Bee blocks, Mom's quilt, and oh yeah, I had a baby

I'm finally back on my sewing machine after a hiatus of over a month.  I had my baby!  She's beautiful and wonderful, and everything went great.  But the adjustment of going from a family of four to a family of five has been a challenging one and not much time was left for sewing.  Fortunately she's started taking longer naps, which means I can sneak downstairs with the other kids and get some sewing in.

My August bee block is underway!

I think this is the first block in the bee that I'm actually sad to mail off...I wouldn't mind keeping it!  I'm still working on piecing it together (and I actually made more progress since this photo was taken this afternoon) but I already really like it.  The colors are really pretty to me.  I hope the recipient likes it too.

I also got some work in on my mom's quilt.  I'm over a third of the way done quilting, and I'm going to show it to her this weekend.  Hopefully she'll like the direction it's going, since I don't want to rip out all of that quilting.

I also got an urge to start another mini-quilt...a paper pieced Mariner's Compass.  We'll see if I actually get around to doing it...I feel like I have too many WIPs, and I want to finish some before I start some more.

It feels so good to have my hands back in fabric and my feet back on my treadle.

Why I've been sick...

I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been sick and haven't wanted to sew.  Well, there's a reason.

As of today I'm 13 weeks pregnant.

I've been so hesitant to share the news since I had a miscarriage, but I recently had an OB appointment and they found a good heartbeat via Doppler.  They also found a heartbeat at 8 weeks via ultrasound, so it's good to have a second confirmation that there's a healthy little person in there!

I'm very excited and trying to have faith that it'll work out this time.  Prayers and well wishes are appreciated.

I have to go find some sort of a wheeled cart to carry my hand crank sewing machine to sewing days.  Pretty soon 35 lbs of cast iron will be too much to carry!

Insecurity

 A local fabric designer named Allison Beilke developed a line of fabrics inspired by Milwaukee.  So the local modern quilt guild is having a contest where you can make a quilt or other sewn item from the fabrics and some selected Kona solids.  The judging will be in mid-November and all the entries will be put on Flickr.  When I first heard that I thought, Hey, that sounds like an awesome contest that I will never enter!

I'm a novice quilter.  There's no way I'd win.  There's actually an excellent chance that I'd embarrass myself.  I can't even do free motion quilting right.  Do something like that?  No thank you.

But a little part of me thought, It would be fun just to participate.  Just to be involved. 

I was pretty sure I wouldn't bother to enter until this morning.  My son is entering kindergarten this fall and we've been taking walks to his school so the school is familiar to him.  I was looking at the beautiful old building while the kids played on the playground.  The brick work on the building is beautiful.  I especially liked this:

And I found myself thinking, Wouldn't it be cool if someone made something like this pattern using those Milwaukee fabrics?  That might look really neat.  And gradually my feelings changed from, there's no way I'd enter to, it would be neat just to participate.

So I'm going to get some fabric scraps and try to replicate the brick pattern.  If I can, I'll make a mini-quilt and enter.  And if I can't, at least it'll be a challenge and I'll learn something.