The things you do after

Keep sewing.  It's where Stella always was right next to me - sitting on my chest licking my face while I'd try to read, or putting her forehead on my cheek while I tried to sew.  It's hard to not have here there, but I don't want to avoid it because she's not.  I just tell myself that's the room where I have a lot of memories.

We took her to the emergency vet on Wednesday - maybe it should have been Tuesday night, but you never really know that until Wednesday morning, do you?  I still wake up crying.

I made this to hang over the chair we always sat in to read each evening.

 Ok, I realize that I use the term "made" pretty loosely when I'm talking about machine embroidery - what I actually did is thread the machine and hit a couple buttons then walk away and start cutting pieces for my first Swoon block.  When it was finished, I put it in vintage wooden embroidery hoop.

This morning I finished putting together the pieces for the afore mentioned Swoon block.

It's HUGE - it's a 24" block, and the pattern has you make 9 of them for an 80x80 quilt.  I think these would make pretty cool pillows too.  I had to buy this pattern after seeing so many amazing blocks on Flicker.  It's all the same pattern, but it's amazing how different it looks when you play around with color (or rather value, I suppose) on the parts.  I'm pretty happy with this one, but I do feel that some of the white circles intersect with the white in the middle and it interrupts that sharp lines of the center star.  That's being a little too anal for me though, and I know that in the grand scheme of things, it'll look just fine.

I made a few wonky bento box blocks a few weeks ago, just because I love the block and wanted to do it.  Later I thought that maybe I could use them for a baby quilt - my manager's wife is pregnant.  They aren't finding out the sex so I wanted to make it kind of neutral.  The solid green is brighter in real life - more of a lime green.  The brown and gold dot fabric is some stuff I've been hording since Catherine and I went to the fabric store in Waynesville (how long ago was that Catherine??) and I decided finally that it needed to be used - what good does it do just sitting there?

My original block was made using this - and that's kind of where I pulled the green and brown from as well.

I like these colors a lot - and I'll certainly save them for something, but Billy convinced me that there may be too much pink for it to be potentially for a boy.  I think it's more acceptable for there to be no "girly" colors in a girl's quilt, than for there to be pink in a boy's quilt.  Oh, this picture shows the brightness of the lime green better too!