To quilt or not to quilt

Hi everyone. This is Nicole. At the request of my good friend, Meredith, I will be contributing guest spots to the blog every now and then. I am just warning you...I'm not as funny as Jen, so please read this with low expectations and no one will be disappointed. So far, this whole pregnancy journey for me has been filled with mixed emotions. For example, happy, worried, holy crap, I'm going to be a mom, will everything be ok, and think of all the things we can buy! As you know, Jen hates shopping...any kind of shopping. So, today, we took my mom and two of her good friends on a shop hop...a quilt shop hop. Yes, I said quilt shop. That's right, I'm gay and I like to quilt which has caused my DICO score to plummet (more on that to come in another post). As some of you already know, I LOVE to shop. Any kind of shopping. Malls. Outlets. Craft stores. If it's got a sales sign, I'm there. Now, for those of you that don't know what a shop hop is, you travel around CT and go from quilt shop to quilt shop looking at a variety of patterns, materials, books, machines, gadgets, and anything else you could possibly need to make any type of quilt, wall hanging, bag, pillow case, apron, and virtually anything you can imagine. My mom, her friends, and I all had a blast and Jen...well, Jen drove. Thanks, Jen. Most of us rated the shops based on the quality and variety of the patterns available while Jen rated the shops based on the quality of the free snacks available. Each time we entered a new shop, we would get our passports stamped, get our free strips of material, and excitedly start looking through the bolts of fabric to make our projects sing. Jen seemed to disappear almost immediately in each store and would later be found critiquing the cookies, granola bars, chocolates, and other treats she had found tucked away in each store. She usually did not surface until she found the food and, once she did, she was gone for a while. By our 6th shop and 6 hours into the trip, she was desperate for some Tums, which my mother had actually packed with Jen in mind.

With my new quilt treasures in hand and some other material I had found before, I am aiming to make a quilt for our little one on the way. As a beginner quilter, I am still not very good at judging the amount of material I need to make a baby quilt, and, as my mother has informed me, I have already bought enough to make a queen sized quilt, curtains, a bed skirt, baby bumpers, and a few other things. Oops. I hope the baby likes Classic Pooh because he/she is going to have tons of things in his/her room made with that material right through his/her college years. So, with all of this material and all of these projects ahead of me, I will be spending a lot of time in our craft room making all sorts of doo dads. I will keep you posted on my progress and maybe I'll post some pictures. And with that I say, quilt on, my friends. Quilt on.