Hungry Caterpillar Finish

I'm so excited about this quilt.  It's bright and cheery, and I love Hungry Caterpillar.  Both of my children recognized the caterpillar right away and started "reading" the book on the quilt.

I don't know what it is about baby quilts that always make me resort back to loopy line quilting, but I love how spread out you can make the design.  I added hearts and stars to the loopy lines this time around to give it a little more interest:

Now that Ben's quilt is done I'd say he can come at any time, but since I still have 10 weeks until my due date I think it would be better not to jump the gun quite so soon.  I suppose I should start actually getting the house cleaned up and ready for his arrival. 

Linkin' up to TGIFF and Link-a-Finish-Friday.  

WIPing it!

It's been a while since I've actually done a WIP post, because I haven't been all that organized with my sewing lately.  I thought this would be a good way for me to figure out what exactly is on my list of things to do and make sense of my current projects.

I finished up the quilting on my February Skill Builder Blocks last night.  This is Em Dash:

 It's a Zigzag Spiral in the dashes.  Here's a look at the back:

The block before was The Mood:

I still need to piece together my Skill Builder blocks for March.  However, I'm up to date on Do. Good Stitches.  I just finished the wonky stars a couple days ago:

Baby Ben quilt is layered and all ready to be quilted.  My goal is to try to get this quilt done by the end of the week:

Other projects
Sisters BOM- up to date
4x5 Modern Quilt Bee- I need to decide on a block and make 5 of them
Quiet Book - Ugh.  No progress.
Christmas quilt - nada nada limonada

Stats for the Week:
New projects - 0
Completed projects - 0
WIP- 6
Linking up to WIP Wednesday. 

Spiral Mess

I have a number of things that need to be quilted.  I finally got around to quilting one of my Skill Builder blocks from February.  I wanted to work on spirals, so I found the perfect design for it.  Leah refers to it as Spiral Mess, and I think it fits its name perfectly:

 View from the back:

 ps- I think Spirals are a ton of fun to quilt. 

Wonky Stars

This month's block for do.Good Stitches is the Wonky Star.  We had to make two 14" wonky blocks (one with a tan background and one with a gray background):

I love wonky stars, so these were a lot of fun to make.

Ides of March

It just occurred to me that March is already half way over and I haven't sewn a thing - so sad!  I started making a list of the things I'm supposed to get done in March and then I remembered I never finished the quilting on the Skill Builder blocks from February either.  Oops.  Looks like it's time to get sewing.  During nap time today I pieced together the 2 March Blocks for Sisters Modern BOM: School Girl's Puzzle. 

Dancing on 42nd Street

This past weekend I made my annual pilgrimage back to my hometown to see the high school musical that my best friend's mom (from high school) choreographs.  This year they performed 42nd Street.  It's an old-school musical (it won the Tony in 1980 and again in 2001 for the revival) that is about behind the scenes of the production of a Broadway musical.  It's full of chorus-line girls and all the typical Broadway characters like the arrogant producer, the famous but not all that talented diva, and the starry-eyed chorus girl from a small town.  It actually has a number of really well known songs.  Most people have heard of We're in the Money and The Lullaby of Broadway even if they don't know where the songs originally came from.

Source

I'm not as huge of a fan of old-school musicals, but I have to say that these kids did a killer job on the dancing.  I've never seen so much dancing in a high school musical before and it was almost all tap dancing.  Most of these kids had never had any dance exposure before, and tap dancing is one of the most difficult genres of dance to just randomly pick up, so Cathy did a phenomonal job with them.  I was seriously so impressed with their dancing.  Even the guys did a great job tap dancing. 

Just a funny little side note on how far removed from the high school scene I am:  The director and choreographer of my high school musicals were married, and during my senior year the choreographer was pregnant.  They had a little girl.  It was that little girl who, as a Junior in high school, was the lead in 42nd Street this weekend.  Time certainly flies by quickly.

Blocks Are In!

I got the last of my 5 blocks from the Winter Round of 4x5 Modern Quilt Bee in the mail yesterday!  They are all wonderful!  I now have 10 blocks in these colors (purple, turquoise, and gray with a black background), so I'm going to do one more round before I put together a quilt top.

Never a Dull Moment

It's been a crazy day at the Thompson residence.  I should have known it was going to be an eventful Monday when I got all the way through the grocery line before realizing I had forgotten my wallet.  I have to say that's a first for me, and I'm hoping there's not a second time. 

We were having someone over for dinner, so I was running around trying to get the house clean and all that jazz.  I had a meeting for church, and then I took a couple of minutes to finish up my Bookshelf Block (based on Elizabeth's tutorial here):

My do. Good Stitches quilting circle is making a quilt in conjunction with an effort to make a quilt for each of the families of the victims of the shooting in CT.  We are assigned to the family of the principal that was killed.  We thought it would be fitting to make a Bookshelf Quilt for the family since she was an educator.  I'm really excited to see this quilt come all together.

That part of the day was ok, but then this afternoon Little Man's aide came upstairs and said, "Um, I thought you might want to know there's water flooding your basement."  Say what?!!  It turns out our washer was leaking, and all the water was traveling down the heating vent that's right in front of the washer.  The water formed a T-shaped waterfall in our basement off the heating ducts.  Luckily, because of Brooke we caught it early.  We shut off the water and started moving things right away.  The loss was minimal, but the annoying part was that all of the hoses were still completely hooked up to the washer and the front door wasn't the leaking part, so it's got to be something underneath.  It's only 2 years old and is still under warranty, but they told us they can't come to look at it until March 7th!  I love that they say they come in cases of emergency, but even with a flooding home they can't make it out until March.  Sigh.  Looks like I'll be washing clothes at my friends' homes until then.  I'm so grateful though that it was my last load of laundry when it started leaking.  At least we have clean clothes for now.  I feel a little like white trash though, because we have stuff lining our front rooms to dry out, and we have tons of towels hanging in the backyard in freezing weather.  Good times.

Linkin' up to BOMs Away.