A tale of two quilts

Right now, Steve and I appear to be in a baby cycle...that is to say people we know and love are starting to reproduce so I have been busy making baby quilts. The two pictured above are the same pattern, but done for two different babies in two different color schemes in two different countries.. The first is for our friends in The Netherlands, Bas and Erna and their new much wanted and long awaited baby girl. The second is for the first of the next generation of the Wachter family. Technically the baby will be a Murphy/DeVore...but technically the Wachters are actually Richardsons so who can keep track, and why do we care? The important thing is that Steve's sister Bonnie is finally going to be a grandmother when her son and daughter in law have their first baby sometime in June. I had the pleasure of meeting Jackie for the first time last September and loved her on site. We talked then about her desire to start a family, what neither of us knew was that at that very moment she was already pregnant! I hope her little peanut likes its quilt as much as I do!

As the Aquarium Cycles...

So, I was cleaning the living room the other day and I paused to look at our new fish tank. Steve has gotten on the fish tank bandwagon with me and together we have set up a really good looking tank. Its about 30 gallons, and its got live plants, a first for me, but Steve really wanted to give it a shot, and so far so good. Only one type died on us but all the others are growing like sea weeds. Its teaming with life, our tank and that is what I was thinking about when I took a moment to watch the fish. Less than twelve hours after adding the first two guppy fish to the tank to help it get through its nitrogen cycle ( the first crucial few weeks of a new tank) I looked up and saw baby fish swimming around the tank. You can see one in the top photo. 5 have survived from the initial brood and they are hale and hearty and doing fine. We have since added 5 danios, 5 tetras, 2 otocinclus and 3 angle fish, and I enjoy watching them all. The baby guppies though are special. They will live out their entire lives in the middle of my living room... Think about that for a minute. There are five fish downstairs in my living room right now who will live out the entirety of their existence in the middle of my living room. That is

an odd thing to consider, no?

It might seem sad at first except I know these fish are many hundreds of generations removed from their wild ancestors and so for captive bred fish they are living large. I don't mean to brag, but really, look at that second picture and tell me those baby fish were not born into the lap of watery luxury!

Aloha Oe!

Here are a few shots of our newly redecorated home office. We had so many cool things from Hawaii that we decided to devote a room to them. I spent a great deal of time surfing the web looking for the right office furniture. We finally found a computer desk and hutch that were at the high end of our price range, but it had the right tropical vibe and we were just waiting till the stars aligned and the time was right to buy that desk. In the meantime however we kept looking around in case we found a bargain and boy did we! The desk itself was not tropical in any way, but like my friend June likes to point out, real Hawaiian style is not over the top tropical with koa wood and rattan everywhere, but a mixture of some traditional, some tropical...so with that in mind we decided to snap up the bargain desk and make it work. We found the perfect rattan chair at Pier One on clearance, and a great lamp at a consignment store. Once we moved all our Hawiiana into the room it was ready to go. I did add one little touch though. The woven panels in the hutch are my handiwork. I bought some lauhala place mats online, cut them to fit and stuck them on the glass panels of the two cupboards. Once they were trimmed out with bass wood trim they look like they were always there. Now we have some more concealed storage and the best part is that its totally reversible. If we ever decide to redecorate then all I have to do is pull them out and clean the glass. So tell me what you think?

A visual Aid

Would you believe me if I told you I had been trying to get back to my blog for three days? Well, that is to say, get a new picture up on my blog. I have been back, but empty handed, so did not bother to post anything. If a picture really does speak a thousand words, then the above shot should easily be able to fill that quota. It was taken with the photo booth feature on the computer, but it's taken me this long to figure out how to get it on the blog. To be fair I have not been at it full bore for three solid days, but I have made an attempt or two and left in frustration. I guess I am back to my old click and cuss method of computer usage. I have yet to figure out how to upload a picture from Picasa to my blog, but maybe I will figure it out. I guess Picasa is fairly new to the Mac world, like me, and like me is still feeling its way around in the dark uncharted reaches of deep cyberspace that is realm of the Mac user. Hopefully I will learn the new ropes soon and it will not be the trauma to post on my blog that it is right now.

A hot mess

This is a picture of a cupcake doggy we picked up at a local grocery store to take to a friends house on New Years day when they asked if we would bring desert. It was meant as a joke because we thought it was the most hideous thing we had seen in a long time and was well worth the $4.99 it cost just to see the stunned look on the faces of our hosts...Joke was on us. It turned out that they actually liked the dog and thought it was cute... I had Steve take a picture of it in case I decided to submit it to the Cake Wrecks blog. So far I have not bothered. I chose to post it on my own blog as a visual metaphor of my computer skills. Just as this creation can only loosely be described as a cake or for that matter a dog... I can only be loosely described as computer literate. What we both are in fact is a hot mess, though neither of us can be fully responsible for being that way. Just as this Dog was left as you see it at the hands of another, so I have been rendered helpless by somebody not leaving the computer as they found it. I cannot upload my pictures from my camera and am left to troll my old photos for something usable. I cannot be sure, but what I think has happened is that my more computer literate Husband has monkeyed with the settings and now Picasa does not function for me like it once did. I have tried my patented method of clicking the mouse until something happens, but nothing has...I even resorted to calling Steve on each of his two cell phones, but you guessed it, he is not available right now... so... PLEASE STAND BY....

The Mokes

This block does not exist in the original Aloha Album. There is a trumpet vine block that I eliminated because though they are pretty, I don't have any real associations with them and Hawaii other than I drove past a nice one on my way to Zach's school from time to time. I modified the Diamond Head block for this one of the Moku Lua, the two islands that are just off shore of our favorite place in all of O'ahu, Bellows Beach. Now, of all the blocks in the quilt this will probably be the most special, not just because I designed it ( rather cobbled it together from other sources) but because Bellows was a special place for us. Sometimes we had the whole beach to ourselves. If surf was up we could ride our body boards for ages. I could see then why surfers are addicted to riding the waves, when you catch a wave just right and you are able to ride the crest...nothing else compares. Of course that only happened once for me, the waves big enough to do that are a little daunting and I wondered if it was the smartest thing I had ever done...probably not, but I am glad I did anyway. I will never forget it. I will also never forget a day when the sea was calm and we floated in the water bobbing and drifting in the gentle surf. While I lay stretched out in the sea I looked up and saw a rainbow over the open water. It was a moment of unrivaled beauty and peace. That's why we loved going out to Bellows so much, no matter what was on offer -adrenaline rushes, meditative soaks, or just walking along the beach it always put us back in balance. June is blessed to live a short walk from this very view!

Kalo

This is block number 4 in my Aloha Album, its a Taro plant, or Kalo in Hawaiian. Our Neighbor Jerry Carson had a pretty taro patch at the bottom of his garden border. It was where the water collected when his automatic sprinklers kicked in and caused a little stream to form trickling down the slope of his yard making the perfect spot to grow a taro plant. When he thinned it once he gave me a plant to put in my yard and as far as I know it's still there. I like that I planted a taro plant while in Hawaii, it seems the appropriate thing to do. I also enjoyed poi while there. I liked the creamy texture and the faintly yeasty flavor. I loved mixing a little poi with my Kahlua pig, though I was told by someone that its not done...mixing poi with other foods like that...While I do like to respect tradition when I can, I will not let it stand in the way of good eats, so I am an unrepentant poi tainter and will mix again if ever given the opportunity.

This block was a joy to stitch. It had lots of inside curves and points...things that used to give me fits back in my early days, but now that I know a few tricks of the trade they are actually more fun to stitch than the straight parts. I hope the next block is as fun to sew...