Nora's Chevron Big Girl Quilt

About six months ago I decided that I wanted to start making Nora a quilt-- twin sized, for when she was ready to move into a big girl bed.  We had no plans to move her out of her crib, and I had no idea how long the quilt would take, but I was hoping to give it to her for her second birthday.  I finished it with about a month to spare... but kept forgetting to blog about it.  Those of you who are on instagram are probably tired of this story by now, but in case anyone is interested, and because it is now possible to write a blog post in several pieces of the course of weeks while Nora plays mostly independently for five minutes at a time, I thought I'd share the details of this project.

First I surfed the web for purple and green fabrics in hopes of finding something that would coordinate with Nora's room decor.  Of course, the purple and green I found are completely the wrong shades... but I loved the fabrics so I chose them anyway.  They come from the Joel Dewberry Aviary 2 Lilac Palette.

I had decided initially that I wanted to make a chevron pattern (running the risk that this trend will be out-of-style before Nora even uses it, but oh well).  I found this pattern on etsy and really happy with it, so I definitely recommend this shop.  Although I've made several baby size quilt projects, this was my first full size quilt, and this pattern was super easy for me to follow.  Since I knew I was going to use three different fabrics, and wanted to do a few panels on the back side of the quilt, I had to do a little bit of planning to figure out how much to buy of each fabric.

Once the fabric arrived, I started measuring and cutting.  And measuring, and cutting, and measuring, and cutting.  Wow.  The most eye opening thing about this project was learning how much work goes into making a quilt beyond the sewing.  Thank goodness for cutting mats, quilt rulers, rotary cutters, and serialized dramadies on demand.

I worked on the cutting and the embroidery at the same time.  One of the reasons I first proposed the name "Nora" to Billy was because I wanted my daughter's name to have a strong literary legacy. (I feel like I should consider giving a nerdiness disclaimer here, but unless this is the first post you've read, it's not necessary.)  Nora from "A Doll's House" is an early example of a female character who stands up to the limitations of patriarchy, so I chose this translated quote from the end of the play to embroider on the back side of the quilt: I must think things over for myself and try to understand them.  A lot of what Billy and I do as parents is try to figure out how we can teach Nora to be an independent thinker.  So I like to think she will learn this by osmosis if she has this quote tucked under her chin every night.  A mom can dream, at least.

After I cut out all the squares, I pressed them, sewed them together on the diagonal, cut them in half, pressed them open, and trimmed them again to size.  So basically what you should know, if you are not a quilter, is that most of the time is spent measuring, cutting, and pressing.  But this step satisfied my perfectionism because it meant that all the squares I was going to piece together for the quilt were exactly right at this stage.

Once I had all my squares ready, I thought I was going to sort through them all to make the pattern look as good as possible.  This lasted about ten minutes.  I realized that if I'd wanted to keep all the wood grain going the same direction, for example, I would've had to modify the pattern before I started cutting.  Live and learn.  Nora's quilt will be scrappy just like her, I decided to make myself feel better.  But the perfectionist in me did make sure the wood grain and dark purple fabric followed a pattern of non-consistency.

Then the quilt called for sewing the squares into horizontal strips. When I completed those, it became possible to see what the quilt was going to end up looking like.

I think it was around this time that I finished the embroidery, which allowed me to sew the back panel together.  I wanted the purple section to fill most of the top of the bed, while the white panels will start on the top but mostly spill over and down the sides.

Once I had sewed the squares into rows, and pressed all the seams, I began sewing those rows into pairs, at which point the chevron pattern started to stand out.  Then, after a particularly long and difficult day on campus, I decided I was giving myself the whole night off from my academic work (and cleaning up Nora's toys) so I could earn some gratification by finishing the top panel.  I sewed all my pairs of rows together and took this picture of the back, which shows just how much sewing and pressing goes into this pattern.

Look how much beautiful work I've done, I thought.  I didn't even notice that I had messed it up until I looked at the photo I took of the front.  

I could not find my seam ripper, so I gave up on this stupid project for the night, which was probably for the best.  Later, when I picked it up to take it apart, I was thankful that at least I realized the mistake before I had pressed open the seams I'd mis-sewn.  It was also around this time that Showtime took Shameless off the on-demand offerings, which I had been watching while I worked.  Thanks for nothing, Showtime.  I still don't know what happened after their mom came back.

In another example of fortuitous genius, I arranged to have some college students pick up the couches we were giving away on the same night I was going to spray adhere and pin my quilt.  This meant I had a lot of extra room to spread everything out and get it tacked together.  Using spray adhesive and fewer pins is the type of thing I did not want to do because it felt like cheating.  I was already planning to machine quilt, after all, and that was a huge shortcut.  Can you really call yourself a quilter if you haven't pinned the thing together within an inch of its life?  Yes, said the kindly old lady at my local quilt shop.  You'd be crazy to do it the old fashioned way.  Okay, then.  You don't have to twist my arm too hard to convince me to do things the easier way.

After I had the whole thing stuck together, I got to do the gratifying work of the actual "quilting"-- sewing it all into one piece.  There are a lot of parallels between writing a dissertation and sewing a quilt.  Behind the "writing" of a dissertation there is the thinking, researching, and the synthesizing, just like behind the "sewing" of a quilt there is the measuring, cutting, and pressing.  But there is no writing experience comparable to the quilting stage of quilting.  When you attempt to piece your writing together into a single document, it is still a huge mess.  It takes a ton of revision to get it to look right.  This is not the case with a quilt.  When you decide what pattern you're going to use for the quilting, and you finish all those lines and turns, the thing looks awesome.  I mean, you still have to trim the edges and bind it, but it's practically done.  Even Nora and Oscar thought it was already finished, apparently.

I learned how to hand bind a quilt on YouTube.  This modern world, my grandmother would have said.  

And then it was finished.  I love it.  It's almost perfect, but it has just enough mis-aligned sections to prove I did it myself.  It's also huge.  I had no idea that a twin quilt would actually be big enough to stretch all the way across our queen sized bed-- but I guess it allows for a lot of overhang.  

Now that it is finished, I still have no idea when Nora will actually use it.  We are in no rush to move her out of the crib, and when we do, we've been thinking about using a toddler bed so she still has more play area in her room.  Who knows.  Perhaps she will grow up thinking the quilt always existed.  Which, in a way, because I made it out of love for her, it always did.

Thoughts on Weaning

If you continue breastfeeding after your child begins eating food, a common question you can expect to be asked is "How long are you planning to keep doing that?"  My usual answer was, "Until one of us is ready to stop."  While many lactation advocates indicate that you should keep nursing until your baby self-weans, I feel like the lactating mother's feelings matter, too.  If I could have seen the future, the concrete answer to that question would have been "Until she is 19 months old."  That's right-- Nora is no longer a breastfeeding toddler, and while I am very happy and proud to have provided her with all the advantages of breastmilk, I am also glad to be done nursing her.

In case anyone is curious, I thought I'd explain what the process of weaning was like for us.  I was determined to get to one year of exclusive breastfeeding so we could bypass formula entirely.  As I've mentioned before, this required a LOT of effort on my part once she began full time day care.  I spent the month before building up a freezer stash by pumping every night before bed.  Once she began day care, I was pumping twice during the day for about 15-20 minutes, and then I would pump again for about the same amount of time before I went to bed.  She still nursed like normal on the weekends.

This kept us going until her first birthday, at which point we decided to start mixing in alternate milk.  Since Nora has the dreaded dairy allergy, we first started with almond milk, which is more easily available.  After a few weeks of what seemed like continuous cold symptoms, we switched to coconut milk, and have stuck with that ever since.  Since these milks don't have as much fat as whole milk, we have made sure to supplement those fats in her diet with things like avocado, Earth Balance spread, coconut oil, etc.

We wanted to introduce non-human milk gradually, and I wanted to reduce my supply slowly because I have always had difficulty with hormonal changes.  So I first dropped the nighttime pumping session, and this resulted in mixing about 3oz of breastmilk with 1oz of almond/coconut milk for each bottle.  If Nora noticed any difference, it didn't bother her.  A few weeks later, and a few weeks before my comprehensive exam, I cut back to pumping once mid-day.  At that point the bottles were more like 50/50.  By the time I passed my exam, I was so tired of pumping that one of the ways I celebrated was by giving up pumping entirely.  I did suffer some headaches with each dropped pumping session, and when I stopped pumping altogether, they were noticeably worse, but that only lasted about a week.

From late November through early February, Nora was nursing when she woke up and when she went to bed, and she was drinking coconut milk during the day.  While I was home with her in December and January, we worked on switching her from bottles to sippy cups in preparation for the toddler room at her new day care.  There were only a few times during this period that she asked to breastfeed during the day, but she was usually satisfied by an offer of coconut milk, and if not, we could distract her with something else.  We did suffer a bit of a setback when she was sick in Oregon-- since she was dehydrated, and didn't want to do anything but nurse, I let her nurse whenever she wanted for those few days.  Then she returned to day care and wanted to be nursing literally from the minute I picked her up until the minute I put her down to bed.  That transition was hard on all of us, but thankfully it only lasted a few days.  Once she felt comfortable at school, she no longer needed to nurse during the day, so we were back to nursing at wake-up and bedtime.

In early February I was getting tired of nursing, so I started offering Nora coconut milk in the morning. If she wanted to nurse after she finished the coconut milk I would let her, but that only lasted about a week.  I thought my supply would dry up fairly quickly at that point, but we continued nursing for 10-15 minutes before bed until about two weeks ago.  At that point, we had put her down to bed without nursing a few times here and there, and she didn't have any trouble getting to sleep.  Nursing before bed still seemed to be comforting to her, but I didn't think she needed to do it, and I was ready to be done.  So I just decided which night would be our last, spent that nursing session reflecting on how fortunate we are that weaning happened fairly naturally, and then the next night I just rocked her and put her right to bed.  She hasn't shown any indication that she misses it, and although I do feel a little nostalgic for when she was a baby, and nursing is tied up in those emotions, I am glad to be done.  She has been gleaning nutrients from my body, at varying levels, for over two years.  Although I couldn't be happier about being able to provide those nutrients and their benefits to her, I am proud that we are continuing to foster her developing independence and happy to have my body back to myself.

Since we were changing her bedtime routine slightly, we also ditched the sleep sacks she has been using since she was four months old.  Now she gets tucked in under her very own crib quilt, which I made her.  This was a fun little project for me, and since she's no longer making use of my breastmilk, I like thinking that she's tucked under something else I made with love just for her.  : )

Valentine's Day

This year was the 10th time Billy and I celebrated Valentine's Day together-- whoa!  We are not big celebrators of the holiday, but we do usually find small but personal ways to acknowledge the holiday.  This year he ordered me some delicious chocolate covered strawberries and I brought some tiramisu home for him.  The "sweetest" part of the holiday for us, though, was sharing it with Nora!

Last week, we were notified by her teachers that they would be having a Valentine's day party with the kids, so they gave us a list of names so Nora could give everyone Valentines.  Now that she is scribbling, and since I have no shortage of cardstock in my craft drawer, I thought it would be fun if we made her Valentines ourselves.  I was doing this mostly for myself, since I enjoy crafts, but I was excited to see how much she enjoyed making them, too.  She loved squishing her fingers around in the paint, and she was much more cooperative with making the handprints than she has been in the past.  I was expecting her to mess a lot of them up, but since she made such nice prints, we decided to keep going and make some Valentines for family and friends who are not in her class.

Once the paint was dry and I had cut the handprints out, I gave her a silver marker and helped her to draw some scribbles over the top of each one.  She took this very seriously!  After the first time I took one handprint away and handed her the next one, she began deciding when each print was "done" by setting it aside and grabbing another one.  I could not believe it.  Some of the prints got a lot of scribbles, and some only got a few, but she worked her way through them just about one at a time.

Then she left it up to me to assemble the different parts.  We were pretty pleased with how they turned out!

I tried to get her to model the one I made for us to keep, but she didn't quite understand what I was asking her to do.  She pressed it up against her belly and walked around holding it there securely.

We worked on these over the weekend, but while Dad was at work on Monday, we made him a special card.  This time I let her handle the paintbrush, and she thought this was amazing!  I am not sure what types of art projects they've been doing at school lately, but she seems to specialize in pointilism... both with her marker and her paintbrush.  We snuck the card into Dad's laptop bag, so he saw it when he arrived at work on Valentine's day and took this picture.

On Thursday morning, we took her valentines to school and all of the teachers in the toddler classrooms gathered around to gush over them.  They complimented her on how perfect the handprints were, asked me how I got the heart spaces in the prints, and one of them even said "I've never even seen that on Pinterest!"  Nope-- that idea either came out of my imagination, probably thanks to  of the Childraft Make and Do book.  As a child, I made and did every craft in that book that didn't require paper mache (which I found messy, gross, and too much work to clean up).  I loved making the Valentines with Nora so much that I hope this will become a yearly tradition for us.  I have never considered myself an "artist," but Mom always encouraged my crafty side, so I hope I can pass the enjoyment of it along to Nora, too.  I loved how much she participated in the process this year, and I'm sure it will be even more fun when she starts coming up with ideas for crafts on her own!  Plus, if she makes her own Valentines, she'll never have to give a boy who irritates her a card that says "Be Mine."  Maybe it was the early stages of my type A personality talking, but as a child I was always frustrated that the packs of Valentines didn't come with more that just said "Happy Valentine's Day." I was mortified that a boy might think I liked him just because I had to save the really generic ones for the boys I really couldn't stand.

When I picked Nora up, their Valentine's day party was winding down.  She was wearing the crown her teachers had made her and helped her cover with heart stickers, and she was taking the final bites of a cookie.  By the looks of her face, she made quick work of her mini cupcake.  This was the first time I let her have juice, so I thought she'd gulp that down, too, but apparently she was more interested in the sweets.

When we got home, we pulled her box of valentines out and went through them.  One of them was attached to a baggy of goldfish crackers, so you can guess which one she liked the best.  Her teachers helped her put her handprints on a Valentine for me and Billy, too, which was cute.

Everything is better with Nora included, but that was definitely the case with Valentine's day this year!  She received some valentines of her own in the mail, as well.  I'll leave you with a video of her showing off the one she got from my mom.  We hope all of you celebrated Valentine's day in your own special ways, too!

Quilting

Over winter break, I took up quilting.  Mom taught me how to sew when I was young, and I had an operating sewing machine until I burned it up sewing a new ceiling for the SGA Homecoming dance in 2007.  With several babies close to my heart set to arrive this winter, I thought it would be fun to try to make them some baby quilts.  I asked Billy to get me a new sewing machine as my (early) Christmas gift, so once I passed my exam, I began working.  I had a lot of fun figuring out how to make the designs I dreamed up in my head, searching etsy for patterns, and cruising the craft stores to find fabrics and figure out which tools would help me most.  It is always hard for me to transition from hyper-efficient academic mode into the more relaxed pace of semester breaks, so having the crafts to work on also gave me something to do in the evenings that was less stressful than schoolwork.

The first thing I set out to make was a baby quilt for my friend Anne-Marie, whose shower was in mid December and whose baby is due any day now!  She loves William Carlos Williams, so I found an excerpt from a WCW poem that reminded me of what it felt like to fall more in love with Nora as I watched her take in the world.  I had fun embroidering the words onto the fabric, piecing the quilt together, and learning that binding the quilt is definitely the most time consuming part.  Overall, I was pleased with how the quilt turned out, though when I took this picture I realized that the lettering was much harder to read than I thought.

Once I finished that quilt, I began making a play mat for Everett.  I found this pattern on etsy for a play mat with a drawstring around the outside that turns it into a bag.  The idea is to throw the toys in the middle, cinch up the straps, and carry it as a bag when you're taking the baby somewhere outside the house where you plan to set them on the floor.  I knew that if I had ever shown up to new mom's support group with this dual-purpose blanket, I would have been the envy of everyone, so I hoped Ashley would find it useful for Everett.

It's tough to be an inexperienced quilter and a perfectionist, I learned.  I managed to get the corners to line up perfectly on Anne-Marie's quilt, but I just had to let go of my irritation about the strips not lining up on Everett's play mat.  Maybe if I make this again for someone else I'll do a better job.  I did award myself bonus points, however, for choosing an animal print backing that makes it look pretty trendy when it is in bag-mode.

Ashley is really good about sharing photos of Everett with us, so here is one in which he is doing a VERY careful inspection of the ribbons I sewed into the seams.  If he shares his cousin Nora's love of tags, he will be even more fascinated by these when he gains the use of his arms and fingers.

I also made a birth stats wall quilt for Everett, but I forgot to take a picture of it.  Thankfully, I learned my lesson about low-contrast lettering before making something that my colorblind brother would want to read.  Instead of stitching the birth stats into the fabric, I used felt lettering.  I also made some fabric headbands in cute patterns for Vickie, since she now has to wear plain navy blue scrubs to work every day.

My newly acquired quilting skills are back on hiatus during the semester, but when I have time again, I'm planning to begin working on a twin sized literary-inspired quilt for Nora.  And if I can get my emotions together someday I would like to do something with the bags of Dad's t-shirts I have stored away.