Personal Post – Page 3 – Sew Bittersweet Designs

And thus endeth the neverending floor saga!

6 Comments / Personal Post / By Melissa Dunworth

I am happy to say that we have new floors! And they are absolutely stunning! I just hope my hubby likes them as much as Anne, my mom and I do!

Welcome to my sewing room! This is the cleanest it has been in four years! I really only took this picture to show my husband. He asked how it felt for it to be clean and I promptly told him it felt strange and uncomfortable and as soon as the movers arrived I would mess it all up! Not sure he thought that was as funny as I did!

And of course, a shot of my sewing room wouldn’t be complete with out my pretty quilt wall. This room is now jam packed with all of my sewing things and it is even still mostly clean though a bit more crowded.

I decided that new floors deserved a trip up to Ikea to celebrate the occasion and look at what followed me home:

I love them because they perfectly match our dinning room set and Anne loves the novelty of eating at the kitchen counter. I do think that the hubs will like this particular change for sure!

Stay tuned, I have been playing with some FMQ and have lots to show you this week!

Have a wonderful Tuesday!

Email and Blocks

13 Comments / Do.Good Stitches, Personal Post / By Melissa Dunworth

Have you ever just felt so behind you don’t know if you can dig out of the chasm that has been created. That is how I feel. The first 2.5 weeks of this deployment have been so difficult, much more so than I anticipated. Largely because Anne is so much older this time and it is taking a deeper emotional toll on her than the last two. Age really does matter. I am dreadfully behind on email. I’m going to try and catch up this week. If I haven’t replied to a comment, please know I am reading all of them, I’m just not really finding the time to sit down and respond to each one.

As terrible as it sounds, while I am behind on email, I am not behind on sewing, mainly because when Anne is napping it is exceptionally therapeutic for me to sit behind my machine and sew my heart out. It makes all the pain and exhaustion go away.

Here are my bee blocks from August for Do Good Stitches, I am happy to report they were even mailed on time!

Have a happy hump day everyone!

Where Have I Been?

21 Comments / Personal Post / By Melissa Dunworth

I know I have been a negligent blogger lately, but in exchange I have been very involved in what has been going on with my family. As most of you know, we are a military family. My husband is a US Soldier and sometimes his job takes him to far off places for long stretches of time. Last week we started another deployment. There is nothing easy about this time in our lives. I wish I could sugar coat it but I can’t. We all miss each other terribly but are doing our best to buck up and move forward. Our last night together we took some silly photos together to help make us smile and remember while we are apart. I thought I would share a couple with you.

A nice simple one (my mom’s favorite family pose):

Then we got silly:

Then we played with some of the cool settings on my new iPad:

And I really love this one!

We miss each other, but we are getting by. This is Anne’s third deployment and she is a trooper though I wish she didn’t have to be.

My goal for this month has fallen to the wayside as I have focused more on things that make Anne happy, we are working on a Halloween project that I will show off next week, but the Elsa dress has made no progress except the purchase of fabrics. Luckily I have 2 more months until it NEEDS to be done.

School starts soon, which means we will have a routine again. I think this will be the best thing for both of us. Days that are full of activities and people.

So that’s where I have been and what’s going in our lives. What’s going on with you?

My First Quilting/Sewing Contest – The Thurston County Fair

20 Comments / Personal Post, Quilting Competition / By Melissa Dunworth

One of my personal sewing goals this year was to enter a quilting contest. I think the reason I picked this as a goal was because while I do put myself out there all the time on this blog, I don’t put myself out there for “judging”. Judging is hard. You worry if what you do is good enough. I’m really glad that I decided to participate if only for the experience. I’m not sure I will do it again but it was certainly fun yesterday to walk into the hall where the quilts are displayed at the county fair and see my quilts hanging.

I entered Anne’s Easter Dress into the fair just for fun. This is the dress that I am probably most proud of making because the bodice is fully lined (a first for me). I won a blue first place ribbon for her dress. It was so cute when Anne saw it yesterday and asked “mommy, is it going to stay here forever?” I had to reassure her repeatedly that we would be picking it up on Monday.

After finding her dress, I went on a hunt for my quilts and found my Rainbow Star Burst quilt.

I entered this quilt into the lap quilt lot for the machine pieced, machine quilted category and won a blue first place ribbon.

I ended up being kind of silly and entering two quilts in the same category, so they were competing against each other.

The Sew Intertwined Quilt was awarded a third place ribbon in the same category, Machine Pieced, Machine Quilted.

Ribbons aside, the most fun part was seeing all the quilts hanging up! I get to pick my quilts and Anne’s dress up on Monday and I will get a feedback form from the judges. I am excited to see what they have to say. I’m hoping for truly constructive criticism so that I can improve my work.

In the meantime I have 20 hours left to figure out my goal for August. Guess I better get on that! Don’t forget to link your finish up for July!

Oh, and I apologize for the crappy cell phone pictures! I brought my camera with me and took one picture and then got a nice little message saying “memory card full”. Seriously?!? I’m hoping to head back tomorrow with my parents (who are flying in this afternoon for a weekend visit), this time I will bring an empty memory card!

Have a great Thursday!

An Easter Surprise for Anne

13 Comments / Clothes, Easter, Personal Post / By Melissa Dunworth

Last Monday I told Anne that we were going to go on a long car ride and pick something up the next day. On Tuesday afternoon I got her into the car, brought our tablet along with us for entertainment purposes and headed out for a 50 mile trek in rush hour traffic to pick up her “package”. We got to the airport with about 15 minutes to spare before the “package’s” plane landed. Anne saw the luggage carousels and assumed immediately her package was a bag of some sort, imagine her surprise when she saw my mom.

Nevermind…you don’t have to imagine it! I will just show you the look on her face!

Her surprise was her Nana! Best look of joy ever! We spent the week running wild! We went to the Seattle Pacific Science Center, we went out for her very first grown up tea, and we drove out to Bremerton to visit family. On Easter Sunday, she got all dolled up in the dress I made her and we had a wonderful dinner at home with my cousins and mom visiting. It was absolutely lovely!

The dress turned out so different than I intended. I bought the wrong sized pattern (3 sizes too big) so I had to change the bodice sizing. Then I decided I didn’t like the collar so I removed that from the pattern all together. I also decided I didn’t like the skirt or the way that was assembled and I changed that too. I guess you could say I have finally become comfortable enough with clothes to do my own thing! WOOHOO!

Here is a shot of Anne with the Easter Bunny. She LOVES the Easter bunny and so do I because I get a nice picture of her once a year without her screaming bloody murder like she does with Santa!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!!!