Mini-quilt wedding gift

 My father-in-law got married, not this weekend that just ended, but the one before.  Robert and I wanted to make a nice gift for him and his now-wife because we think they are really awesome and wanted to commemorate their marriage (and what can you buy for parents - they are a firmly established household and could buy anything they needed or really wanted).  We decided on a cute mini-quilt (my part of it) with a lovely kolrose-d stand (Robert's part) similar to the one Robert made for our wedding cake topper.

I followed this tutorial at Two More Seconds for the heart applique, but made it a lot smaller.  Most of the fabrics are from a warm scrap pack I got on sale from Hawthorne Threads a few months ago, and a few are leftovers from other projects.    I embroidered their wedding date by hand before I sandwiched and (minimally) quilted it.

Here's the stand.  There are two narrow vertical sleeves on the back of the quilt to put over dowels that go in the holes of the stand.  The T and A are in blackboard bold (a mathy font - both my father-in-law and his wife are math professors), which fit perfectly because the theme of the wedding was "Nerd love"!

I didn't finish the binding on the quilt until the morning of the wedding and in my excitement to get it wrapped up I forgot to take pictures of the finished product ... maybe I'll get some the next time we visit ... or maybe I'll forget ...

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I'm zipping along on my first Deflect sock.  I'm almost finished with the gusset.  Somehow I didn't notice when I chose the pattern that it has non-traditional shaping on the gusset.  All of the stitches decrease into (both sides of) the cable panel on one side of the foot.  It was a nice surprise, but for a few minutes I was pretty confused about how the gusset decreases were supposed to work out!

Machine-embroidered cloth napkins

My mom moved to start graduate school and celebrated her birthday in August, and I had a super idea for a birthday/housewarming gift for her: cloth napkins!  I got the idea from napkins my sister-in-law made when she first got her embroidery machine.  The designs are from urbanthreads.com.  I used the fancy embroidery machine that Robert's grandma sent me last spring, and they turned out super well.  I bought off-white home-dec weight fabric, cut 19" squares, embroidered the designs (four of each design) in one corner of each square, and used this tutorial from Sew Bon to do a narrow mitered corner hem.  Of course I didn't start the project until a week or so before my mom's birthday and it took way longer than I thought it would, so I didn't get them finished and mailed until half way through September, but of course my mom loved them anyway!

Three weeks of CMS/Colloquium knitting!

 I finished the second cuff on my shrug (it took two weeks of CMS and colloquium) in last week's colloquium.  Now I just need to graft the stitches together, weave in all the ends, and block it!

Last weekend, I flew to Arizona to hike in the Grand Canyon and camp in the National Forest with two of my best friends.  We had a great time, and I started a new pair of socks on the plane.  The pattern is Deflect, from Knitty.  Here's how much I got done on the trip:

 And here's how the first sock looks after CMS and Colloquium yesterday: