The Best Anniversary Present Ever!!!

Last week Wednesday was our 9th anniversary.  That was also the day our little boy decided to make his appearance into the world.  What an anniversary present!  June 13th will definitely be a day to celebrate in our household!  (and it certainly makes it easier for Joel to keep these dates straight!)

His name is Carter William and he was born at 6:30 in the morning, weighing in at 8 lbs, 3 oz. and 22″ long.  This is one of his first pictures, showing just how long 22″ is.

The delivery went fine and both baby and Mom are doing well.

On day two he looks a little less shell-shocked and much more rested!

We had lots of company in the hospital, as there were lots of little nieces and nephews anxious to meet little Carter.

I didn’t do a very good job getting photos of everyone, so here are just a couple favs . . .

Joel and his mom dressing Carter for the trip home.

A four generation picture with my Mom and Grandma.

A couple of random foot shots . . .  always a favorite!

I think he might be able to play the piano with these toes!

We have been home for about four days now and I wanted to show you a few shots of Carter at a week old.  He is full of cute expressions that keep us constantly entertained  . . . .

Thanks to everyone who checked in to see if everything was okay.  It has just taken me a little while to catch up on some sleep and get around to loading photos.  I have had lots of good help, which I am so thankful for!   We are also thankful that Carter has been such a good baby (so far).   So much for that box of fabric from my last post – I am now smitten with something else!!!

Seaside Cottage Has Arrived!

So remember that box of fabric that I had been “waiting out by the curb” for?  It was supposed to be here quite a while ago and has finally arrived!

This is just my sample yardage, so I am busy planning what quilts I want to make. 

Remember in my last post when I was talking about the things I have tried to move this baby along?   My guess is the best thing to move this process along is a box full of fabric that needs to be sewn up right away.   My theory isn’t scientifically proven, so we will just have to wait and see.  I will keep ya posted.

(BTW – I was really only half serious about those things and would have done all of them anyways, just because I am trying to keep busy and make this last week move along a little quicker).

So, I am busy cutting up fabric.  Arranging pieces on the design wall.  Trying to decide which prints I want to use for borders.  All that good stuff.

The fabric will be in stores in July.  I’ll keep you posted on that too.  In the meantime, I will hopefully get a few things finished to show you.  If not, there will be a baby to show instead!

**You can still go to Henry Glass’s website to enter to win some fat quarters of this fabric and my newest book!**

Nursery Update and Virtual Baby Shower

It’s less than a week until my due date and time is moving very slowly!  I have tried to speed things up by walking, landscaping, gardening, helping Joel prune trees, eating spicy food, going for a bumpy boat ride, etc. but so far nothing has helped.  My SIL suggested castor oil, but I’m not desperate enough to try that yet.  I’m sure that some of you might have some good suggestions on what to try too – I’m sure I might get a chuckle out of some of them!   I think the baby is trying to help too by attempting to kick his way out, though I don’t think my ribs make a very good opening.

In the meantime, I am still working on the nursery.  It has been a slow process, mostly because I am picky when it comes to color, but also because I seem to pick detailed accents that just take a while to finish.

Remember the book ledges that we were making?  They are finished and up on the walls.

They are made from two pieces of 1x material.  The bottom piece is a 1″ x 2″.  The top piece is made from 1″ x 3″ material, which Joel notched to form a lip to keep the books on the shelves (Just in case we have a door slammer?).  All that “notching” was followed by lots of sanding, then priming and painting.

Next, I was going to attempt to slip cover a chair.  It’s a nice comfy chair that I found at HomeGoods, but it never quite was the right color (very dull green/brown plaid).  Here is the chair before:

I have been dragging my feet about doing the slip cover, as I HATE doing stuff like that.  So, after lots of procrastination, I opted to try dying the chair first.

Yes, you heard that right.  I figured I didn’t have anything to lose, as the current fabric wasn’t working out anyways.  So, I bought a weed sprayer, mixed up a batch of watery dye and sprayed the chair very lightly.  I used a gloved hand to rub the mixture into the fabric and into all the nooks and crannies of the chair.

Now, for the after:

Much better, don’t you think?  Can you believe I pulled it off?  I ended up doing two coats to get it just the right color and it dried nice and even.  I figured it would at least have a marbled look, but it really worked pretty well.  How lucky  . . . . .

From that picture you can see that I have done a decorative paint treatment on the wall.  I began by auditioning diamonds cut from colored paper on the wall.

Then I did the math to figure out how many diamonds would fit the space.  The first day I did the orange diamonds, then let them dry overnight.  I kept layering the colors, doing a little bit each day and allowing that layer to dry.  (so allow at least a week to do this).

Lastly, I taped and painted the brown lines.  If you try this, be prepared to go through lots of tape.  It took quite a while to mark and tape off the lines, then a few minutes to paint them.  The worst part was, the tape lied.

When I took the tape off, the dark paint had bled all over behind the tape.  (I had this issue while painting the diamonds too, but it wasn’t quite as noticeable with the lighter colors.)  I decided the easier thing to do was re tape the lines a little wider and paint them over.  I used Frog tape for the second go round and that worked a little better.  I still had lots of bleeding, so some of the lines were painted four times before they looked like this –

I am happy with the fun detail that it adds to the room, but found it to be a frustrating process!  Did I mention that I did two of these argyles?  There is another one on the other side of the window.

Another frustrating process was painting the furniture orange.  I have tried out every shade of orange spray paint at every hardware, craft store, and home improvement store in the area.  They are all either to bright or too dull.  So, I bought a quart of orange oil base paint and a sprayer.  Turns out they can’t get a very deep orange in oil base, so that didn’t work either.  I decided to give up and go back to the first orange that I tried.  Craziness, huh!   I recommend just sticking with cream or brown furniture.  Much easier.

(BTW – I used a mask for the painting so I didn’t inhale any fumes that would be harmful for the baby.  I did, however, feel like a really bad parent going into all those stores and buying cans of spray paint with this huge belly!)

I am also working on the baby’s quilts.  Here is a shot of his puppy quilt.

I haven’t quite finished it yet, because my arms have gotten too short to machine quilt it (which is a nice way of saying that my bump is too big to reach the handles on my quilting machine!)

So that is my progress so far.  Maybe someday I will have photos of the finished room!

One last thing – Henry Glass is having a virtual baby shower for me over on their blog.   Click here to join in on the fun and for a chance to win my new kids book and some fat quarters of my new fabric.