A bit of catching up

Firstly, my dad celebrated his 94th birthday.  He spends quite a bit of time working on his ancestry and it's amazing how much he has found and how far back it goes.  To the 1300s even!  He is originally from Montreal and was very pleased to discover he is decended from two of the filles du roi.  He found a picture of this regimental flag and I sewed it up as a little quilt for his birthday gift.

In April my bee went on retreat to another fabulous house in the North Carolian mountains.  My, how serious we look while we are sewing!

But we celebrated several birthdays and there may have been some silliness too.  :-)  I'm between surgeries here.  You can see the pillow on my chair in a vain attempt to be comfortable sitting all day. And the next photo shows my teeth still intact, though the appointment with the specialist was looming.  Definitely time for some silliness.

The weather was a bit rainy, windy and foggy.  The clouds finally parted and we did get to enjoy the view.

The birthday party items were given to The Viking to enjoy, which he very much did.  He and I had a nice little "half birthday" party for him at lunch one day.  So much delight!

Besides working on my 365 Challenge blocks at retreat, I also put together this Chain Reaction quilt. Bee member Cathy, the designer of the pattern, gave us wonderful a tutorial on putting the chain blocks together.  I made mine to look like the pattern cover quilt.

 Quilting is now in progress!

Stardust has turned FIVE!  How did that happen so fast???

I find lots of free patterns and tutorials online and for some reason I thought this little cat was the cat's meow.  The Viking chose the fabrics out of my stash.  "It has to be orange, Nini!"

The pattern doesn't specify eyes.  The button eyes are a bit spooky, but he doesn't care.

I found a bunch of felt mask patterns and asked The Viking if he would like to be a bat.  Yes he said, but he won't wear it.

I made the eye holes bigger so he consented to put it on for a photo which we texted over to Mommy at her office.

He was delighted with Mommy's reaction!  He was further delighted to have a printout of the photo to show off to everyone.

He dotes on his stuffed cats.  I tried out another tutorial on making an animal carrier out of plastic canvas.  It's a bit weird, but he doesn't care.  It holds his precious cats and that's all that matters.

In between everything else I did manage to get the center of the 365 Challenge quilt together.  I'm still playing catch-up with the daily blocks though.

The cats also got sleeping bags.  Back we went to the stash and The Viking this time insisted on blue and green, "and flowers Nini!"  They are a little tight for him to maneuver the cats into so I'm going to try to insert zippers this week.  We shall see.

The Sailor Son came for Mother's Day weekend.  I needed strawberries for the dessert I was planning so we went and picked a bucket.  The week of rain and hail had taken a toll on the fields, but we managed to find enough good ones for gluten-free strawberry shortcakes.

He wore a bow tie to please his Nanny and Papa!

My goodness.  Am I shrinking??

Oh!  I also sewed up a bunch of these foot pedal non-skid thingies for myself and my bee friends.

The last little project was this silly cat for The Viking.  It's nice he indulges me by enjoying all of this odd stuff.  Pinterest has a lot to answer for.  ;-)  The others are getting a bit old for a lot of this nonsense.  I guess I'm just going to have to dig deeper into the psyche of their age groups and see what I can find to make.