We're Ready!

Well, we're as ready as we're ever going to be! Olivia Grace will be here by Monday the 27th of June for certain unless she decides to make an appearance on her own. In the meantime, I will be mentally preparing, knitting, carb loading for labor energy (read: excuse to have Mark make me pasta) and getting one last trigger point massage to hopefully get things going.

I don't know if you can ever be ready for labor, but I feel oddly relaxed about it. Maybe I'm just to the point where I've had it up to my eyeballs with pregnancy. Carrying around a nine pound baby is difficult and not just mildly uncomfortable, to say the least! And of course, I'm ready to meet our new sweet little girl and excited to watch our family grow and change.

I've only managed to make a few hand-made items for Livie, including a minkee-backed Little Folks blanket (love the idea of minkee, sewing with it not so much), another voile receiving blanket, some terry cloth burpies and bibs. The teeny tiny sweater I knit for her may still be a bit too big for her to wear home from the hospital. It's a really simple, quick knit called the Small Things Sweater - great for last minute baby gifts. I used only one skein of madelinetosh dk in the color Gossamer I had left over from another project. It still needs buttons so I had better get moving on that.

I will truly have a new baby to show off to you when I see you here again! Hope you all can handle lots of baby pictures because I have a feeling that's what you'll be getting:)

Wow! I finished a quilt!

I've finally finished baby Olivia's play mat quilt! I got the piecing done rather quickly, and soon afterwards almost completely lost my sewing mojo. But it's all finished now, and I think it will look even better with a sweet little baby girl resting in the middle, don't you?

The pattern is called the Sixth Times a Charm from Anna Maria Horner's book Handmade Beginnings. I loved pulling all sorts of girly prints from my stash in hues of pink and yellow to slice into strips. But I must say, I was in complete shock of the amount of waste leftover and after cutting my first set of triangle components, I looked for another way to pull it off. Rachel has a great post here about her method of reducing scrappage. Even after making alterations, I couldn't even bare the thought of trimming this hexagon into a traditional rectangle quilt and leaving so many precious prints behind with no purpose. So in the end I decided to leave it in this shape, and actually I think it will get a lot of use this summer outdoors under a shady tree.

The quilting is minimal, and honestly I would've liked to have done more but my time at the sewing machine is extremely limited these days and this one just needed to be finished.  I'm trying now to work on bibs and burp cloths for the baby, which is proving to be a difficult task these days. Sitting at the sewing machine is do-able, but standing up cutting fabric and ironing leaves me feeling woozy and ill. But hopefully it won't be long now. I'm 37 weeks along, already dialated and the doctor thinks this girl is already tipping the scales at 7 1/2 pounds. Time to come out baby girl! So needless to say, I'm hoping my next blog post is one to show off our new addition to the family:)