Tag Blankets Revisited!

Last month, I mentioned that my mother-in-law and I had made a tag blanket for E with a kit from Mill House Quilts.  We had so much fun, and it was so easy.  I thought it would be nice to get some friends together and try to make our own! 

I had a lot of fabric, but everyone brought some ribbon to contribute to make a lot of variation.  Here are some of the finished projects!

Homemade Applesauce

I love the fall.  It is my favorite season and a large part of that is how much I enjoy Fall foods.  Anything with apple, pumpkin, or squash is just dandy for me.  This year, it was extra special since it was my first fall being a mom.  

Unfortunately, the apple harvest wasn't quite up to the challenge.  We didn't get to pick our own apples this year, but we did manage to go the orchard twice to buy apples.  Both times I brought them home and made applesauce for E.  This is by far the best applesauce I've ever had.  The original recipe can be found here, but all I did was take 5 lbs apples, 1 cup applesauce, vanilla, lemon juice, cinnamon and cloves and simmer until my apples were complete mush.  Then I ran them through the food mill to get rid of all of the extra skin since I was making it for E.  

I managed to forget to take a picture of my applesauce, so you will just have to imagine how delicious it looked as well as tasted.

Bench Seat

Yesterday I started with these ingredients:

2" thick foam, three separate pieces all glued together and then wrapped in a layer of vinyl

A large bench seat, 72"x31" from putting two Ikea Expedit shelves together with some sturdy hardware.

Then add a surprise fabric, zipper, time, one broken machine needle and you get:

Finished Bench Seat Cover!

This is just one small step in our family room makeover, but I really love how it turned out.  Next we need to get the futon out of there, add some book shelves, and get some art onto the walls!

First Word!

E said her first word last night.  To my great joy and delight, it was "Mama".  Before you go thinking that I imagined it, let me just tell you what happened.

The Notredame game ended up going into overtime and E had gone down for a nap in the third quarter.  When the game was over she was still sleeping, but we had friends over and we had all planned to go out to dinner with E after the game.  I figured she'd want to have dinner before going to bed for the night anyway so we woke her up and all went to dinner.  Well, trying to wait to feed her until we got to the restaurant was apparently not the right idea.  She was screaming in the car, and we were all listening to her cry.  Then, in one of her cries she very distinctly said "Mama."  I was driving and she couldn't see me so she was probably wondering where I was and why I wasn't feeding her.  Everyone just kind of looked at each other and decided that yes, that had actually just happened.  

So, I have three witnesses besides myself and I have to say, I'm a very proud "Mama."  Too bad she had to get that worked up in order to have us hear it!  I can't wait to see what her next word will be, maybe "Dada?"

Here she is in the restaurant right after saying her first word!

Another Blog!

As many of you may already know, I have another blog that I share with my art night friends, art night posse.  You would think since I rarely post there and I rarely post here that those would be enough for me, but apparently not.  

Art night posse is for all of us, and mainly for crafts we make at art night.  And this blog is for anything and everything, so I wanted to make a blog just for my sewing/quilting.  That blog, The Quilted Lane, only has two posts so far, but that's only because all of the things I'm working on right now are gifts and I can't show anyone yet!  

I hope to be posting more on all of my blogs soon as I've finished my Christmas gifts for the most part so nap times can have more blog posting!

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Now to share someone else's amazing craftiness.  My mother-in-law made this quilt for E and we just got it in the mail today, what a great surprise!