The End Of 4th Grade

This school year was a tough one.  There was the start of the "tween" phase.  Which consisted of having a smart mouth because we, the parents, asked him to finish up his chores and he wanted to read.  He has goals after all.  And he hit them.  He has the highest reading points in his class.  And he was so upset that his teacher made him turn in his library book before he was done.  "I ONLY had 341 pages to go."  It was also the busiest year to date.  Karate, soccer, basketball, 4-H(dog project, record book, club historian, arts, crafts, sewing, community service, fair).  And then there was Jet's stuff.  But that's a whole new post.

Luckily, we landed with a great teacher.  I was a little skeptical.  His teacher was part of a big scandal that almost tore the town apart.  Thanks in part of misuse of social media and wrong information being spread around.  And she used her expertise to handle my child.  He's not difficult if you get past the talking.  But he's too smart for his own good and it definitely can get carried away if he lets it.  And she taught him how to deal with it and let it be part of his homework.  He may just become a writer from this year.

So as I have since I started school, I made this year's teacher a thank you quilt.  And I must admit, it's probably the best one that I've done so far.  And it's definitely the biggest one that I've made for a teacher so far.  So let me start talking about this quilt.  She loves Dr. Who.  And I found just enough Dr. Who fabric to make a quilt for her.

And since I could only find 3 prints, I decided to do a somewhat of a take on the stack and whack pattern I used for his 2nd grade teacher.  So I decided to make 5 inch squares out of the whovian fabric. Then use the blue glitter fabric for a wide border,  Then a small border with the white and silver polka dot fabric.  I wanted the squares to be a finished size of 8".  And well, I don't do math well when I'm exhausted and tired.  So I started cutting and the squares ended up at 10.5".

After some math redo, I came out with 6 rows of 5 squares.  It actually ended up being bigger than I originally planned on.  And that was ok.  I had bought some gray mottled 108" backing fabric for the back.  So I had room to spare.

                                    

And for the quilting.  I just a basic lattice motif.  I had to get this done.  I mean, I was coming on the last week of school.  Which was only 3 days this week.  

I also just did the binding by flipping it over the top and folding it a couple times.  And then zig zag stitched it closed.

She loved it.  I helped with the year end party and she had it out in front of the class.  She was so thankful for it.  And so excited about it.

And at the close of 4th grade.  He got on honor roll and perfect attendance.  And had the highest reading level in his class.  And close to the highest in the grade.

And with this, here's to a great and relaxing summer.

Finding His Sport

Rionn is still in the midst of finding what he's good at.  So far he's been doing martial arts, basketball, soccer, and swimming.  And we've always done some skating and kayaking.  The other day we had nothing going on.  I mean, I looked at the calendar several times to make sure we had nothing scheduled.  So while Jet was napping, Rionn went out and skated a bit.

And then his brother woke up.  And he was very upset that he couldn't skate too.  So I dug in the very back of the coat closet and found Rionn's training skates.  I've tried to sell them and I've tried to give them away.  But the art of skating is going away.   Luckily they fit Jet.  And we ended up like this.

And he does pretty good.   Considering that they are training skates with 7 wheels that hardly roll if you try.  He even tried to jump over the concrete slat partitions like Rionn. I see us skating in the future.  Our city has family skate night for $2 a person on the weekends.  Now I just have to practice my skating. I'm a little rusty myself.  

Remembering A Sister

So there was a post a few months ago about having to make the saddest quilt ever.  The family that it went to loved it.  And they wanted a quilt that their oldest can have that was similar but different.  So I decided to try my hand at thread art.  And while I'm not sure that what I really did was actual thread art, I'm happy with the results.  And so are they from the photos that I sent them.


So this was the original quilt.  It had the Trisomy 18 awareness ribbon, and an elephant.  Both in the Trisomy color.  And I did a basic line quilting.

So what the mom wanted was an elephant quilt without the ribbon.  And something a little bigger.  Problem with a quilt like this is that the quilting part is hard.  I like stitch in a ditch quilt pattern.  Something to not take away from the pattern.  But there is no pattern here.  So as I was waiting during soccer practice one day I heard a podcast about taking a thread art class.  So basing my quilt design off of that description, I came up with doing the elephant and the rest of the quilt was going to be thread art.  I wanted a kid-like picture of the elephant doing something.  Now the original quilt was 12" by 18" or so.  And this ended up being 36" by 42".  That's a lot of white space.  And since it was for the toddler daughter of this family, I decided to incorporate the daughter that became an angel too soon.

I appliqued the blue elephant.  Then I reversed the image and quilted another elephant in a metallic baby colored variegated thread.  I envisioned a lot of symbolism here.  Not sure if it got through or not.

Now for the remaining background I decided to make it a kiddie drawing.  Which was relatively easy since I'm not an artist.  I planned on a park theme.  And since it's windy here I thought about kites.  So the blue elephant is flying a kite.

And of course, it's always sunny at the park.  Right?  So I put a smiling sun in the corner.

The elephants are standing in front of a big tree.  Equipped with a squirrel hole.  And a hanging bird house.

And then of course, because it's for a little girl, the grass is covered in flowers.  I used a purple variegated thread and a red variegated thread.  And just a plain pastel pink.   Then I used dark green for the grass and light green for the flower stems.

And then the rest of the "sky" was just white thread to help with the "wind".  I figured it would look a lot better than straight lines.   And the back and binding was this pink, purple, and gold butterfly fabric.

I think she's going to love.  At least I hope so.  I'm fairly proud that I was able to pull this off.  I wasn't sure I could.  It may become my preferred method of quilting.

Mother's Day

This year was my 10th Mother's Day. 10!  And this year, I threw out all of the expectations, and just enjoyed my family.  And you know what?  It was one of the best Mother's day so far.  But my guys did great.  They had breakfast waiting.  A great gift.  I got a couple new camera lenses and a tripod.  And besides going and buying a last minute lunch with my sister in law, I didn't have to cook or clean.  So I spent the day playing with my new toys.

Spring Tourney

This past weekend, Rionn had his spring karate tournament.  He didn't place in any of his classes.  But he did great.  He's at the lower end of the class belt rank and size.  But besides the driving(which seemed to take forever) we had a fun day.  This year it was at a nice park and rec building with a fantastic park.  So I'll do a picture montage of our day.