When I want to group photos for my blog, I typically do it with Power Point and I usually know what I want to do with the photos. Even so, once I place more than one photo on a slide, PP offers design ideas for at least one or two dozen different ways I might want to shape, group, or arrange the photos. For the first time, I stumped Power Point. The words inside the blue oval say “Sorry, no design ideas for this slide.” I guess the number of photos I’d already grouped exhausted PP’s creative abilities.
Without the computer telling me what to do (gasp!), I had to figure out something on my own. Oh, the trauma, right? I resized the photos all by myself. Mission accomplished.
I included a small snack bag of Hershey’s kisses in my backpack for our trip to Provo for Ollie’s first birthday party. After boarding the plane to go home, I dug into my backpack and pulled out the bag of kisses. I offered some to Ted and to the man on my left as well. Choc-a-holic Ted said “yes” and took a few kisses; the other man said, “No, thank you.” As I was returning the snack bag to my backpack, one of the kisses fell to the floor. The man on my left reached down to pick it up, laughed, and said, “Ok, I guess I’ll have one.” I still had the snack bag in my hand, so I gave him another and told him we all know it’s true that if you eat one, you wish you had one more. He accepted and we all had a nice flight home.
After landing in St. Louis, Ted and I were heading out of the airport when the man hurried to catch up to us. “Thank you so much for the candy treat,” he said. “That was the best part of the whole flight.” What a nice guy and what an easy way to spread a little joy.
When Alex and Kaitlyn told me they were expecting a baby–Ted’s and my first great-grandchild–in “mid-March,” I hoped the baby would be born on my birthday. Of course, we all know that babies come when they come, and Ollie was born two days before my birthday. That’s fine. It means we can share a birthday month instead of only one day. To celebrate Ollie’s first birthday, Ted and I decided to go to Provo to be with the family for the Big Day. What a great decision!
Kaitlyn’s family took full responsibility for the party preparations. Three of their children (including Alex and Kaitlyn) are attending BYU and live in Provo, but the rest of the family lives elsewhere, so Jeff and La offered their Provo home as a venue for the birthday gala. I’m telling you, those women had their ducks in a row. Their entire family–including the supportive men–marched into the house carrying food, folding tables and chairs, gifts, and everything else needed for a party. They took over the kitchen and went right to work. That’s Kaitlyn’s mom and dad working behind the kitchen island. At one point, I counted five of their family members working simultaneously back there.
Kaitlyn’s job was cake decorating. The photos below show Ollie’s smash cake with a little Mickey Mouse in the center; the flat cake in the background is a similar, larger “cake in progress” for the rest of us.
When the food was ready and the tables and chairs were set up, all twenty members of the party crowd headed for the buffet and filled their plates with delicious food. I took the picture below after I finished eating, in case you’re wondering about the absence of great quantities of food on the tables.
To give our delicious dinner some time to settle, we trooped downstairs to take a family picture. Two of Kaitlyn’s sisters had already left for another engagement. Fortunately, her other sister brought a friend to the party. The friend graciously offered to take pictures on everyone’s cameras so we could all be in the photo. This is an unusual photo in my experience. Ollie is celebrating his first birthday with three sets of great-grandparents, as well as two sets of grandparents.
After the photo op, it was time to watch Ollie open his gifts. The ball pit was fun. Ollie was pretty happy to be surrounded by balls, and only crawled through the tunnel into the castle once.
In spite of all the new toys he received, Ollie proved himself to be a typical kid. He picked up a box and carried it around with him, occasionally putting a smaller toy into the box. Jeff and La give him an elaborate labyrinthine tower with tracks for cars to run downhill. That’s Jeff on the right reading the assembly instructions.
The quilt I made for Ollie was less captivating to him than the ball pit and the cardboard box, but he looked at it carefully, pointed, and said one of the three words in his vocabulary–“dog.” Way to go, Ollie!
After all the gifts were opened and examined by Ollie (and everyone else), it was time for Ollie to attack his smash cake. What fun! Notice that he even shared some of the cake with his mom. When Ollie felt sufficiently stuffed with cake, the rest of us enjoyed some birthday cake in a less messy manner.
Here’s Ollie in his Mickey Mouse birthday outfit–before he ate his cake. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in having the headband with the mouse ears on his head. I think I can speak for everyone present and say that Ollie’s first birthday party was a big success.
While I was working on my second quilt for Ollie’s birthday gift, I said to Ted that, given shipping costs, we could probably deliver the quilt in person for what it cost to make two quilts. I was kidding, but after a second or two, we looked at each other and said, “We should do that.” We texted Jeff and La right away to ask if it would work for them to have us visit for Ollie’s first birthday. They said, “Absolutely,” so we immediately bought plane tickets. (Much cheaper than shipping, right?)
The weather on the first day of our visit was perfect for a walk to check out the neighborhood. Ollie loves to go outside, so he was excited. Alex tried to make him look cool with a pair of sunglasses, but either Ollie’s not the cool type, or he just doesn’t like glasses, because he took them off immediately.
Provo is in the Utah Valley and is surrounded by mountains. From anywhere in the city, it looks like you can walk in any direction and run into a towering mountain. The mountain in this view from Jeff and La’s townhouse complex looks farther away than the one that stood behind the Airbnb where we stayed for our Christmas visit.
Our walk took us to the pool area. Safety is obviously important, as indicated by the warning beside the baby pool.
From there, we went to the clubhouse exercise room. Ollie was fascinated by the treadmill. Alex set it at the slowest speed–0.5 mph–and put Ollie on it. The little guy crawled like crazy to reach the other end, but every time he stopped crawling to reach for the frame, the belt took him back again. Then he tried walking. That worked better, but he still couldn’t get to his goal. He finally noticed that the side rails didn’t move, so he planted his right knee and hand on a rail. Unfortunately, his left hand and knee still kept going backward, forcing him to “half” crawl. Alex took pity on him and put him fully back on the treadmill. By the time we decided Ollie had enough exercise, he’d done a 20-minute workout.
After all that exercise, it was time to rest a bit. We went into the playroom where Alex and Ollie got comfortable on a toddler-size sofa.
Then it was time to eat. Just like his Grandma La, Ollie loves mashed potatoes. Not every bite made it into his mouth.
It only took a little while for Ollie to feel comfortable with Gigi and Grandpa Ted.
Of course, we played games. This time it was Mahjong, sheephead, Catch Phrase, and Skull King.
The big attraction was Jeff’s new VR headset and his new game, Beat Saber. Jeff and Kyra excelled at the game; the rest of us had a great time with lower scores. Jeff cast the game to the TV screen so we could all see what the player was doing. In the photo below, Kyra is leaning to the side to avoid being hit by the white rectangle coming at her. If it hits you, a message bluntly tells you that you failed. You don’t get loving support or encouragement from a video game.
I found Zack, Kyra, and Alex sitting together on the sofa and got a nice picture of them–except for the lights reflecting on Zack’s glasses.
All good things come to an end, and so did our visit. We can’t wait to see the family again, so until next time, lots of love to all of you.
Ted’s sister, Mutzie, (aka the Quilting Queen) gave Kari a small quilt when Kari was a toddler, and she also gave Kari a baby quilt for each of Kari’s three boys. Kari loves those quilts (she wore hers down to rags) and thought making a quilt for a baby gift would be a good idea for our next sewing project. Since Ollie’s birthday was coming up and since I’d be working with Kari on her quilt project, it seemed like a good idea for me to make a gift quilt for Ollie.
The last time I worked with a sewing partner was during the years my mom taught me how to sew. Now that Kari has decided it’s time for her to learn to sew, I have a sewing partner again and I’m really enjoying it. We start our mutual sewing projects by shopping for fabric and supplies together, a subset of sewing that’s also more fun to do with a partner. Kari chose fabrics in blues and yellows. She wanted to make a simple quilt for her first effort, so she planned to sew the edges together (wrong sides out) and turn the quilt through, then topstitch a “binding” edge and quilt it. She bought calico for the top fabric and fleece for the bottom because some of the quilts Mutzie made for the boys have a fleece backing and Kari loves the softness of it.
My choice of fabrics was calico in light and dark blues. Kaitlyn told me that Ollie looks good in blue and he loves his Mickey Mouse toy, so I decided to put some Mickey Mouse appliqués on his quilt. I planned to use a bias-cut binding around the edges. Kari’s quilt gift will stay in Missouri; mine is going to Utah. We chose a medium-weight batting for hers because more than that would be too much with the fleece backing; I went with a heavy-weight batting for Utah’s cold winters.
Things were looking good. We worked together on Kari’s quilt when she had time to come over for an afternoon and I worked on mine between our mother-daughter sessions. I’m not an artist, but I found a clipart Mickey Mouse-like outline online, zoomed the PC screen to my appliqué size, and traced a pattern.
I cut out the appliqués, fused them to the quilt top with HeatnBond, stitched around the edges, and admired my work. It looked good.
If this quilt ever becomes valuable (hah!), “Antiques Road Show” will raise its value with the provenance of a signature, so I decided to put my signature in a corner of the quilt. I estimated where the signature would fit without being covered by the binding and I stitched it. So far, so good.
Then I pinned the top fabric, the batting, and the bottom fabric together, basted them, and marked my quilting lines. I was pondering how to draw long straight lines when I remembered that we have a spare 7-foot piece of finished oak baseboard in the basement. I checked to make sure it wasn’t warped, then washed it off and used it as a long straightedge. It worked great for marking the quilting lines.
As I was marking the lines, I discovered a problem or, in Bob Ross terms, a happy accident. One of the lines went right through the signature. With my seam ripper in hand, I ripped out the signature and repositioned it. After that, it was exciting to start sewing quilting lines to make my project look more like a quilt than like two pieces of fabric with a filling. I laid the quilted quilt on the table, examined the lines for straightness, and saw some more happy accidents. There were so many crooked places in the lines that I wasn’t pleased at all. I got out my seam ripper (again) and sewed the lines (again), then checked how everything looked (again). There were still some areas that needed adjusting, so I ripped (again) and re-sewed (again). 😢 Bob R’s happy accident thing is wearing thin.
After the third round of stitching lines, the quilt looked ok–not great, but passable–so I moved on to the binding. I started pinning the binding near the signature and guess what . . . the binding covered the bottom edge of the signature. Dang it! How many happy accidents can one project have??? I ripped out the signature (again) and stitched it (again). Then I sewed the binding to the top of the quilt, mitered all the corners, folded it over and pinned it to the bottom, making sure I caught the bottom edge with my top pins. I was ready to “stitch in the ditch” to attach the back of the binding and finish the quilt.
But, . . . when I finished that job and turned the quilt over, almost half of my stitches in the ditches had failed to catch the edge of the binding, in spite of how carefully I’d pinned it. I’d been pretty patient about all the do-overs so far, but this was the last straw. I’d already clocked 43+ hours on this quilt because I’d ripped out so much of what I’d done and re-sewed it at least twice and sometimes three times. I’d had it! Good-bye, Bob Ross, and take your happy accidents with you!
I was tired of the way this quilt was behaving and I told Ted I sincerely believed it was cursed and the universe was giving me a message. I was not happy with how my (almost) finished quilt looked and I felt like I’d have to make excuses for all the things that were not up to my standards. I definitely didn’t want another seamstress to see it up close and I did not want to give work of this quality to Ollie. “Despondent” perfectly described my mindset at that moment. I think the heavy-weight batting was the problem. It was too thick for my sewing machine to do its best work and it definitely made the quilt heavy. Not warm and cozy heavy, but “take this thing off of me” heavy. I decided (with Ted’s full support) to start over, and this is what I did with the Mickey Mouse quilt.
I bought some lighter batting, chose a blue fabric with a puppy print (remember, Ollie looks good in blue), and a brown fabric for the backing. The print I chose won’t remind Ollie of his Mickey Mouse toy, but what little kid doesn’t like puppies? I decided to stay with my original basic idea–appliqués and a binding–but instead of messing with a bias binding, I chose to do a self-binding.
To complement the puppy-patterned fabric, I chose puppy paw prints for my appliqués. The Mickey Mouse appliqués were a single piece of fabric; the paw prints had five pattern pieces each. I printed copies of my pattern and cut the pattern pieces out of one of the sheets to create a template. It was so easy to place the template on the quilt fabric, fit the adhesive-bonded pieces into it, and iron them in place.
Never let it be said that I don’t learn from my mistakes. This time, I drew my quilting lines before sewing the signature in the corner. I knew exactly where to place it and it was in the right place the first time.
I put the three layers together, basted them, and sewed the quilting lines. Every single line was straight the first time! The heavy batting was definitely the problem. Folding over the edge for the self-binding was easy. I attached it with a decorative stitch, and that turned out very nicely. A feather stitch closed the open miters at the corners.
Voilà! In less than half the time I spent on the Mickey Mouse quilt, I had a quilt that I think is even cuter and that I was excited to give to Ollie. Anyone who wants to examine it–seamstress or not–is welcome to do so, because I’m proud of this work, not embarrassed by it. The trash can was the right place for the Mickey Mouse quilt and this one is for you, Ollie.
The trials and tribulations I experienced with the Mickey Mouse quilt were happy accidents after all. The puppy quilt turned out beautifully and, when Ollie saw it, he pointed at the puppies and said one of the three words in his current vocabulary–“dog.” Happy first birthday, Ollie.
The high temperature of 85 degrees today broke the old record of 79 degrees. It’s time to get outside and play. First order of business: hit the road on our bikes. We spent an hour on a 14-mile bike ride around the neighboring subdivisions. Yippee!
Second order of business: Sit outside to enjoy the sunshine. Check!
Third order of business: a happy surprise. Ted knows how much I enjoy spring, so every year he buys me a pot of spring bulbs. This year, it was yellow tulips. Happy spring!
