

Block #2 is Pebbles in a Stream.  I really enjoyed doing this particular design and it fit well into the space I was working with.

A closer look...

Boy Scraps

It seems like everyone's having a boy these days.  Another friend is having a boy in November.  Normally I wouldn't be getting around to making them a quilt until at least October, but since all of my baby boy fabrics are already pulled out it felt like the natural thing to start next.  In fact, I was able to make these blocks entirely out of my scraps.  Wahoo!

Churn Dashing

July do. Good Stitches....check!

A good tutorial for these guys is found here.

Using Scraps & Loving It!

What is it about using scraps that makes us feel so good?  I don't know about you, but it makes me feel like I've been so resourceful and that my scrap bin is truly worth the space.  I love scrappy blocks and this one was no exception.  It took me forever to get it all pieced together, but it's definitely my favorite block of the Skill Builder series so far:  Broken Arrow

Love & Logic

source

Our book club read Parenting with Love and Logic for the month of June.  Here's the little blurb about the book:

"This parenting book shows you how to raise self-confident, motivated children who are ready for the real world. Learn how to parent effectively while teaching your children responsibility and growing their character.

Establish healthy control through easy-to-implement steps without anger, threats, nagging, or power struggles.

Indexed for easy reference."

Of all the parenting books I've read this one probably falls closest to my parenting philosophy. I really loved this book and it gave me pause and really made me think about how I approach communicating with and disciplining my children.  The one thing I have to say though is that it takes quite a bit of effort and it takes some serious personal discipline to always respond to your children without any charged emotion.  I also think there are instances that I don't know that I agree that just natural consequences are enough.  One thing that I really loved though was learning to listen more and give options instead of unwittingly forcing my will on my children.  I value them learning how to make good decisions; it's just hard to always put it in practice.  I've noticed when I am more consistent in being calm and giving my son options that his melt downs are less frequent, so the book definitely has practical use.