Year in Pictures

We had a lot to be thankful for in 2010.

January

First, in January, we got a surprise call from good friends in Mazama, where we spend nearly all our vacation time, telling us about a great little house going on the market that was just like what we were always daydreaming about owning up there. Why not come take a look? So we hopped in the car, drove five hours in the snow and sleet, and promptly fell in love:

...and began the three month process of making it ours. And now it is! Bearpaw Cabin, our home away from home.

Here we are just before the new year with my Dad at Bellevue Botanical Gardens. On the coldest night of the year, I think.

February
February involved several more trips out to Mazama to try to close the deal on the cabin. Which let us get some fun time in playing in the snow. 

At the Riverside Inn in Winthrop...

March

The big event in March was a family reunion of my Dad's siblings and all the cousins who could make it, at my Aunt Carolyn's house in Greeley, Colorado. Here are Ernest, Dad, Dorothy, and Sof and I. This was an amazing visit, even if we did get stuck in the airport overnight on the way out.

Uncle Tom and Aunt Carolyn:

April
A tea party to celebrate spring...

May
In May we made two or three trips to Winthrop, and ended up hauling this one stupid watermelon back and forth on all of the trips and never eating it. Which led us to draw a face on it and adopt it. We called him Ned. We kept him until he rotted. 

I kind of finished my nephew's quilt. Not really:

June
Father's Day was celebrated with matching, father and daughter Monkey-and-Herschel shirts. A proud moment.

 And there were summer trips to the zoo, with much face painting excitement.

July
We spent our usual two weeks in Mazama for the Winthrop Blues Festival, and our friends Kate and Steve joined us for a long weekend.

 Studying also picked up hugely for me as I moved into my first set of final exams since 1993. Phoenix was always on hand to help.

August

In August, we took both our dads to Oahu, to revisit my Dad's stomping grounds from his Navy days. It was an amazing trip! 

September
Sofie turned four in September, surrounded by many, many friends.

And Brett got a bike and spent a couple weeks up in Mazama by himself being a mountain man:

October
We made one last trip to mazama in October, then celebrated Halloween with good friends and an awesome pumpkin carving party at Kerf Designs. 

November
In November, we were lucky enough to visit the Oregon Coast with friends Kate and Nate, who shared a family retreat with us. The kids had an awesome time.

And then Sofie and I went to Texas to visit my sister and her family. Nick and Andrew were so awesome to their little teeny cousin! Everyone had a great time.

December
And finally December, my favorite month of the year! We decorated in turquoise and red this year and spent the whole month snuggling in front of the fireplace, admiring the Christmas tree.

Happy New Year to everyone, and best wishes for an awesome 2011!

Merry Christmas Eve

It's a rainy Seattle Christmas Eve and life feels just about perfect. Earlier tonight, we went to our friends' second annual toddler Christmas Eve party, where Brett dons a santa suit in the basement and sneaks around the outside of the house to the front door, to bust in and delight everyone with a big pillowcase full of presents and many aside comments to the parents about having just left lumps of coal in the stockings of the staff of Fox News. (Blurry and slightly scary IPhone pic at left.)

And some of the kids, especially Sofie, actually know it's him, because Brett mostly looks like and sounds like Brett, even with a full wig and beard and a really good santa suit -- but at four years old, the line between reality and imaginary is still just blurry enough that all of them, even Sofie, believe it, at least a little bit. He got mobbed in the toddler version of groupies with kids shouting out their Christmas wishes and staring starry-eyed and gobsmacked at him. Pretty awesome.

Then home at 7 p.m. with a tired kid in tow to put out the cookies and milk and get snuggled into bed -- and then the real fun begins. Wrapping and filling stockings, getting out the huge dollhouse my sister sent Sofie. Brett laid on the floor in the living room assembling it, which turned out to be not too heinous of a task. It's a true Ward Cleaver moment, somehow, assembling your little girl's dollhouse on Christmas eve.

Let me just say that I wanted a dollhouse just like this my ENTIRE childhood.Never got one. Three stories! With stairs! And a front yard with flower pots! And it came with a stroller and two baby carseats! Sofie is going to die of joy.

Being Sofie, she will of course jettison the slightly creepy looking human family that came with it and fill the house with cats. I unpacked a few of the Pet Shop kitties we got her and posed them on the second floor to help her get started.

I'm looking forward to playing with this with her for a good portion of tomorrow.

And of course her stocking is all packed with goodies - new paints, some blue fabric she can use as a scarf, a couple of dresses I made for her Olivia doll, some candy. Nothing all that fancy. But it will make her very happy. Four is the most awesome age ever.

And here's the kitties' stocking, with little hand-sewn kitty fortune cookies packed with catnip that Sofie picked out for them.

The tree is lit, my family is happy, my home is warm, my kitties are curled up asleep, we have our health and our friends and we have each other, and I just couldn't imagine a better way to be looking at the end of 2010 than this.

Merry Christmas to all of our dear friends and family - hope you have a great day tomorrow.

Little teeny quilts

Inspired by Spotted Stone's lovely Christmas mini, and by Teaginny's even smaller version of the same, I made a few of these little bunting quilts last week. These aren't very good pictures, as they were taken on my phone:

Obviously both of the originals are a little better at the embroidery thing than me. :) But I'm learning!

Christmas

Lovely picture our friend Larissa took of part of our mantel. Silver/white/aqua and red are the color scheme I've been using this year.

Sewing, and committee sightings

Sofie's been making lots of wistful comments about how some day she'll be big enough to sew, usually while watching me work on something brightly colored and fun, so today I got out a very dull embroidery needle, felt, and bright blue floss and showed her the basics. And darned it she didn't pick it up really, really quick.

I helped her at first, but then I moved on to something else and she went on to sew two little felt pillows for her babies, each of which was stuffed with half a kleenex.

Here's Baby Phoenix, enjoying his new pillow:

Then she moved on to another project near and dear to her heart - finally formalizing Owl's entrance into the committee. After a long apprenticeship, Owl has finally been certified, six sigma'd, swatted, TQMed, matrix managed, re-engineered, reorged, approved, reviewed, and accepted as Number Seven. Which we proceeded to sew to his chest.

It was a proud, proud, moment.

Of course, it didn't stop there. Members 8, 9, and 10 were also inducted. Baby Phoenix is number ten, as you can see below. I sewed his on really loosely because, although she was quite insistent about the whole thing, I suspect that sometime soon it's going to be equally important that these numbers come off of him. 


But here's a rare picture of the chairman with the full, expanded committee.

Cheese!

Christmas Quilts

Don't you make most of your Christmas presents?

If I could count the number of times someone said this to me over the last few years... let's just say lots. And until this year, running Bellflower Textiles with its busy Christmas season  meant that no, I absolutely couldn't make much of anything for personal reasons, because I was spending every free second making orders for clients. Business was so brisk last year from October through mid January that it took me months to recover.

This year, though, with the business in a much lower gear, I've been happily sewing away, making Christmas gifts. Here are a few -- some I can't show because the person receiving them will know who they're for, but these are fairly safe, I think.

Mostly a series of little wall quilts. These first two were made from an Avignon jelly roll and are probably 24x24". I can't tell you where these are going, but aren't they cute?

This is just a front - haven't blocked and quilted it yet. I made this last night - it's called Birds of a Feather.

Here's a close up of the block - the interior fabric with robins, and then the awesome dark blue with feathers on it that Erica gave me last night. Perfect match! It's all set in oatmeal linen, which is still one of my favorite fabrics to work with.

I still have one or two things left to make, but I'm really happy with how much I've been able to get done this year!