Hello, 2012

Guess what? I finally have a smart phone. For all the web stuff I do, it's kind of ridiculous, but my non-tetchy husband felt it was an unnecessary expense. Can you imagine that?!

So this is a test post using the mobile app on my phone. My mom, Brock and I went to McCalls pumpkin patch today. Brock was a total sourpuss all day.

The funniest part of this post is that I posted it onto the wrong blog and had to come onto the real computer to transfer it. So maybe I'm a bit more 2010 than 2012. I got this now.

String quilt update

Someone contacted me the other day wanting to know the status of my string quilt. Yeah, I was just as surprised as you are that I still have anyone who reads this blog. I've been a little neglectful lately, but that's because I have so little time to craft, or to think of anything clever to write about. I've also started a blog (Prominent Butt) that's about my fitness/health journey. That journey is also a bit time consuming! I've quickly fallen into neglecting that blog, as well.

Well, due to popular demand (by one person), here is my string quilt top. That's as far as I've gotten. I have no time for personal sewing. I am (was?) making this for the mother of a baby that died from a brain tumor, but it's just not good.

First of all, now that I'm looking at it, I don't understand why it's so square. It should probably have another set of squares on the bottom, but that requires making 12 more blocks. And I'm out of fabric. Still, it would work as a lap quilt.

As you can see, using the white strips in the center of each block creates a more distinct visual effect of squares throughout the quilt. Unfortunately, none of my white strips met up nicely in the corners. Pretty much all of my corners look like this:

Actually, that's one of the better ones.

To make matters worse, the whole thing is warped. That's what happens when you sew in a hurry and do a sloppy job and then try to force it to fit together in certain places.

It just doesn't lie smoothly. So I know if I try to quilt it, it will just pucker up and get a bunch of tucks and folds all over the surface.

So that's where it stands now. I am just not sure I'll try to finish this one due to all the bad sewing. I would like to give the mother of this baby a gift to honor his short life, but this is an embarrassment.

I'm going to make you look at a whole bunch of pictures of my kid

Because we both work at a newspaper, my husband and I are lucky to know lots of professional photographers. One of them came over recently to shoot some pictures of Brock. He's now 2 years and 3 months old, though these were shot over a month ago. He's certainly become a contrary one. He battles me on everything and I think his favorite phrase is, "Stop it! Do not! No mommy! I don't like it!" OK, that's four phrases. They are very common in our house.

Here are the photos by Roberto E. Rosales