all I want for Christmas...

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I certainly did!! Hubby and I took the baby to the lake cabin to spend the week with his family. We arrived Christmas Eve after I got off work and are staying through New Years weekend. It's nice to have something that resembles a vacation!

So Ann tagged everyone to list what they got for Christmas. This year was great despite the economy. What I got:

*A remote car starter for my Xterra (a gift from my husband - it's wonderful considering how much snow we've gotten)
*A pair of chocolate-brown Uggs (I've wanted these for a long time)
*A Swarovski crystal tennis bracelet and matching earrings
*$50 Barnes & Noble gift card
*$200 Walmart gift card
*8" Viewsonic digital photo frame
*$100 check from my grandparents
*An awesome white and silver snowman cookie jar
*Movie tickets and babysitting from a good friend
*Some really great hand-crafted Christmas decorations
*Stuff from my mom that I haven't even received yet since I won't see her for a couple more weeks

What's funny is that this Christmas the hubby and I expected far fewer gifts because everyone was making a big deal about this being Drew's first Christmas (which is what we expected). Then, to our surprise, we actually got quite a few wonderful gifts! Drew definitely got the most gifts - of the 6 of us at the cabin, Drew got more than half of the presents under the tree. So much for taking back less than we brought up!! To top everything off, we had a wonderful turkey dinner followed by the best prime rib (my mother-in-law makes the best prime rib ever) the next evening. This is definitely one of the best vacations I've had in a long time!

June capsule contest

I decided to officially enter the June capsule contest at Stitchers Guild. My plan is called "Like Father, Like Son" and will be a matching set of clothes for my husband and our infant son. A little bit of background: my husband and I are big fans of the TV show Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen's character wears these retro/bowling style shirts on the show (it's his trademark for anyone who hasn't seen the show). My husband loves that style of shirt and has a few, but has been asking me for quite some time to make him some more. I had been putting it off until this contest came along. Since hubby has been wonderful at taking care of the baby and letting me have some sewing time, I decided I should reward him by using some of that time to make something for him. When the contest was announced I made a plan for myself - which I will still make for the summer - but I changed my mind and decided to enter a wardrobe for him. Hubby came up with the idea of making a matching wardrobe for the baby.

Here is the storyboard for my plan:


Since the challenge for the contest is no black, I had to order new colors of fabric for the shirts. I'm going to make khaki cargo shorts and the colorblocked shirts will be in shades of brown/tan and blues. I'll also be putting my new embroidery machine to good use by doing some custom embroidery on the colorblocked panels. I will probably not do any embroidery on the baby's shirts, but the basic design will match. There is also an accessory requirement and I'm going to make hats from the same fabric as the shorts.

I'm very excited to be doing this for my boys. My "before June" item will probably be the cargo shorts to get them out of the way and then I can make the shirts assembly-line style. If I'm unable to get the hats done in time, those will be my purchased item and I'll just buy something that goes with the ensembles. I hope to get the fabric in the next week and by then I'll have the shirt patterns created with the different colorblock configurations. My hope is that on June 1st I can start cutting everything out and get started!

Wish me luck - I may have just gotten in over my head...again :)

just checking in

I have been offline for several weeks now, and as things are starting to calm down somewhat, I felt that it was time to give anyone who reads this an update on what's been going on...
There has been absolutely NO sewing, planning or thinking about sewing taking place in the past three weeks. At 2:09am on February 11th, I FINALLY gave birth to our long-awaited new addition - a baby boy named Andrew Joel. He weighed exactly 9lbs and was 21 1/4" long. Needless to say, he's a BIG boy and I'm still recovering from the birth!! The past 2 1/2 weeks have been focusing on getting to know our son and learning how to be parents. Here are a couple of pictures:



So there you have it - what I've been up to for the past few weeks. As soon as little Andrew starts on a more regular schedule I'll be able to head back to the sewing table. In the meantime, I've decided that the 2008 SWAP just isn't going to happen. I'll definitely make all of the garments on my SWAP list, and will hopefully make a dent in my to-sew list for 2008, but we'll see how that goes...