distractions!

I keep forgetting to blog, and then feeling guilty when I remember. It's the curse of Instagram, I suppose - everything is so instant and the connections there are so great. I really love my "Instafriends".

I cleaned out the toyboxes this week and Piper had somehow found her little mermaid crayon pouch. (Where she hides these things I will never know.) It started with this star block, so long ago...

And now I'm drawing it up to make a pattern. Because I don't have enough else to do! Ha. So I pulled out all my light or white background mermaids.

The goal is to have eight patterns written and ready for sale in actual real live quilt shops (and here!) by the end of July. The good news is, I have eight quilt patterns' worth of notes in my dot paper notebooks. The bad news is, they're in Jennese. That is, my incoherent note babbling. I am terrible at taking good notes when I'm making a quilt! YIKES!!

But we're getting there. One step at a time.

The girl-child is sick; she went off to the doctor yesterday with DOG in tow. Our doctor is amazing, and clued right into my hints that maybe DOG needed a checkup too. So we listened to DOG's heart, then Piper's, then DOG's back, then Piper's...but we hit a snag with the tongue depressor. Piper bit down and would not let go! (DOG doesn't have a mouth that opens, see?) Eventually the doctor wriggled the tongue depressor in enough that it made Piper uncomfortable and she gagged but the doctor got a quick look. One tonsil has pus on it (gross!) and that's why she's refusing food. We are to keep an eye on her and if it gets worse, come back for antibiotics.

But it is scary when my little ones are sick, because it just doesn't happen that often!

Mr Poppleton and I celebrated five years of being married this month! We have been together for just about ten years. How crazy is that? I can't believe we have been together a third of our lives. It feels like forever and it feels like not long enough. It probably isn't fashionable to say this, but I really do feel like we are soulmates. There's no one in this world I love so much as him.

Except these little same-sames. Look at their identical faces. You'd think they were related or something!

And another cute picture of me and the mister, since we actually got TWO anniversary dates this year - our customary breakfast at bills in Darlinghurst, and a sneaky dinner date thanks to our excellent two babysitters Kat and Kris!

Since the fifth anniversary is "wood", I got my fella a woodworking/bushcraft knife, and he got me these coveted hexagon boxes from White Fox & Co.

Back to craft. Okay, I've had this amazing handbag for about two years and the lining (purple dotty cotton) tore and ripped and was generally crap. SIGH. I unpicked it, determined to replace it, and then left it alone for a ridiculous amount of time. It's all good, I had a 241 Tote as backup. But Sunday I was determined to get this handbag back in action, so I pulled out my very special favorite Katherine Codega fabric and cut into it.

A few treasured linen scraps became the pockets and now my bag is as GOOD as NEW!

I've also been working on bee blocks for the Aussie Modern Instabee. Here is April's...

And here is May's. I need to get these in the post, post-haste!

I really like making these blocks. I need to finish my AusModBee blocks too. It's really embarrassing how late I am.

But of course I started yet another dang project. This time I was inspired by a stack of mint and peach fabric. I did a mini-LQS-crawl and the quilt popped into my head unbidden. An Arkansas Crossroads quilt. They're dead easy to make!

This is my minty peachy stack. Isn't it divine? I quickly outgrew my little bucket.

So that's what I've been working on!

I finished one of the quilt tops required for the show and the second one is on my to-do list for this afternoon (after I get my Arkansas Crossroads quilt cut out). It's improv so I'm dead scared of finishing it but I'm really excited about the QUILTING. Which reminds me, I REALLY HAVE TO BLOG ABOUT MY FRAME. Especially after going to the excellent Modern Quilt Show in Berry last-last weekend and talking to another quilter friend (one I have a huge quilty crush on PS) about the untold struggles of frame and long-arm quilting. Having started FMQing on a domestic, you sort of hear people going on about how getting a long-arm is a target, like it'll be easier and you'll click (and how having a domestic set up is harder) but there are aspects of both that need examining. Time to get my critical boots on, that's for sure...but it requires more thought and time then I have today. :)

So I'm off to get some of the finer details of this pattern written...hoping to be back here soon!

Cheers!

Penny x