Tula Tuesday: Blocks 59 and 60

While it might feel like my entire life has been consumed by watching my kids participate in youth theater

(Annie in a goth version of Romeo and Juliet) or play baseball

(Henry’s team took 3rd place in their end of season division tournament), I’ve managed to get a tiny bit of sewing. Thank goodness I don’t have any major deadlines!

Even with a vacation, 2 rounds of theater camp for Annie, and little league baseball including a major tournament for Henry, I finished blocks 59 and 60! Which means I’m still on track with my goal of 10 blocks/month for 10 months. I didn’t sew anything else this month, at all, but that’s okay.

Block 59. I used the original fabric scheme, and adapted the colors to make them my own.

That Parisville dotty print os one of my faves, and I’ve found it hard to work into these blocks, so I was happy to find a spot for it.

Block #60- I used that same Amy Butler Love print that I, yes, love, so much… and this time I mixed it up with a very bright blue.

My photos of both blocks are lousy, but the blocks really are straighter than they look… Part of being so busy this month was running out of time to take even crappy cell phone photos of the blocks, and also being too tired to care. Did I mention that Henry played 4 baseball games in 50 hours over the weekend- and in the middle of all that we had to drive to the mountains and back to pick Annie up from sleep away camp? And the baseball was so intense that I couldn’t even manage to knit while they played?!

I need a week off.

Meanwhile, here’s 7 months of Tula Pink City Sampler blocks for your enjoyment:

Do you have ay Tula progress to share? Link up below.

 

I’m linking up with Sew Cute Tuesday and Let’s Bee Social.  And maybe next week, I’ll have some more sewing to show you, Maybe. (Don’t hold your breath- the Denver County Fair is this weekend, and that promises to be so much fun!)

Colorful Colorado is Coloradical

I thought I’d share some highlights from our mini break last week…

Pillowcases: The Final Frontier

Do you remember a Sunday Stash way way back (okay, just back in March…I’m a drama queen) when I showed you some fabulous nerdy novelties?

I *finally* busted out the Star Trek fabrics for their intended purpose, to make pillowcases for Henry. He’s now got a super nerdy bed, what with the Trek pillowcases and the Minecraft blanket…

 

I think he likes them…

Meanwhile, my husband REALLY liked the fabrics. I don’t really want Star Trek on our bed, so I came up with another idea. I’ve long wanted to make place mats for the entire fam a la this blog post by Weeks Ringle. But then I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have the kids help pick their own fabrics and sew their own slabs? (Thank you, Cheryl, for that term and technique!) And lord knows, we have enough bits of leftover novelty fabrics to make that very wild and fun. So Rich can have a Star Trek place mat, and our bed can stay matchy matchy, so, win win, right? Maybe we’ll even start that this weekend.

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday, TGIFF, and Fabric Frenzy Friday…

 

Nearly Wordless Wednesday: Maya

Through my husband’s job, we were lucky enough to have after-hours, nearly empty opportunity to tour the Denver Museum of Nature and Science‘s new exhibit, Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed. It.is.awesome.  Go.now. (If you can…)

(PS, okay a few more words… These are all subpar cellphone pix. I didn’t bother to take the real camera, as 99% of the time you can’t take photos inside of a special exhibit. This turned out to be that 1%. Oh, well… can’t win em all.)

A Giant Creep(er)

Somehow, I forgot to tell you all about my biggest finish of 2013- actually, the biggest knitted finish of my life to date! What?!

Pinterest made me do it.

Last year I was poking around, and I saw this blanket by Own Two Hands. And I fell in love. So simple and graphic, and sure to make my Henry the happiest kid in the world. He loves Minecraft and would play it all day every day, if only his pesky mom (hi!) didn’t set limits on his computer time… Cuddling with a Creeper blanket would make him so happy.

In September, I went to Michaels and bought a giant batch of their Loops and Threads Impeccable solid yarn. Washable and inexpensive to boot. The best kind of yarn for a project for a smelly 10 year old boy…

And I started knitting. I knit rows instead of individual squares (because the pattern is made up of 100 squares, and that amount of sewing up would have killed me), and I seamed them up as I finished them. (I was afraid otherwise I would end up spending all of Xmas eve seaming like mad…) I made my squares slightly bigger than called for in the original pattern because, um, I can’t remember why.

Slowly, the blanket grew. I only worked on it at home, because it was just too big and too much yarn to carry around with me.

And a few days before Xmas, I was done.

And so I wrapped it up, and put it under the tree.

I think he liked it.

Now, it lives on his bed in place of a quilt. When we changed sheets last week, we left of the crazy pile of stuffed animals long enough to get an action shot of the blankie. Here’s the Ravelry link to my project, if you are interested…

But you know what this means, right?

In the interest of fairness, it’s time to make a new giant project for Annie. Pinterest to the rescue- I’m thinking, a Tardis quilt (bed sized) adapted from THIS beauty.

Wordless Wednesday: Mythbusters Exhibit

WIP Wednesday: Creeper Hats

In the realm of knitting all things Creeper, last week I cast on an adorable hat for Annie. The pattern is a freebie from Krista Sodt, and I found it while on a Minecraft-themed Pinterest binge…

It’s a super fast and simple knit- started Friday, finished Monday. So why on earth am I calling this a WIP Wednesday post?

Well, does that kid look like Annie to you? Nope. Turns out the hat was way to small for her, so… younger brother scores. I was planning on making his next, anyway. So I have cast on again, with many more stitches, and hat #2 should fit child #1.

Also, after 48 hours, Henry “loved” that hat so much that the pompom exploded right off the end. We think it may have something to do with the flipping of the hat back and forth repeatedly… And tugging on the pompom.  Sometimes with his feet. And trying to sleep in the hat. But on the bright side, before he killed it, his grandma took him to the mall, where the Hot Topic employees ooohed and aahhed over my skillz. What a claim to fame!

 

Bust a Myth

Opening at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science tomorrow is: Mythbusters, The Explosive Exhibition. My kids are total Mythbusters junkies- before they discovered Doctor Who, it was all they wanted to watch, and it still ranks up there even now. So the exhibit has been very anticipated in our house. We were really sad to realize we wouldn’t be able to attend the sold out meet and greet with Tory and Kari at the members preview…

But then we found out about this! A meet and greet at one of my favorite pizza places! Win Win!

So we had a yummy dinner, and then got to chat with Tory and Kari. Who turned out to be some of the nicest, most gracious people, ever. They signed photos for my kids, and for some friends of theirs who weren’t with us at the time, and even Henry’s old, outgrown, “Buster Does All My Stunts” shirt… I’m going to turn the shirt into a pillowcase for him now. Tory even noticed that Henry was wearing his (ever present) Minecraft shirt, and told him all about a new video on their web series, where he blows up a creeper!

The kids were totally starstruck, and so very happy. We’re now counting down until we can get into the exhibit… Whee!

Dalektable

My Henry turned the big 1-0 back on Friday the 13th. Celebrating his birthday was tempered by the fact that my grandma passed away earlier the same week, and we spent Henry’s actual birthday flying to the funeral.

There was a bittersweet upside to this sad situation- for once we got to celebrate a birthday with lots of relatives (no one but my mom lives near us…) And it’s always nice to balance a funeral with a celebration of life…

Meanwhile, we planned Henry’s celebration with his friends for a few weeks out- yesterday, in fact. This year has been the year of Doctor Who for our family- we started watching the show all together, and both my kids are now Whovians. The party itself was at a local laser tag place- not too expensive, close to home, and hey, it means I don’t have to clean the house or entertain the kids myself… 3 of Henry’s last 4 parties have in fact been there. So while I didn’t plan anything too elaborate for this party, I did want to give it a little Whovian touch.

I’ve spent a little(!) bit of time on Pinterest looking for great Doctor Who ideas, and I found the following cupcakes:

 

Henry LOVES Daleks. Loves. See?

(That’s him cuddling with his new, plush Supreme Dalek on one of the legs of the flight to the funeral.) And these cupcakes looked simple enough even for me- just print and cut out the wrappers, then tape them together and stick in a cupcake.

But somehow, I couldn’t get my cupcakes, standard size, to fit into the wrappers right side up. So we had upside down Daleks!

No idea why mine didn’t fit in the right way. But, even though he totally noticed that they were upside down, Henry still loved them. Only one of his guests actually knew what a Dalek was, so no one else noticed. Phew. I was pleased that the Laser Quest party room table was darn near Tardis Blue!

I would have felt like a super cool mom, but the people in the next party room over had gone all out with a Minecraft theme- and Minecraft is the only thing that Henry likes as much as Doctor Who. He and some of his little guests were staring longingly into the Minecraft room. Sigh. Maybe next year…

Although, when he sees what I making him for Xmas, I think I’ll be back at the top of the “Coolest Mom Ever” charts..

Wordless Wednesday: Underwater Edition