On the Table Tuesday: Birthday Edition!

Welcome to this birthday edition of On the Table Tuesday (it's still Tuesday... it still counts!) First of all... I should get this one thing off my chest. Not only did I not finish everything I had hoped... I didn't finish any of it!

None.

Now, on to what I did get done! I themed this 3 year old birthday with "pink". That's all. My pink girl needed to have a pink birthday. Grandma sent a pink dress, so we opened it first thing in the morning so she could wear a new pink birthday dress (who cares that it was supposed to be for warmer weather... we improvised!)

And this here is her pink cake. However for people who don't use standard food coloring (and as a woman who can't talk her husband into the importance of the really expensive natural food colorings), we improvise in this area too. That cake is a v.e.r.y. sweet strawberry cake. I just kept adding pureed strawberry to the frosting until it was pink enough (and the right consistency for spreading as I used all my homemade powdered sugar).

And all that pink frosting is on top of a white cake turned brown when I added strawberry to it too. So much for pink cake. I subbed the strawberry for some of the buttermilk, so the cake didn't puff up as much as it normally would have. But it was still good (ok... so I told my diabetic land lord he couldn't have any after My Beloved offered some last night [small fridge problem brought him out after hours to check on us]... I just couldn't let him eat any in good conscience.)


I said I didn't finish any of the projects I had intended... I didn't say I didn't try. It's just that we ran into some technical difficulties. More on that later. For now I'll point out the design difficulty.

What do I mean?

Can you read that??? My Beloved pointed out several times that he couldn't. I knew it wasn't going to work great. But by that time I was so far in that I was committed and decided to just do it anyway. She's 3, after all. She's going to love it anyway!

I was planning to quilt them all like this one.

Or perhaps like this one (can you see the quilting on the letter?)

This is one of the places the technical difficulties came into play. I've been fighting with my machine this week and it wasn't going well. You should see the back of these things. Matted and terrible. I'm *sorry* I didn't get a shot of that for you. Oh, wait... maybe I'm not. At any rate. Only the first few letters look like these. There is a little tiny bit on the rest of "happy"...

But really most of them look like this. Plain. And hard to read.


And I was planning to cute them up with rick rack and other fun embellishments. But since I intend to toss or disassemble them once they are down... I just didn't have it in me. Let's not even mention that I flat out ran out of time because of all the machine issues!

And once I did get my embroidery floss threaded through and hung, they weren't staying close to the wall, but turning sideways instead. So I stuck a {pink} straight pin in the wall to hold one.

Worked like a charm!


Like I said... it's not like I didn't work.

This is the doll quilt I worked on all last Tuesday and Wednesday night. I even had it almost half quilted. I had told my husband minutes before that I would probably get it done before we went to bed.

Famous last words.

Then I turned it over and saw that I'd caught a bad wrinkle in the backing and it was not savable! I hate to admit that I actually spent 1.5+ hours with my seam ripper tearing out all the quilting. And I'm not that good at free motion yet... some of the stitches were beyond tiny! I couldn't see straight for a while after I stopped looking so closely at those little stitches!


So it waits for me to figure out my machine problems. But it's pieced. Nine patch is the pattern. But instead of 3 inch squares... each block is 3 inches. Insane, I know! It's finished (pre-quilting) size is 12"x15". And I just can't wait to get it to her... she's going to love it. She got a baby for her birthday and has been mommying it so well already!


How about you??? Do you have anything on the table??? (I say on the table because that's where I do my sewing... on our kitchen table. Your "table" could be in your craft room, in your lap, or anywhere else.) Are you working on any little projects? I'd love to know about it... and if you have posted on it, leave me a link so I can check out!

Labels: As it happens..., Little Moments, With These Hands

posted by ~Babychaser~ @ 7:54 PM