Posie Gets Cozy

Sun Spots

Spring sunshine. It's so nice. We had such a nice weekend! Short but very sweet. Amelia adores her grandparents who held and played with her non-stop for three days straight. So sweet. Andy made corned beef and cabbage for us. He's the most non-Irish Irish person I know. We listen to Irish music the entire month of March. There is a lot of Pogues and Flogging Molly playing. He makes corned beef and cabbage in my dad's old cast-iron pot every year. He buys us all shamrock swag. I love how much he loves things.

Remember the quilt I started for Amelia a few weeks back? I had it finished by BumbleBee Quilting and picked it up on Saturday morning. I absolutely love it! The way I did this was ridiculously easy. I bought many (I'd have to count how many, but maybe thirty or more?) 1/8 yard pieces of random fabrics from several different local fabric stores. I just picked stuff that I liked. I had no particular color scheme in mind, but I wanted it to feel sweet and subtle and mellow and pretty. My colors wound up being peaches, pinks, inky blues like her eyes, pale grays, vanilla creams, aquas, a few saffron yellows, a few nutmeg browns, an orchid. Most of the prints are tiny calicos, small polka dots, tiny ginghams, and a few baby animals mixed in. To make it, I trimmed the 1/8-yard strips to 4" wide, trimmed off the selvedges, and then cut the strips randomly into rectangles. The rectangle lengths weren't measured. Then I started sewing the short ends of the rectangles together until I had a pieced strip that was vaguely 54" long (I put two pieces of tape on my sewing table, which is just a bit longer than 54", and just laid the strip out between the tape pieces to measure it). I sewed the strips together until the quilt top was about 54" across, and then I trimmed the pieced edges until they were all even. It was so fast. Only half the measuring. I am definitely going to make another one for her bed with the leftoever fabric (this one is more of a throw). Rectangles go so much faster than squares. I don't have much time to do stuff like this anymore, so fast is key! And I also think the rectangles let the fabric print show better, which I've always wanted in my quilts. There are so many beautiful fabrics out there. If the pieces are too small you just can't see the fabric prints, you know? I love looking at the individual patches in quilts, picking out favorites. I love how dated the patches get, timestamping the quilt even without a label.

My darling peachy-pink girl! I love how she loves everything, too. She just loves everything. She inspires me. Every moment. She's teaching me.

Winter Wonder

Oh, snow! Thank you, thank you Brother North-wind!!! A million small blessings, falling on my face in the front yard, in the morning light. The most beautiful thing to wake up to.

[Pirouette, and flourish.]

All gone now, but nevermind. It was glorious.

There's a very small, very adorable baby dressed in a pale pink kimono onesie and oatmeal-colored tights lying between my legs under a crocheted blanket here on the chaise lounge. She's looking up out the big windows and talking to herself and kicking me in the stomach, which is one of my favorite things. She has long conversations with me and with herself and with the sky as she kicks and makes funny faces and balls up her fists and shoots out her arms and laughs at little things only she understands. We've been here for hours and hours today, wrapped in quilts and corgi and bottles and cups of tea. Sometimes she suddenly sleeps, or requests her bottle, but mostly we talk, and look, and sometimes I watch Christmas movies and surf Pinterest for ideas for window seats and her big-girl room (extremely fun). The furnace kicks on and goes off again. The sun comes out and disappears. The UPS man comes and goes, causing the poor puppers to lose her mind with anticipation. He often stops at our house, and brings her a treat; when he goes to someone else's (his truck is quite distinctive, so we know the second he turns onto our block) she can hardly believe her ears. We spent the weekend at parties, one ours, one our neighbors' for us, surrounded by friends and families. In the wake of such a long, sad week, it felt good to stick together and stay close to everyone we love. Under the evergreen boughs and the Christmas lights, listening to the old carols, remembering my dad and the ones who aren't here anymore, I held my baby girl in my warm arms and kissed her big pink cheeks and told her all sorts of things I wanted her to know. About good people. About snow. About good things. About joy. About love. Always about love.

Summer Sweetness

August has a glow. There was twilight birdsong all around us in the field. I cried in the sunset. My sister's visit has been wonderful. The world spins and spins. The flowers. The nights. The years.

Summer Days

Ah, summer days. Cloud cover and sunshine. Bicycles, books, and bridges. Beers on the front stairs and watching the garden grow. It's my sweet sissy's birthday today, and she has a gorgeous new blog!!! Xoxo love you girl.

The best visit ever. Dear, sweet treasures in my life.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

Can't Hardly Wait

We are so lucky! Our friends are coming to visit us! The plane gets in this afternoon. My heart is bubbling over. So, so, so excited. So excited.

Sunshine Day

The weather here has been so glorious the past few days it's almost all I can think about. And talk about. I think my life revolves around the weather more than I think it does. Getting outside into the sunshine this weekend was like a dream. We had my family over for Easter lunch and got to spend most of the day outside. My mom made that beautiful strawberry shortcake!

I'm off to the woods before the rain starts up again. Back in a bit!

A Little Farm

Our friends Brady and Peter recently bought a little farm at the edge of the piney woods. It came with an apple orchard, a big gray barn, a flock of sheep, and a hen, but no name. Any ideas?

It's the kind of place I dreamt about when I was a child (though my dream had a dapple gray Connemara pony in it, too). I can't wait to go back when the apple trees are in bloom.

A Little House Tour

Photo by Julie Smith

My sweet sissy did a little house tour and interview with Andy and me the other day for a home design web site she is working with called Houzz. I loved the questions (and I love Andy's answers) and I love the the pictures she took. She tape recorded the interview we did and said our voices (hers and mine) sounded so similar that it was like listening to one person talking and laughing — and not either of us, but our other sister, Susie. Hah! I busted out laughing when she said that. Awesome. Anyway, always so much fun working on stuff together. Click on the link in her post to get to the tour. Thank you, Julie! xoxoxoxoxo

Winterweather

We have two impossibly gigantic, Rackhamesque oak trees across the street from our house. Now denuded of leaves, their branches almost look like huge black feathers waving in the wind, especially this wind; it's been storming for two days. A week or so ago I had a dream that a tree fell from across the street into our yard (naturally, it was a different tree — that is, based on the place from where it fell it should have been one of the oaks, but because it was a dreamtree it wasn't anything like the oaks). I'm certain the dreamtree was much smaller than the real trees. It just missed the corner of the house. I believe that if one of the oaks falls, it will land on our roof.

Our luminous niece/goddaughter came to spend the night. We fed her pizza and waffles 'cause we're cool like that, or rather, she fed them to us. She made homemade pizza for dinner from scratch, proofed the yeast and made the dough and rolled it out and topped it off. I sat on a chair in the kitchen and talked her through it and it was so much fun. We watched Shirley Temple in Heidi and I knit and we talked about Lapponian reindeer-herding dogs (since she asked me what my second-favorite breed of dog is), and looked at pictures of them. I was worried the power might go out last night because of the wind, so I brought her a candle to keep near the bed just in case she needed to get up. It's hard to believe she is thirteen years old already.

I'm making curried lentil soup tonight, and we bought good semolina bread from one of my favorite bakeries. I'm working on a new cross-stitch sampler that I am redonkulously excited about. I realize that would sound like an oxymoron coming from the vast majority of people on earth.