Hawaii

We've been back for a week already, but birthday party craziness for Sofie has meant no time to blog about recent events until now!

As you may know from Facebook, Brett and I recently took both of our dads to Oahu. My dad was stationed there from 1952-54, at Barber's Point Naval Station (now defunct) and hadn't been there since, and Brett's dad had never been there at all. And Brett and I had never been to Oahu either - usually we prefer the less populated islands, but this time it seemed like the right place to go for a more sight-seeing focused trip. We weren't planning to spend a lot of time on the beach.

Of course, we went to Pearl Harbor. It seems strange that it had been less than a decade since the attack when my father was there. The Arizona memorial is deeply moving, and the displays and movie as you wait to board the ferry there are fascinating.One of the gunwales sticks up from the water, and you can make out some of the detail of the boat beneath the memorial.

Here are the menfolk on the Arizona:

And of course we toured the Missouri. Of the million pics we took of that, here are a few of my favorites.

The big guns:

My Dad on the deck:

From afar:

The plaque marking the sight of the Japanese surrender:

We also went to a luau - which honestly, only Sofie and I particularly enjoyed. The food wasn't spectacular, but it was silly fun and Sofie got to get up on stage and do her version of the hula -- which really involved lots of leaping "ballet tricks", and she made a wonderful little friend who she played with for two or three hours.

Then she conked out.

We had an awesome pool at the house that we spent many, many hours in:

And an awesome view:

Even at night:

Overall, a really nice trip.

Finished!

Here's the diamond quilt again, all finished!

I originally intended to do the binding in red, but I'm glad that I chose the turquoise for it - kind of a pop of the unexpected, and it pulls out one of the less frequent color from the squares.

I basically stippled it all over when I quilted it. Still working on my stippling -- I think my lines crossed twice -- but I'm getting better at it.

And here's the back, although it's just the same as the binding.

This quilt is for sofie, but there isn't much room for it on her walls right now so I think we're going to hang it over the couch for a while.

New quilt

With school and working part time, I didn't have any time to sew for most of this summer -- or do anything muhc else, for that matter, aside from take care of Sofie and occasionally make an attempt to clean up the house.

So by the end of finals, I was jonesing pretty bad to make something. I bought fabric on my way home from my last test and waited all of like 18 hours from finishing finals to start cutting this out:

Isn't it pretty? It's a single fabric, from Alexander Henry, that has a wonderful swaths of red, orange, pink, and turquoise blue. Just a simple half-square triangle quilt, but I love the cheerful look of it.

Here's the actual fabric, before I cut it all up:


Only the top is finished now, but I hope to get a backing on it this weekend.

Today we're working on Sofie's annual cat cake, made from a big mold that takes two boxes of cake mix and hours and hours of frosting work.  She's turning four today - I can't believe it!