Quilting and knitting

Spent the weekend working on my quilt. What a nightmare! I am not doing such a great job on my first quilt. Lesson learned: it's all in the planning. I should have drawn a better pattern and done a better job of planning out all the pieces I needed ahead of time. I'm getting close but it is just taking forever... I went to the fabric store to buy backing fabric and batting for the quilt. I bought cotton batting thinking I'd rather go natural. When I got home and read my Quilting for Dummies book it mentioned that a disadvantage of cotton is it can shrink. It suggested pre-shrinking the batting. My gut told me not to do it... but I trusted the book. Sure enough the batting was ruined in the washing machine, even though it says 'washable' on the packaging. Andrew insists I should take it back....but I hate confrontation so I haven't decided what to do yet. I'm not sure if Hancock Fabrics will refund my money or try to convince me that I didn't use the batting correctly. Oh well....there goes $25. The whole cotton batting incident but me in a really foul mood yesterday. I haven't even mentioned how my quilt backing fabric is now covered in cotton lint. Getting it off should be lots of fun. ugh...

I did find this super cute fabric on sale at Hancock. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it but I had to have some.


I also finished my first knitting project! A baby blanket for my friend Stefanie. The pattern is out of the Stitch N Bitch book; Big Bad Baby Blanket. I used 8 skeins of Dale of Norway Baby ULL 100% merino wool that I got from Halcyon Yarns. Since you hold two skeins together I used one colored cream and one colored tan to get a varigated pattern. It worked really well, I am very happy with it. Stefanie is due any day now so I must get it in the mail. I hope the new baby likes it.


I've started knitting project #2... but I'm not going to tell you what it is...it's a surprise.

Last night Andrew and I watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was a fun movie and artistically very interesting however it often seemed like a rip off of multiple sci-fi movies...like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Matrix, etc, etc. I give it one thumb up.