Ember Costumes and Crafts

Previous Installments: Starting My Dream Quilt Catan Hexagon Quilt Update #1 Catan Hexagon Quilt Update #2 Unfortunately, I've had some major setbacks with this quilt. The first is personal: I spent so much of my free tv watching time holding the baby over the past 8 months that I haven't had much time for hand sewing. The second is medical: I have carpal tunnel in my wrists that has flared up very painfully recently and makes basting hexes slower than usual. The third is...design issues. This is what this post is going to be about. The land continent hexes are all complete and sewn together into large pieces, so I started working on basting the water hexes. I have collected a variety of blues over the course of the year and a half I have been working on this project, and rejected some (the greens in the lower right of the picture, for example) and then decided to go with a more uniform color pallet and started exclusively basting the slate-blue colored waters that you s...

Another costume-maker who I love to watch on Youtube is Bernadette Banner! She lives in New York city and her videos are full of cool historical research and an unbelievable amount of hand-sewing. I would call her crazy, but I'm hand sewing a king-sized hexagon quilt so....I'll call her ambitious and dedicated instead! Really though, her stuff is impressive, her vlogs are interesting and entertaining, and she does most of it in New York city which is basically a foreign country to a suburban Texas girl like me! Check her out!  

Over Christmas break, I taught Jack and James how to play Settlers of Catan. After the babies were in bed, I set up the board and let them choose their colors. The first night we played, it was Catan in the simplest form.  No development cards, no longest road, and no robber until we'd gone around a few times and gotten the hang of it. Trading I let come naturally, when James didn't have the right cards for his settlement and I suggested that he ask Jack if he had one. We only played to five points. It was awesome. I first played Settlers of Catan in college, with Gunnar and our friends and roommates, and with John and his friends. It became an obsession, and almost every night me and my roommate would set up the board while the guys cleaned up dinner, and then afterwards we would all play these epic long games with two games worth of land tiles, creative setups like "gold island" or "four islands," and lots of fun and sometimes even some arguments. ...

I have always been a huge planner junkie, and anyone who knows me knows that I have used a planner every single year of my life since the 6th grade. Currently I use a customized horizontal Plum Paper planner, unbound, which I then hole punch and put into my original purple patent leather A5 Filofax binder. It lays open on the desk downstairs in front of the computer and I write everything the family needs to do and know in it! I also love goals and goal-setting, and this year I used the Year Compass free downloadable booklet to reflect on my past year and make plans for the new year. It's very journaling-heavy, but since I also love journaling, it was perfect for me! Which brings me to my goals! My friend Christina just posted her 20x20 goals for 2020 and while I am very impressed by her initiative, I'm not quite as ambitious! I've narrowed my goals down to a few major areas, many of them are just continuations from last year with a little expansion. 1. Be Blac...

Reading The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee I didn't love it. I didn't dislike it enough to stop reading it, but I definitely only read the bare minimum and it took me almost the entire month to read it.  I'm not even sure what I don't like about it, to be honest...maybe it's too "hard" of sci-fi for me? There is a lot of tactics and warfare. Maybe it's the random use of alternate words for normal things (like calling all the ships moths) that made it really hard to figure out what was going in..I don't know. I do like the main character and the situation she's in, but it's just not dramatic enough, and didn't pull me in. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch  (Didn't Finish) I hated it and couldn't finish. I got about 1/3 of the way through and was so not into it, so I read a bunch of reviews to see if it was going to get better, and the things described in the reviews were not things that I particularly wanted to read...

In the year 2019... I read 33 books I finished 4 quilts I made 46 blog posts I earned my red II belt!  And I had a baby! He's 7 months old now! And much, much more! I made costumes and doll clothes, I cared for increased workload of kids full time, I went to Padre Island and Lake Buchanan, I helped out at my church's MOM's group, I laughed and cried and yelled and sweated.. It wasn't all good. I said goodbye to a very dear friend who has moved on in her life to new things. My father-in-law who has Alzheimer's is sadly not doing well. He is in a nursing home but does not know any of his children or grandchildren anymore. Jack broke his arm, we all got a pneumonia-like respiratory infection that lasted ages. My c-section recovery was long and very difficult.  I didn't meet all my goals either...or rather, I re organized my priorities. I put my in-progress novels on the back burner and stopped going to my writing gr...