Where have I been?

Hello again!

Oh my, where has the last year gone?  It has been a year, over a year, since my last post.  What happened?

Well, not too long after my last post last year, I got pregnant!  And pregnancy and me--don't agree.  I get very sick and pretty much lose all desire and ability to do anything.  Combine that with a full time job, which I have, and you get lazy evenings and weekends where I did nothing but lie in bed with no energy to quilt or blog.

So the bulk of the last year was spent pregnant and sick and tired.  But happily, in March I gave birth to an absolutely beautiful baby boy, and am now feeling back to my old self.  Unfortunately, two small children plus a full time job (which I'll be returning to from maternity leave in about two weeks) will probably not leave much time for quilting or blogging, but I'm going to try!  My drive to sew is back, although my time may be limited.

I do have one finish to share, and it's one I'm very proud of (I wish I would have thought to blog a few days ago, this would have been a great entry for the Blogger's Quilt Festival).  When I found out I was having a baby boy, I began thinking about color schemes for his nursery and what kind of quilt I wanted to make him.  Because even though I was tired and not feeling great, I was going to muster up the energy needed to make him a quilt!

I decided on a gray, aqua, and lime color scheme, along with a wonky star pattern, inspired by all the beautiful wonky star quilts I've seen on Flickr, but most especially this quilt.  I decided to use the various aqua, lime, and gray mini dots from the Ruby line by Bonnie and Commie for Moda for the backgrounds of the stars, and pulled a big selection of aqua, lime and gray prints from my stash for the stars.  I did a little bit of easy math to figure out the number of each color block to make sure I had an even distribution of colors, and to make sure I ended up with all three color backgrounds and all three color stars.  

And three days before the baby was born, I finished the quilt!

I love it SO much.  It turned out exactly as I envisioned it.



To quilt it, I quilted on either side of each seam between the blocks, and also outlined each star.  I love the way the quilting looks from the back, as I used an aqua Moda Bella solid for the back, and so the quilting of the stars really stands out.



I just love it.  It's perfect.  And I'm using it as the background to take monthly photos of the baby to show how much he grows every month.  I know I'll love seeing it when I look at those photos in the future.

So that's where I've been.  I'm hoping that now that things are back to normal, health wise, and we're slowly settling into the new routine with the baby, that I'll have time for quilting and blogging again. I definitely haven't stopped buying fabric (!) so I need to get quilting and use it up!

(And oh my goodness, as soon as I hit publish on this post, I realized it's my 100th post!  How funny! Yay me.)