Catching up!

I know I've been quiet lately on the blog front, and I never finished my London series of posts. Whenever I read bloggers apologizing for their absence I roll my eyes, yet I always seem to be one of them. Life has been happening lately though, so what can you do.

The biggest piece of life that has been happening lately is that I'm pregnant! I'm actually seven months pregnant now, eek! We are having a little girl and just about every waking moment has been spent prepping and crafting for her arrival on or around January 3, 2013.

It's getting harder to lean over my sewing table to measure and cut so I'm trying to get as much done now as I can!

I have tons and tons of finished projects to take photos of and post about. I use Ravelry for all of my knitting projects, I really wish we had something like that for sewing. Instead I'll try to discuss my comments on the patterns and fabric in the blog post. I've been doing a lot of iPhone photos lately (so convenient!) but I'd like to get some higher quality ones with the real camera on a nice day.

My latest project started off as Halloween related, but I dragged my feet on it and finally just whipped these babies up yesterday. They can totally be used until Thanksgiving though since I made the sashing brown! I used the Pumpkin Block Tutorial at Sew Lux, and just used the coaster directions since I only made two blocks. I really only need one (the dots of course!), so I'm going to gift the other one. I actually like the plain one better, but the binding looks nicer so I'll give it away.

Orange is probably the smallest color in my stash, so these were actually the only two suitable fabrics which is why I only made two blocks. That also may have something to do with the fact that I pulled out all of my fallish fabrics at least a year ago for a quilt and the pile is still sitting on my second sewing table! I forgot all about them. None of these really would have worked anyways right?

Overall the block was really easy, and I'm pretty sure I spent less than two hours on the whole project. I wanted a little mug rug for myself to keep on my desk at work. Originally I was going to do the three blocks but it seemed too big, then I was going to do just one block and free motion the word BOO! next to it or maybe piece some little candy corns. Then it took me so long to think about how I wanted to do the project that I never actually started, so I said to heck with it and I just made the simple block with brown sashing so that it could be used all fall. Why do I overthink projects?

Also, I used Fusi-Boo batting (two layers) and ended up doing binding to put a little more orange into it. Maybe if I had used the plain binding on the dot pumpkin, I'd like that one better. I must have been confused because I thought my block was 5" square (it was 5.5") so I only cut 22" of binding, thinking I had extra! It was really close at the end there. Next time, 24" at least.

I do really want to finish posting about my London trip! To make it a little less daunting, I'll sum up London in just one post with lots of pictures and a list of where we went and what we did, instead of descriptions of every.last.detail. I still have yet to really go through the pictures and print them out or put them on Facebook even, so that has been the biggest hurdle! I'd like to do it soon before I forget what all we did though. We found some really great local restaurants and stores so maybe it will help someone planning a future trip. Or we can reference it when we go back (and we are SO going back!)