Baby Quilter in the Making

Well, did you survive the time change? My husband says he doesn't know why it bothers me so much, as I have the time and freedom to just take a nap if I want to. Actually, I'm more apt to get up with the light, so it seems I'm being lazy not to be up til almost 8 am. By June I'll be up before 6 am to go for a walk while it's still relatively cool. 

But Daylight Savings Time means I can be at evening church events again, like Ladies Night Out. With my sparkly ghost vision, driving at night has the potential to be hazardous, and I hate to be dependent on someone else for a ride. I know people would be happy to help; it's just hard to give up my independence--she said while being married to a stroke survivor who has no use of his left side. Insert eye roll.

We had a really warm, nice week the end of Feb. Ziva and I were able to get a couple of good walks in, before the freezing temps and blustery wind chills shooed us back inside. I have no idea what this plant was, but just had to get a picture.

Of course, I don't know what kind of bush this one is, either, but the flowers were just so dainty yet hardy, I snapped it, too. Couldn't get many, because Ziva was running out of patience, but I'm toying with printing these out and framing them. I think they'd fill a small wall space really nicely.

Hazel spent a weekend with us, I think it was over President's Day. She loves to explore in my craft/sewing room, and now that she's older, I feel more comfortable letting her do that without worrying she'll poke herself with sharp scissors or pins, or bump her head on the metal corner of the ironing board while I work on small projects. I love that she's so into arts and crafts and working with her hands. 

Soon she declared she wanted to make a quilt. I have several small quilts she uses as doll blankets, and she decided she wanted a large one for her mom. So we started the process. First we went through my fabric bins and auditioned some scraps, and she actually has a very good sense of color! We didn't have a pattern chosen, because I didn't foresee her getting very far with this, but hey, we all start somewhere, right? 

I sat her down at my machine, put the pedal on a small stool so she could sit in my chair and reach it, and gave her a lesson on machine sewing. She learned how to turn the machine on and off and not adjust the feed dog by mistake, straight forward sewing, reverse stitching, needle down, and why you need to know where your thread is when you start sewing. I threaded the machine and showed her the bobbin but I thought we'd gone over about as much learning as she could do in one session, so we grabbed some scrap fabric and let her just sew on those awhile.

After about half an hour, she informed me she thought she'd better start with the basics before making a quilt. If I'd said that to her, she would have thought I was holding her back. Instead, I agreed that was a good decision, and we moved on to other things.

But I am so delighted she wants to learn to sew. It was not something Dawn was interested in, and actually, the only C she ever made in college was in the costume design class she took in theater arts. It wasn't until it came time to make Halloween costumes for her daughter that Dawn ever voluntarily did any sewing, and then it was whatever she could do by hand.

I scored a Brother sewing machine for Dawn from the Buy Nothing group, but we've not been able to coordinate our schedules for a teaching session. Hazel already knows more about machine sewing than her mom, so she may end up being the one to use the Brother. With her great sense of color and her already wild imagination, I can't wait to see where she goes with this!