Alex had her first halloween and she was such a good sport for it! She was dressed up as Pubert Addams (easiest costume I’ve made yet – a grand total of 2 hours to complete it!). Since it was designed after one of her jumpers it was nice and comfy (although she’s already growing out of it!).
ooooohhh what’s that?let’s see here, what do i have…
She got dressed up, with makeup and got to play with candy for the first time. Then we went trick-or-treating to a couple neighbor’s houses where she proceeded to dry to grab candy from bowls. Back home to hand out candy until bedtime, where she got to play with candy in our bowl for another 20 minutes. So I think halloween is her favorite holiday, she got very very mad when I took candy away from her (evidently wrappers taste really yummy).
busted!look at those cheeks!nanana boo boohanding out candy (yes that is the bowl right there for her to play in)bedtime!
And now it’s almost the weekend again! We’re very excited about this weekend, Ryan is going to demo the upstairs bathroom and soon to be laundry room. Then we plan to get new cement board down for flooring up there. After that it’s back to the kitchen to work on electrical and the floor down there (has to come up and cement board put down). We have one more weekend before thanksgiving and insulation so this weekend has to really count!
It went slowly, one panel at a time but this weekend I finished the last curtain panel for the nursery! I still want to make tie backs (for now I’m using ribbons), but they give great coverage and make her room dark enough for naps!
These are simply a brown fabric with beige dotted vertical lines and a white lining on the reverse. We’re using spring rods for now because we didn’t want to cover the trim up although if the rods fall down easily I may do some mounted rods on the inside of the windows instead of the springs (babies like to grab things!)
Second window has curtains now!And tied open with ribbons to let in some light for photographs 🙂
The nursery is still in disarray because the closet system is not yet in so I’m waiting on final pics of that (plus I want to paint the mural). In the meantime … here are some gifts I wanted to show. First a package arrived for Alexandra from her Gramma Bozik…
Birth Announcement in cross stitch and a new hat (that matches her blanket!). The cross stitch is on the dresser for now but I'm trying to decide where to hang it so it's proudly displayed!
And for my first Mother’s Day from Ryan…
A white gold locket so I can carry a picture of Alex with me always.
Yesterday we had a very busy day, with my allergy shots in the morning, walking the dog since we finally had nice weather to do so, then down to Worcester to pick up our stripped doors! Finally a stop at my aunt’s quilt shop and then stitch night. Needless to say we went to bed early last night!
Today we have mother’s group (find out how much Squishy ways – that’s her new nickname), then cleaning the house!
This weekend I had my second baby shower (my local friends threw one for me). They went with a theme for gifts and all got me/Itty baby books! I am in awe with the little library Itty has already now!
Books from my friends!
And of course some of them couldn’t resist a few other gifts – including a home made blanket from Harrin, Moby wrap (and owl toy) from Sarah, adorable winter hat from Erin, Red Sox gear from Denise (she and Harrin are big fans), and a necklace from Michele (not pictures because I was wearing it all weekend and it’s up on my dresser) 🙂
Non-book gifts - baby blanket is my favorite colors! Purple and green 🙂 of course!
And on Sunday while Ryan worked on the nursery (he had a lot of work work to do this weekend but did have some time to work on the nursery of course), I took a break and did a little work on my wallhanging I’m making for the baby. I started cutting out the applique pieces for the owl and tree blocks. I’d like to get this far enough along that I can have some hand work going in the evening when I’m too tired to do anything but sit on the couch. I think 2 blocks are ready for hand sewing almost (just have to cut the background fabric down a bit and center the pieces).
The owls will have a lot more details (eyes/beak and feet) but I just wanted to get started with the bodies and wings. The green fabric will be sashing, the pink/daisy fabric will be corner blocks and the purple/daisy will be the outside border me thinks.
I’ll have a separate post on nursery progress when I get some pictures of that – my phone is acting strange with pictures, sometimes I take them and they don’t show up as pictures later – a complete loss of the progress part since I don’t realize it at the time 🙁
I’m not even sure when I stitched this but I forgot to update the blog with a picture. I’m thinking this might have been a few weekends ago at this point.
Royalty ABC
I really like this piece because I can pick it up randomly and make decent progress. Until next time 🙂
Well this weekend was eventful but not quite productive 🙂 Ryan was away with his friends for a long weekend so after getting the house cleaned up and organized, and doing lots of baking I had a little girl party on Saturday (stitch friends). One of the treats I made was these homemade strawberry sorbet in chocolate cups treat:
Mmmmm - strawberry sorbet!
Fitzy had his cousin Buddy over to play for the weekend and they really are best buds.
Tuckered out on sunday 🙂
Saturday was a long day and after the girls all left I just crashed for the night (after clean up of course). Sunday I had big plans to be productive – but when i woke up I was still tired so the dogs and I chilled for most of the day (I finished up a good books with them cuddled on the couch). In the afternoon I did manage to do one little household item that’s been on my list for a long time…
We have this old switch (turn style) for the basement entryway light and it doesn’t always work (the wiring is old and loose). Since we put in new basement lights when we first bought the house I’ve been meaning to run a new light and switch off of that circuit so I could reliably see going down the first half of the basement stairs with laundry in my arms. Plus this means I could disconnect a bunch of the knob and tube that’s spliced numerous times for this light/switch and an old outlet.
Took a little while but we have a light. This isn’t permanent, when we remodel the kitchen we’ll be redoing this entryway a bit but who knows when that will be so for now we have a light!
New switch (see the turn style one to the right - that's now disconnected)New light fixture (the old one was definitely not up to par)
I also hung up a sheet to keep the dust more contained in our work area (since I’ll be sanding the drawers and shelves of the built-ins as soon as I’m motivated to).
Work area dust sheet 🙂
I spent Sunday evening over at my uncle’s house for my cousin Maia’s birthday. Buddy is going to stay the week with them so he made the trip with me. The dogs must have worn each other out because Fitz was pretty tired most of Monday when I worked from home. He has completely recovered however and thank goodness it was daycare day – he was driving me nuts this morning!
And last night I decided to do something fun and make a baby quilt for Itty Bitty! I actually only intended to get the strips cut but it went so quickly I couldn’t stop myself. This is the same pattern I used for the crib quilt for little Jason but this time I used all flannels. I just have to figure out what to use for backing and binding now. The one unfortunate thing was that I could only use 10 flannels so I had to limit my choices and now i have leftover favorites so I may need another quilt. But after I finish this up I need to make an owl wallhanging. Maybe I’ll make burp cloths or bibs something with my scrap pieces.
Fabrics that I selected for the quiltQuilt top all put together (crib size)
The corners of the blocks definitely do not line up well but the nature of flannels is that they are stretchy so that was challenging and since the quilt is so busy I wasn’t worried about it. Plus I plan to lay it on the floor for tummy time – not exactly important that it’s perfect 🙂 This quilt took only 3 hours to cut and piece (for future reference)!
With the amount of work ryan had to do this weekend, he really surprised me when he said he’d do house work on sat and just work Sunday. I had not been getting my hopes up with the late nights he’s been pulling that he’d have time this weekend.
Saturday we got to work on the drawers, ryan hung the last bit of hardware for the drawer slides, then we built the last 4 drawers! Next we made face frames for them all with a nice routed top and attached them. All 10 drawers are finally done! Just doors to finish up and the built-ins will be done.
The right hand cabinet with finished drawers!The middle cabinets with finished drawersAnd the left hand cabinet with drawers - that's 10 total!
After that we put together the glider we got for the nursery (our first nursery purchase). For now it will live in our room because we don’t have a place for it and Fitz is not a fan when it moves 🙂
As if that wasn’t enough for a day, Ryan said he would hang one of the tvroom doors if I could find the door and door frame I wanted to use. Unfortunately this was harder than I though and he almost put in three frames before we found the real matching frame for the original door. (The frame was hiding). And we have a door (Fitz is also not a fan of this 🙂 )
Door to the front entry hung! This swings out into the entryway as it originally did.
After that we settled in for some chili for dinner and went to bed early. Sunday Ryan had to work so I decided I would do some spackling and then end the day with some sewing while he watched the big game. There was one section up by the crown molding that needed to be spackled so I got 2 coats on that (maybe one more needed) and I got the closet corners all taped and a skim coat on both the left side and back walls (including the ceiling).
I think in general I need one more skim coat on every surface and the closet will be ready to be sanded! Considering how this started I’m very impressed with it.
Corner taped and another coat on the seam of this wall. Taping that curved seam was HARD!Ceiling got a good skim coat as well as that left wall. This side did not get taped since it was in decent shape (not great shape) but didn't have a hole that needed taping at least.And a view of the back wall, after this I actually skim coated that whole descending wall so everything except the right wall has a skim coat or more now.
While I was skim coating I think Ryan was looking for a break because he said that if I got everything set up and found a door and door frame (for sure this time) he would install the other door in the tvroom! I dropped everything and went on the hunt. This door originally was replaced by a newer door so I had to go through the collection of ‘removed’ doors and frames to find one for this spot – and we were in luck!
Door from the tvroom to the kitchen area installed!A view of the built-ins and the door hung 🙂
That leaves only 1 more door (which I’ve already picked out) to be hung in the tvroom – the closet door. It’s kind of nice to wait until the spackling is done though in there first (almost!). We can start baseboards (which will make the built-ins look more finished) anytime now!
At this point I was going to caulk the built-ins but the game was about to start and I would have been blocking the tv so instead I went up to my sewing room and spent the next 4 hours making up a crib skirt for my sister’s nursery (hey it’s never too late – well it’s not too late yet – my nephew does still use a crib) 🙂
Pleated crib skirt, the main material is white with green stripes and the pleats are solid green that match the stripes nicely.A better view of the pleats.
The only reason that took so long is that I overlocked every seam so it could put up with harsh washing (not that it will but just in case). This probably wasn’t necessary but I had the time and it was good practice (i’ll have to make one of these for my nursery soon and being a dust fanatic it will definitely get washed a lot). AND I used up 2 spools of thread almost on this – overlocking uses a lot of thread! Me thinks I need a surger soon 🙂
What a great amount of progress we made! I can really see a finish in sight for the tvroom which is good since pretty soon we’ll be switching gears to start the nursery and focusing on that room!. I’ve planned out what I want to do storage wise in the closet in the tvroom which has motivated me to finish that soon so I can get some stuff stored in there (I currently have no closets downstairs at all!).
What a strange weekend we had. Saturday I was feeling so much better from my cold finally so we worked on the house (knowing we had only one day this weekend since Ryan had a bunch of work work to do on sunday). First we ran to the dump to drop off the final loads from last weekend, then over to pick up our new windows from Marvin.
Home again we decided to continue the demolition in the upstairs diningroom so we could put up the new wall for the hallway. It was very messy demo due to the insulation in the ceiling and we only did half of the ceiling (just enough to put up the new wall), since the master bathroom will not be done for a long while and i’d rather get the floor down before we demo the rest (it’s not fun cleaning demo debri from the upstairs and downstairs due to cracks in the subfloor). The demo went pretty quickly (poor Ryan had to do all of it) but I helped with bagging it all up and now we have another dump load for another weekend waiting outside (hopefully before it snows!).
With that completed I spent about an hour vacuuming up the exposed insulation and the debri. Finally we started the new wall. We left a few of the studs out so there’s a makeshift doorway to get through for now (since we’re not finishing the bathroom for a while we’ll use it as our ‘guest room’ while we work on the nursery – need to put the bed someplace!).
Finally with the wall in and secured to both the upper and lower joists it was time to remove the jacks to see if the floor had any less movement or not. It has definitely improved, it still moves (the joists included) if you jump on it so we may need to take future measures but there was definite improvement over before.
Ceiling demolition
And the other sideNew wall started (still needs 2 more studs and blocking but it's enough for now).
Unfortunately on Sunday, even though we knew Ryan wouldn’t be able to work on the house I still had hopes to get a few things done but I woke up with a sore throat and headache (cold really doesn’t want to go away). The sore throat was probably due to not drinking enough water on saturday because staying hydrated sunday certainly helped. So while Ryan worked I crashed on the couch with some Pride & Prejudice and stitched as well as napped.
Stitching Progress update. Making good progress on this piece.
Then the stomach bugs came to our house. Kind of. Fitz was the first to go down. Sometime after dinner he got sick (right in his bed too), and it was horrible. He continued to get sick 4 times total over the next few hours and we were on high alert for any sign he might need to rush outside. I have a nice big load of dog blankets that need to be washed (waiting to see how today goes first). Poor Fitzy. I finally took away his water (since he was just throwing it back up) and he was okay through the night.
Of course then later in the evening I got a bit of a bug (or just an IBS attack). I was up till 3am with uncontrollable shivers every 20 minutes or so. Not fun. Poor Fitz and I are quite the pair. So I decided to work from home today due to my lack of sleep and wanting to be able to keep an eye on Fitz (who is acting fine but wants to eat grass now – can’t find any! – which makes me think he’s not better yet). He is allowed a little water (although he hasn’t touched it yet) and I gave him some yogurt with peanut butter for breakfast so we’ll see how that goes. If he doesn’t get sick he’ll get rice and chicken for dinner tonight. Hopefully whatever it was has passed and he can go to his new daycare tomorrow.
I myself am feeling better, I feel like I always do after an IBS attack so that’s probably what it was (from eating too much yesterday?). I’ll take it easy with what I eat today and stay hydrated. I should be able to work most of the day (maybe a short nap at some point). And poor Fitz is stuck in the room with me so I can keep an eye on him.
That was our weekend – so much fun 🙂 I am very excited about the house progress, we can now put down hardi-backer in the master bathroom area and make it into a temporary guest room with sheets for walls and the bed moved in there. Then the nursery clean out project begins and eventually we’ll demo that room and get it going!
I think being sick means I’m in the mood to stitch finally. I continued working on the Royalty ABC banner by Jeannette Douglas, getting the first page completely done (of 4).
Page one done
I’m only making minor modifications here and there. The crowns for example, while they’re all different, I didn’t like that hte one on the right had a queen stitch on top and the left one didn’t so I had them both have queen stitches and made them the same color too. I did keep the styling different but I’m not completely sold on that either. I like symmetry.
And Fitz ripped the head off of his xmas snake stuffed animal – too funny. He’s finally gotten to destroying some of his toys (including is favorite orange squeaky ball) so I bought him a tough chew squeaky ball instead and we’ll see how long the stuffed animals last. It does take a while for him to rip them (the snake has been a favorite since he got it because it has LOTS of squeakies).
Well – it wasn’t allergies – I got another cold this winter! No house progress yesterday, instead we went to the mall to get some quick shopping done. Then we snuggled in to relax for the day re-watching season 1 of Downton Abbey (since it starts up again next week!). I actually got some stitching done (that was as much as I could handle).
I decided to work from home today, I feel up to working (now anyway, we’ll see if a headache gets worse or not being on the computer all day), but I wasn’t up to the drive and I had to sleep in a bit since I got very little sleep last night (I hate sleeping sitting up but it had to be done to get any sleep at all).
As for stitching, I worked on my Royalty ABC pattern by Jeannette Douglas, a piece I did in a Celebrations class a few years ago, I haven’t touched it since the class but got 3 bands almost done (the basket is almost done).
