I've Been Busy:

From the 2nd, when baby Kaylee was born, until the 4th, when I went to Chicago, I was crazily working to finish this:


Which, thankfully, I finished binding on my way down to see this cute little bundle:



Unfortunately, I was too busy playing "steal the baby from whichever aunt that's holding it and not paying enough attention, as I'm super important," to actually take any pictures myself, so I emailed my sister who, um, just had a BABY (see above) 7 days before, and asked her to take and upload pictures for me.

I'm not nice.

But she managed to get it done.

She also took close-ups of the front and the back. She had to take the back, too, to show off how I'd hand quilted the whole thing. Something that I don't know if I can ever do again. Not only was it time consuming, but it was painful - but nothing is good enough for my new niece. (OK, to my siblings: your first child each gets a hand quilted blanket. Cicely, too. That's it.)

The quilt is a Chinese Coin pattern (with 5 strips of "coins"), which was both fun and not that hard to piece together. And since I didn't know that Kaylee was a girl, all the background fabrics are yellow - and the only two yellow coordinating fabrics I liked said "farm." Which is totally cool. But the coin fabrics are all sorts of little baby-ish scraps - ducks, hippos, watermelons, clouds, stars, etc. (I know I'm going on, but this is my first quilt EVER, and so I'm going a little overboard.)

And, of course - things are going exactly according to plan. Susan has promised to try and make Kaylee's favorite possession - the one that will hopefully secretly travel with her to college.