Neptune

Julie sent her most favorite Neptune for us in Bee-Beautiful.
I understand the Neptune love - I used it for one of my first quilts.

Those damask turtles are some of my favorite parts of it, so they got featured!
Julie is going to have a fabulous quilt.

We've been doing lots of summery things. Including the zoo.

I loved the chalk set up in the children's area for them to sketch the animals and flowers!

I have also emptied the dishwasher two times a day every day. Boys generate lots of dishes when they're home!

Use my stash year : week 25

...super late this week.....and super bad.....


Since leaving for Hawaii I haven't sewn a single thing on my machine. I have some bee blocks to get on, but those won't count. And I'm not counting any of the hexagons I'm making until they are made into their final product. Otherwise I won't be able to keep track, really.

in:
half yard bundle of Tufted Tweets
16 FQs from Kerri - crazy amount of cuteness there!
3.5yds of Hawaii fabrics
3.5yds from Pink Chalk - most for free!

While I was away I won a prize in the Blogger Quilt Festival - a gift certificate from Pink Chalk. I was so excited, as I had been eying a bunch of things. Especially these bicycles, and the tiny zoo.

And these wonderful FFAII prints. Look, an orange one for my hexagons!

And I found these, too. Had to add them into the order. The print on the right is a new favorite. I have three more pictures of it for you, since you need even more than that to get it all!

I only bought a half yard and that was barely enough. It is Michael Miller's Tasty Escape and I would say it embodies the family summer vacation perfectly.

It is so jam packed with cuteness that within the half yard I barely have the full repeat. There's a donut shop that is just hanging on each edge that I would have liked more of.

Looking at these pictures I can see that I missed a ton of the cuteness. You'll just have to get 3/4 of a yard for yourself to see it all.

The total damage:

Busted: 0!!!

Purchased: 17 - eek

Net YTD: (35.94)

Have your kit at the Ready!

Well, it has been an interesting week. Seems more like early spring around here with the strange weather. Luckily the travel hexagon kit has been loaded and at the ready for every time we have to dash down to the basement!

A micro burst or something came through - literally pushed over a large willow and spruce in the neighbor yards.

One of our 4x4 fence posts was sheared off at the cement base by the WIND. It's barely holding on at the bottom there!

And this one burst ended at our sunroom. My window is now...art? Poor Becket was freaked out and screaming "I don't want to die!" Amazingly in all that, none of out homes were majorly damaged and no people were injured at all.

Finally, today looks like a stable weather pattern. And I got 45 more hexagons done in the basement. So all is good!

Finding Fabric - here and Hawaii

I've found a bunch of fabric in my mail box the last few days. The stash report isn't going to be pretty on Sunday so I thought I should trickle it in over the next few days :)

Here's a bit turned into awesome hexagons from Milky Robot. We did our own little swap.
I love them!


I totally caved - pushed a button - and this showed up today.

I have a good pile of fabrics from Hawaii that also need shopping details.
On Kauai I went to three shops. I actually printed out Autumn's post and took it with me. Her directions were spot on. All three are within 10 minutes or so of Lihue. Not like anything is far on the tiny island.
Here's Autumn's Kauai fabric shop link.


Of the three, Kapaia Stitchery was my favorite, although probably the priciest. The discount warehouse was the least expensive, and if I had the luggage space I could have loaded up on Kona cottons! Most prints were 3.99 to 5.99 a yard.


I really loved all the sample quilts and wonderful Hawaiian print quilting cotton at Kapaia Stitchery. Back to standard brick and mortar fabric costs, but I could have looked for hours.

Airplane Hexagon Production

So, the important info. How many did I make?
(and I'm remodeling the blog, so ignore the crazy if you clock over from reader)

I made just over 90 - with about 75% of those on the flight there. I got lots of interest from others on the way to the bathroom and the flight attendants. They loved the cuteness.

I didn't have any trouble at all carrying these on - both long flights and the inter island flight mid week.

I used a latch-lid container. Nice and slim but room for all my stuff.

Here is my little set-up. I took on a TON of needles and pins both. No scissors, but they are allowed under a certain size.

This was my best idea. I hot glued several craft magnets to one edge. They held perfectly. When working, it was much easier to place my pin or in-work needle on the magnets than inserting into the travel case. Also I wasn't worried about them flying around with all the bumps from air and people.

I used this needle threader with the little cutter on it. One less thing being able to leave scissors at home. And after threading large tapestry needles with yarn and embroidery floss for so long, I seriously can not thread a sharp needle. It is so annoying!

This little Clover thing worked very well with, no surprise, the gold-eye sharp Clover needles. A few other types I tried didn't work at all. Even one that was labeled as "large eye". I would thread up about 7 needles at once and line them up in my case. That way I wouldn't have to stop so often.

This fun little pile is a sample of some goodies I found in my post-vacation mail!

Kauai Sunrise

{As Mark photoshops our vacation, I'll probably be posting some Hawaii faves for a while.}

Hanalei Valley Rainbow (double!)

Quilt Story

A few weeks ago Heather & Megan contacted me about their cool new blog, Quilt Story. They feature beautiful quilts along with the great stories behind them.

Don't we all love the story? That's why I hoard "This American Life" and other NPR podcasts on my iPod, for the story.

I'm honored to have Panaceia's Mantle featured there today.

Go check out all the great stories they have to share!

Bah

I'm home.

I already miss the evening walk on the beach.

I have to wear shoes now, make my own meals, it's grey and muggy outside, somebody stole the really nice Bose noise-canceling headphones borrowed from my Dad on the Maui/LAX flight. Our pilot missed on the length of the runway, so he had to gun the engines and lift back over the ocean for a second try into LAX - I was sure we were going land on the water. Gone two weeks but it feels like I didn't even go.

But in those two weeks summer bloom has taken hold and there are flowers all over the yard. And within a few minutes of walking in the door, Becket said, 'It's so good to be in my home.'

Hurray for fabricy mail waiting for me. Returning to real life too quickly, it's like getting the bends diving. So I'll slowly enjoy my packages and be reading back through my blog posts to remind me what blue skies looked like.

Fun - mostly

We went on a snorkel and dolphin watch cruise to another island. The crew was very excited - said it was an epic day. The stars aligned and there was just the tiniest cloud over Lanai and the channel between islands was like a lake.

You don't see them very often, as they like deeper ocean, but we found a huge pod (100+) of pantropical spotted dolphins. Mark caught a couple jumps that need photoshop - I love how clear the water is and you can see them riding our bow.


The snorkeling was great in a coral lined bay the Pacific has carved out of the island. Everything was awesome until I had to get back onto the boat. Waiting for two people to climb aboard the rocking boat did me in. I think this will be my last small-boat ocean ride. I didn't lose it, but sat feeling quite miserable for the 2hr ride back to Maui.


Becket had fun! Luckily, Maui has great snorkeling off the beach - one of the good sites is just 5 minutes up the beach here in Ka'anapali.

Becket: Mom, do we live here now?
No, but it WOULD be cool to have a huge pirate ship slide in our back yard!

A Honu Story

It's story time.

We won a sand castle building competition at the Marriott. Along with the structure, you had to have a story to go with it. And I think Caleb's story is what won it for us.

I named us 'Team Honu'. Becket brought along his plastic army dudes to add in. With those two things Caleb came up with this:

There was a far away island that was very hard to get to. So only the strongest army guys could make it to the island. When some got there, they found that only two creatures lived on the island - sea turtles and sealions.

One day they found a dead turtle that had died of old age. They thought it was sad, so the army guys wanted to bury it. When they went to bury it, they found that the shell was made of a super strong substance and it could be used to make armor.

So the army guys decided to stay and harvest the shells of the turtles that have died. Because the sealions were so fierce, a large moat and fortress had to be built to keep them safe.

Our finished castle. You can see on the left the honu symbol they constructed. We all won shave ice and a pizza for dinner. It was great fun!

Then Mark and Kenton went snorkeling off the beach nearby and literally came face to face with two huge turtles.

They were as large as Mark - he's 6' tall.

Freaked him out a little when one was eye to eye with him!

Use my stash year : the Hawaii episode

I found this cute little print on Kauai, perfect for hexagons I'm thinking. And to the right are hand painted batiks - all ocean creatures - that caught my eye. They're charm square size.

Isn't this the cutest store! There were a crazy number of quilts hanging on the walls and from the ceiling. I have a thing for the honu, so I bought the pattern for the turtle applique quilt you can see in the upper left.

This isn't fabric stash, but I wanted to show these cool shirts and bag I found at the Maui Swap Meet on Saturday. I could have bought one of every design they made, but settled for these.

Caleb and Kenton were addiment that I buy this fabric, in two of the three colorways, for pillowcases. I have no idea how they will fall asleep looking at this stuff. I do have to laugh at the surfing ninja and I think that's walking sushi!

Mark liked these - much better.

Aloha

Maui - and another hike!

My beach. I love Maui.

The shoes survived Kauai at least. The hike today at 'Iao Needle killed them.

I know I said I was about done hiking, but most of this place is actually paved trails. Here we went down to a waterfall stream. The boys wanted to add to the stone dam the locals had started.

Becket panicked a bit. Serious terror on that little guy's face.

But he made it across.

Caleb likes to mess around.

See, all the fun stuff is on the other side of railings.