Emerging Nursery Ideas

I thought I'd make this post's subject clear so you can skip if you have zero interest in my thoughts on textiles and sewing projects for our front bedroom-soon-to-become-nursery.  Boy or girl, I am not repainting this room because 1) we just did that, with no-VOC paint, no less and 2) I love that shade of blue, darn it, and I wouldn't paint it pink even if we were having a girl.  So there. 

Selvedge Studio had a big sale over the weekend and while browsing, I decided that I am totally loving the new textile collection that Liesl Gibson of Oliver + S designed.  Here are some of the prints that called my name:

Fun and playful without being all fairy princesses or cars or whatever stereotypically gendered stuff you find when you search for children's prints and patterns.  So I'm working on a set of swaddling blankets like those I made for a friend last year.  Also valances for the two windows in the yellow scalloped print.  Then maybe some scraps stretched over wooden frames as art.  Like I said, it's all still emerging.
But I start to get myself into trouble drooling over all the gorgeous projects The Purl Bee has created for babies using Liberty of London prints.  These textiles are, as my mother would say, very dear.  And yet I have to have just a 1/2 yard of 2 prints to make these frogs:

And this bib set:

Clearly I need to wait on this project until the big reveal of gonads next month.  Meanwhile lets hope I can remember how to thread the sewing machine needle and pick up the thread from the bobbin.  It's been a long sewing hiatus and I am going to warm up on the swaddling blankets tomorrow night.  We are living a wild life, I tell you, wild!

Big Changes in 2011

Happy New Year!  I thought 2009 was a year of major change for us.  We got married:

 

Then we moved across the country and I started a new job:

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That felt like a lot.  In 2010, we took on home ownership and spent months renovating our new house and yard:

It was exciting to see this transformation, but it too felt like a lot.  And yet none of this compares with what we're going to accomplish in 2011:  We're going to become parents!  That's right, we're going to unleash the first Mountain Man offspring on the world in mid-July.  If you noticed my blogging dry spell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, yes, it was directly related to half my brain cells migrating south and being asleep most of the time I wasn't at work. 

I'm feeling like my old self these days and will try not to make every post all baby, baby, baby.  We're finding out if it's a girl or a boy on Valentine's Day.  No doubt I will go into gender-specific crafty overdrive after that.

We're taking off for Patagonia on Tuesday, so I'll be on another blog hiatus for a week.  This pregnant lady will be flying business class the whole way and expects to feel pretty darn good when she arrives in Argentina on Thursday morning.  Adios!