u

AmandaJean from Crazy Mom Quilts decided to start a Quilt-A-Long, so I've decided to join. I've never done anything like this before, so I figured, why not? She's posting instructions to a different quilt block for 12 weeks. By the end I'm thinking that I should have enough to make a somewhat random lap sized quilt. Last night I went to JoAnn's to pick up some cheap additional fabric for the quilt. I want this quilt to be bright colors accenting a white background. Here's my rainbow selection. Maybe I went a little overboard...

Rainbow of colors

This morning I made my first block. It was relatively simple. So that's always nice.

Block #1

Under 200...

It's finally less than 200 days until my wedding! It seems like it is still forever away, but at least 199 sounds better than 200. :) I'm finding that I don't really enjoy wedding planning as much as I thought I would. I guess I didn't realize that it is a whole lot more than the big, white dress that I've been looking forward to wearings for... well, forever. I mean, you have to think about things like DJs and whether I want flowers between the layers of my cake or not. And let's be honest here, the amount of money that I'm paying for that cake is ridiculous, so of course I'm not exited about thinking of ways to make it even more expensive! Another thing that makes it difficult is that Shawn and I are equally unexcited about the wedding itself- we really just want to be married. We've decided to start praying for better attitudes towards the wedding. I mean, if you think about it, it's hard to be excited about something when all you think about is how much you have to do, how far away it is, and how ridiculous the price tag will be. So that's the new thing. We're going to be exited about this thing! :)

This past Friday I went bridesmaid dress shopping with my cousin who is my Matron of Honor. We had a good time. We found these great dresses.

Oh, the lampshade effect is so wonderful.

Looks like split pea soup in dress form.

Ok. So just kidding. After Thanksgiving we should have a real decision made. Maybe then I'll finally be able to answer the question "What are you colors?" after the 100th person asks!

Quilt DONE!

It is finished.

I've finally finished the "Earth Tones" quilt. Last weekend Shawn and I went to Chicago to visit his sister. My intention was to finish the binding in the 8 hours of driving we'd be doing that weekend. Too bad I didn't take into account the fact that it would get dark during our drive and I'd actually only had at most 3 hours to work on it. Oh well. Last night I finally finished it up and I'm happy to be done and ready to move onto my next project.

Oh yeah!

Also, Shawn and I had engagement pictures taken last weekend. Our proofs are online here. Enjoy! :)

And I also made a wedding countdown:


It seems so far...

Pumpkin Picking

This Saturday Shawn and I went to the pumpkin patch and picked some pumpkins. This was the first time that I'd ever picked my own pumpkins, so I was pretty excited and took some pictures. Shawn informed me that he felt silly taking pictures of pumpkin picking. Not all of us were lucky enough to have parents who grew pumpkins in their backyard growing up. Here's my first pumpkin. Isn't it cute?

The pumpkin patch we went to has so many cool pumpkins. There were the traditional orange ones, but they also had some "specialty types". We were both quite impressed by the all white pumpkin and the "bloodshot" pumpkin. The all white one was just that- all pure white. It was pretty amazing. I didn't know pumpkins came like that! The bloodshot pumpkins were mostly white, but they had what looked like orange veins on the surface. It made it look like a bloodshot eye! It was really neat! I wish I would have taken a picture of one of those ones, but check out the white ones in this one!
We took our pumpkins to my parents house that evening where we all carved them. That was pretty fun. However, as you can tell from the picture below, none of us are especially artistically inclined. And yes, my pumpkin is that crappy one on the left.

Quilting done!

I have successfully finished my first attempt at machine quilting. It was so quick and easy. Wonderful. Doing the zig zag pattern was kind of a lot of work, but I like the way it paid off.



I was successful at making no noticeable puckers either! So that's nice! However, I don't know if my sewing machine is really cut out to do machine quilting. Honestly, there are time that I wonder if it is cut out to do any sewing in general. Instead of puckers, it decided to "bird nest" (as the Singer site likes to call it) on the underside. It drives me nuts when it does this. It doesn't only happen while I'm quilting either. I think my machine is just really finicky and likes to decide when it is going to work properly and when it's not.

Now it's off to figuring out how to do a binding. On Evan's quilt I used the satin edging and just kind of "winged it" because I was in a hurry (I finished it the morning of the baby shower). Now it's time to sit down and actually figure out how to do it properly.