Quilting Queue July 2013

I had great plans this summer. All the BOMs I had started in February/March were going to be caught up so when school started in September I'd have my momentum going and would be able to sail through to Christmas break.  

Wrong.

My daughter had a baby. 

I became a Grandma, with all the rights and privileges awarded that esteemed office. 

Miss Penelope Riese Vaughn was born on July 21, 2013. 

I spent the week before and many weeks after just staring off into space. I guess, if you read my last post, you saw I was attributing the staring to being some step in the creative process, and I'd like to think some of it was just allowing my brain to churn out some direction to take with that cute kitty quilt I made. But frankly? A lot of time was spend reeling from a kind of paradigm/tectonic plate shift - a shift in the universe that only I was aware of. 

The English language has one word for love, but we all know there are many meanings for love. I love Utz Kettle-cooked Potato Chips, and I love my husband. I love my children and I love my job.  But I don't love them in all the same way.  Then Miss Penny arrived on the scene and folks - holy cow - there is yet aNOTHer kind of love.  

And this flavor of love also extends to my daughter, Adrienne, and son-in-law, Jeremy, now parents themselves. 

The big question on everyone's mind leading up to her birth was '

what kind of quilt am I going to make her???'  

I love 'I Spy' quilts for little ones.  Jeremy is a big Star Trek fan and I ran across some Star Trek fabric months ago and snatched it up, knowing I was going to use it for this baby.  I test drove the pattern I wanted to use with just the Star Trek figures.

This piece is only about 12x12". To make a whole crib sized quilt out of this size of figures would have been visually numbing.  So I expanded the height of the strips in order to make bigger 'mouse holes'.  (That's what I think they look like!)

I am pleased with how it turned out.  Do you see Grandpa with his tuba???  I had it hanging in my office for a week and got a lot of vocabulary out of my students, so I know it works!

And as you can see, Miss Penny has already figured out how to use it!