Quilting

This week, I'm going to talk about my first ever quilting project. A while back, I got the idea in my head that I needed an exercise mat. I'm not really sure why, because I don't actually exercise indoors all that often (I like to walk), and when I do, a towel or blanket on the floor usually works great, but meh, when my mind gets an idea stuck in it, I have a hard time shaking it. However, I knew I didn't want to just go out and buy one, so I decided to go through my fabric bin and see what I could come up with. What I found was an old pair of curtains I made for our NY house that had a light olive green fabric up top and a cream/floral pattern on the bottom. So my mat is recycled. How do you like that? Even my off-white border pieces came from old curtains.

I lost interest in this project for a while, but I'm happy to report that I finally finished it, in time for New Years, even. New yoga routine, here I come!

Here's a pic of the top part all pieced together; I was honestly amazed at how fast it went together.  It took me all of two hours to go from pieces to pinned and ready for quilting. What did take forever, was cutting the pieces out. That was not fun, I'm not gonna lie. But hey, once that was over, it was smooth sailing. Even the quilting went fast, because (shh, don't tell my mother-in-law) I machine quilted it. Now, I had every intention to hand quilt this baby - I bought a quilt hoop and everything! But I had finished my first square and was starting my second when I said to myself, "Why are you doing this by hand? It's just straight lines. You'll get done so much faster if you machine it." And you know what? I was right; it was much faster. I did learn that I can't do quilting on my machine for anything much bigger than this mat, because keeping everything from bunching up would be nigh impossible. And of course, if I do anything other than straight lines, it would be best if I did them by hand, but for now, the quilting is done, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. It's not perfect, but it's good for a first try. 

The final step was binding it all together. I got my bias tape and started stitching, but about 1/3 of the way through, it became blatantly obvious that I didn't know what I was doing. The bias tape wouldn't stop bunching, and even with pins, I sometimes was missing the quilt all together. A quick call to the quilting expert, AKA mom-in-law revealed that I had to hand-stitch the binding, or at least one part of it. Now, all that being said, I still decided to finish the binding the way I started, just so the bad part wouldn't look even worse by comparison. Is that wrong? Even so, my exercise mat turned out pretty nice. Not bad at all for a first attempt. Take a look:

I even added ties so it rolls up!

Merry Christmas!

Hello, everyone! I've got nothing to post this week because of the holiday. After I have a chance to wind down, I'll post some new content. Until then, merry Christmas and happy New Year!

Not Now

Today I have an opinion I'd like to share. I don't know that it will be popular, or that me having my say-so will make any difference, but here it goes anyway.

By now, I'm sure there's not a single US citizen that hasn't heard about the recent school shooting in Connecticut. My heart hurts when I think about it. Friday, I avoided Facebook  because all the posts were bringing me to tears. I haven't read too much in the news either, because I just can't take it. I can't even imagine how the families of the victims must feel.

However, on Saturday, I braved Facebook and a few news sites, and my feeds were a deluge of people arguing about guns. From gun rights people, I saw every version of "guns don't kill people, people do" imaginable. From those who oppose guns, I saw everything from "we need stricter gun laws" to "ban all assault weapons now." This is not unexpected; it happens every time there's a gun-related tragedy in the news.

I don't know why, but I just couldn't help it. When I saw these, I got angry. Now is not the time for this crap, people! It's only been four days since the shooting, some families are likely still struggling with accepting that this is real, that this atrocity isn't some nightmare they're going to wake up from any second. The last thing they need is the TV and Internet inundated with politicians, activists, and armchair bureaucrats arguing about gun rights and dragging their murdered children into the fray. There's only a week left until Christmas, I'm sure things are hard enough for them without having to hear a bunch of idiots talking about it like it's just another statistic. What they need is time to mourn and time to bury their dead in peace. The way I see it, using the Newtown victims as fodder for your political agenda is little better than the Westboro Baptist folks protesting at soldiers' funerals.

I know some think that now is the perfect time, while the tragedy is still fresh in people's minds, to have this discussion and work on a solution, but I'm telling you that's not true. This argument has been going on for years, and we're no closer to a viable solution now than we were when the Columbine shootings occurred. And even if we were to miraculously all agree on what must be done, it would take weeks at the very least to get new laws passed through Congress. Trust me, this argument can wait a couple of weeks. Please, let's all take a break and give these families a little bit of respect.

The Christmas Season, Feeling Overwhelmed, and Netflix Woes

This post is a little early because I have a confession to make. As you may know, we don't have TV services at my house. I just don't see paying an exorbitant amount of money for a cable/dish package when I'm only going to watch like three of the channels. We rely on Netflix for most of our TV series viewing, and that works fine, although sometimes it takes Netflix a little while to upload new episodes. Normally, I'm not bothered by this, but you see, I have this crush. I finally talked my husband into sitting down and watching season 2 of AMC's The Walking Dead with me, and I've fallen hard for Rick. And you know how when you were young, and you got a new boyfriend how you wanted to spend every second of every day with them? Well, that's kind of how I feel about Rick now, and I don't know what do with myself. I just can't get enough of the long, lean, gunslingin' Atlas figure. Maybe I should get a six-shooter and a highway patrol hat for my husband... but I don't think you guys want to know that.

Source.

At any rate, my withdrawals haven't helped my feelings of being slightly overwhelmed. It seems no matter what I do, I can't get ahead on housework. I have so much stuff I need to do, so much I want to do, and somebody has stolen a few grains of sand from my hourglass! All this being what it is, I'm still very excited for Christmas this year. We're visiting family, yes, but ultimately because of my husband's work schedule, I've decided to spend Christmas Day at home. It will be the first time we've done that since the little one was a newborn. Now that she's a little older, I think it'll be an exciting day of seeing her open her presents and then playing with those presents. I also plan on making a nice dinner for us all. It should be good. Welp, that's all for now. Maybe I'll have something awesome to share with you all later this week. Until then, enjoy this picture of our beautiful tree we got from our local farmer's market:

Fishy Fun Party

So, my little one just turned four, and I have to say, I'm pretty proud of how her party turned out. One day she was sitting on my lap while I was browsing Pinterest, and together we saw this awesome fish cake from Cupcakes Take the Cake. My little one loved this cake so much that right then and there she decided she wanted a fish-themed party. With the help of Pinterest and Oriental Trading, I was able to come up with some pretty nice stuff.

The cake ended up being super adorable. The mama fish was chocolate cake, the babies were yellow cake, and all of them were frosted with a homemade cream cheese frosting. One of these days, I'll learn how to frost without making a complete mess of the cake board, but eh, I don't think too many people noticed. There was one alteration I made to the original cupcake design, and that was to add a fruit slice for the tail. I was going to include fins by cutting a fruit slice in half, but alas, there really wasn't room on the the cupcakes. A word to the wise, if you end up doing this, you won't need NEARLY as many M&M's as I bought. I got three bags, and in hindsight, I probably could have gotten away with one.


A lot of the food was just a matter of creative labeling. For example: carrot sticks were crab legs, bell pepper sticks were calamari, cheese cut into triangles became shark's teeth, and regular old cucumber slices became sea cucumbers. Potato chips and Goldfish crackers were arranged next to each other with a sign that read, "Fish & Chips." PB and J sandwiches became starfish with the use of a handy, star-shaped cookie cutter. Cheese puffs in Dixie cups (turned into buckets by the addition of a pipe-cleaner handle) became "live bait."

Other foods took a little more effort. There was my little squid, relaxing in a tub of ranch veggie dip. He helped make the bell pepper calamari appear a little more convincing. It was super simple, all I had to do was sink a baby bell into the dip upside down, use some gel frosting to make a face, and slip in eight pepper sticks for the legs.

Next were submarine cakes. My daughter has a video called "The Big Submarine" from Little Mammoth Media (they make wonderful educational videos for kids, please take a minute to check them out). I bought it for her so that she could see what life was like for Daddy when he was at sea in the Navy. Little did I know that she would love that video so much. When she saw these, she nearly deafened me as she pointed at the screen and shouted, "MOMMY, CAN WE HAVE THOSE AT MY FISH PARTY?!!" These were made with chocolate filled Twinkies. Yes, we ate collector's items, and they were delicious.  All I did was use frosting to "glue" on the M&M windows, and insert trimmed-down bendy straws at one end. If you absolutely love this idea, but fear paying $500 a box for Twinkies, DO NOT FRET. Little Debbie makes Cloud Cakes. I've noticed they're a little harder to find in stores, but you won't spend your child's entire college fund to get them.

I also made oyster cookies. The hardest part of this was finding something to use as pearls. Luckily, my local Hobby Lobby had shiny, white Sixlets in the wedding section. After that, it was a matter of coloring some frosting, frosting the bottom of a Nilla Wafer, adding the Sixlet, and then topping it all with another Nilla Wafer. I don't even like Nilla Wafers or Sixlets, but these cookies were tasty. Something about the flavor combo made them really, really good.

Last, but not least, is the Rice Crispy treat sushi. This was as simple as making Rice Crispy treats, making them into patties, wrapping them with Fruit by the Foot, and topping them with a fish-shaped candy. I did have to use frosting to make the fish candy stick, but I consider this a success, because a lot of my family told me this would be the only sushi they'd ever eat. (My family isn't terribly adventurous when it comes to cuisine.)

Now, you may have noticed the cute little labels I made for the food. That wouldn't have been possible without my mom's Cricut machine. Well, it would have, but it would have taken ten times as long and been a lot more work. Actually, I made quite a few decorations with Mom's machine. I made seashells and starfish to scatter on the tables, as well as fish and seaweed to hang from the ceiling. Speaking of decorations, I thought the room looked fabulous:



Thank heavens for my parents, my MIL and SIL. I would never have gotten all this set up in time without them.

We also played several games the kids thoroughly enjoyed. For the first game, the kids got to go fishing for fish-shaped goody bags filled with bubbles, stickers, and necklaces. In the next game, the kids became the fish and had to catch gummy worms hanging from strings with their mouths. As is expected with young children, chaos and hilarity ensued.

When the party was all over, we sent everyone home with favors that I got from Oriental Trading. These little water-filled games were so cute, and my little one loved hers almost as much as she liked her presents.

All in all, I felt it was a big success. It was a lot of work and a little bit stressful, but my philosophy is that eventually, there will come a time when my baby will no longer think my ideas are all that great, and so I might as well go all out while I can. The little one has already informed me that she wants a kitty party next year, and so I will be keeping my eyes open for more good ideas. If you'd like to check out my Pinterest party board, you can do so here: http://pinterest.com/am_crittenden/party-ideas/. Happy party planning!