Thank you all so much for the kind words and congratulations about our baby boy. Each and every comment and email made me so happy to read.

Even well into my second trimester, the fatigue is not going away like I thought it would. It’s definitely not as extreme as the first trimester when I felt as if I were constantly under the influence of Benadryl, but it still makes me pretty much a couch potato. So the fact that I spent several hours sewing today is a victory. I made some good headway on a custom quilt and a throw quilt for our sofa. I’m making it my goal to sew for at least half an hour every day. I really have missed it so much.

Last week was the Earth Day challenge reveal for the Dallas MQG. My original plan of making quilt blocks from old cotton men’s shirts didn’t pan out. My mitered corners were a mess so I didn’t get past the first block. (Anyone know of a good tutorial for mitered corners?) I was saved by the fact that I’d ordered a vintage sheet kit from Jeni at In Color Order last week and it fit the reuse/recycle theme perfectly. I made a sweet little wreath that will probably hang in my sewing room, and will definitely come out at Easter.

I won’t call this wreath project a total success, though, since making it involved a near disaster. I made it Thursday afternoon. Today I came into my sewing room and discovered that I’d left my glue gun plugged in (and ON) since Thursday. There was still power to it and it was warm but thankfully its cheap electrical insides burned out at some point and it was not hot enough to burn down our house. That is definitely a crafting fail.

Since today is Valentine’s day, I’d like to tell you about the two Valentines in that picture. They are my parents and this year they celebrated two big anniversaries in the month of February - they have been married for 38 years, and it has been three years since my mom donated one of her kidneys to my dad.

Polycystic kidney disease runs in my dad’s side of the family. My grandmother (Mamaw) was  the first to have it, and three of her four children inherited it. Of my five siblings, three of us have it. I was diagnosed two summers ago when I went to the ER with a kidney stone. PKD is a disease that often doesn’t cause symptoms until middle age or later, but it is a common illness – about 1 in 1,000 Americans have it. Thankfully, healthy kidneys are also common since we’re born with two of them. But on the flip side, there are many, many people who don’t have a loved one to donate a healthy kidney. They have to wait for another family’s tragedy to save their life.  Sometimes they are saved by a stranger who chooses to become a living donor.

February is special for a couple of other reasons. My mom celebrated her birthday yesterday. I won’t tell her age, but I will say that she was born in my favorite decade. February is also the month my Mamaw was born in 1933. She was a quilter, something she learned from her mother and grandmothers.  She mainly sewed with the remnants of old clothing, not surprising for someone who was born during the Great Depression in the rural farm country of Arkansas.  She grew up picking cotton on her daddy’s farm. My dad remembers her spending long hours hand quilting on a frame that came down from the ceiling on a pulley system (much like this one). Her name was Gladys Maxine and she passed away when I was 17, too young to appreciate the wisdom of an “old” woman. She spent the last 16 years of her life on dialysis, and was quite frail when she passed. I wish that she were still around so that we could talk about making quilts. I know her thrifty country girl nature would be shocked at my fabric stash and my expensive sewing machine.  It makes me laugh a little to think of what she might say about modern quilting. She would have been 78 years old this month.

And even though Valentine’s Day is cheesy and overly commercialized, I do think it’s important to do something special for the people (or doggies and kitties) you love today. You can also do something for a stranger and donate blood (or a kidney).

Happy Valentine’s Day,

[fall table runner]

There are so many things to be thankful for, particularly my family and friends. 2010 has been a great year in my life, and I really do feel that every year seems to get fuller, richer, and the joyous occasions (big and small) seem to happen more often. Our Thanksgiving was filled with joy, laughter, and a bounty of delicious food. We visited with family that we don’t see enough and we watched a lot of football. I finished binding all three things I brought to work on, and I’m very motivated to begin some new things in the coming weeks. It was very nice to take a short break from my over-scheduled life and just enjoy being still.

We flew into Dublin, arriving around 8:30 am local time (2:30 am Dallas time and my body’s time). I’d hardly slept a wink on the plane but I was feeling pretty good and the cold weather was definitely refreshing after 14 hours on airplanes and in airports. The refreshed feeling didn’t last very long, though. By 2 pm, we were walking around in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and I was starting to feel the jet lag + lack of sleep big time. I told C that I felt like I was walking on a trampoline. We headed back to the hotel and slept until 7 pm and had dinner in a pub near the hotel [I had a chicken and mushroom pie, which, like almost every single meal in Ireland, was served with chips [french fries)].

Dublin was my least favorite part of the trip. The perfect word to describe it is bleak. Everything is gray and dreary, and there is hardly a stretch of grass or a tree in site. Our second day we took a train north of the city to a village called Malahide, where we saw our first Irish castle.

[Malahide Castle]

They didn’t allow photography inside the castle, which just killed me because the textiles and paint colors were amazing. There was an entire room filled with cameos and silhouette art – both recent obsessions of mine.

After the two days in Dublin, we flew to Rome for 4 days, but that is for another post because I’m nowhere near finished going through our photos. I’m going to skip forward to Galway, which is where we went after coming back from Rome. We took a train from Dublin and met an adorable Irish couple (probably in their 70s) who were so incredibly friendly.  The husband told us a story about a TV show he’d seen called Mit Butters (at least that’s what we heard) and it wasn’t until he was halfway through the story that I realized he was talking about Myth Busters. I think between C and me, we understood only 70% of what they said, but it was still an entertaining conversation.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in Galway we didn’t have much time to explore. We had a hotel and dinner reservation about an hour’s drive away. We went to the Budget car rental office in town, and I had to rent the car in my name because C didn’t bring his driver’s license. This meant that I actually had to drive it. On the wrong side of the road. Let me tell you, driving on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road, is not for me. I made it about 20 minutes out of town and let C take over. I would have let him take over sooner, but I was too nervous to turn off the road. 

We’d heard that navigating the roads of Ireland could be tricky, and the rental car agent gave us a good tip. He said to always look for the next town you’re traveling through, not the road name or your final destination because you probably won’t find it. We followed his advice and ended up safely at our final destination for the night, Dromoland Castle.

There is only one word to describe this hotel: luxury. The room was beautiful and perfectly decorated, and we ate like kings. I have a deep love of luxury hotels -  My favorite thing to do is put on the hotel robe and slippers and order room service. This was definitely the most relaxing part of our trip (which I needed after driving on the wrong side of the road).

After Dromoland, we got back in the car of doom, and headed south, driving along the coastal road. We stopped in a lot of small towns and saw half a dozen castles. C and I both agreed that we like the ruins better than the intact castles.

[Carrigafoyle Castle]

We did get lost for a bit near Ardfert, and when we stopped to look at the map, a herd of cows wandered over to moo at us.  I think it must have been dinner time and their farmer was late.

[Ardfert Cathedral]

In the tiny village of Ardfert, we went in search of dinner but everything but one pub was closed for a funeral.  We had a few beers and started chatting with a local couple at the bar. They actually invited us over for dinner. We had fish pie, brown bread, salad with smoked salmon, and a berry tart for dessert – all homemade in true Irish tradition. They had even caught the fish and grown the potatoes that went into the pie.  It was the kind of Irish friendliness you always hear about, but don’t truly believe exists until you experience it.

After our night in Ardfert, we headed out on the Dingle peninsula, which is the kind of place most people probably imagine when they picture Ireland. It’s a rough landscape on the sea with hillsides dotted with cows, sheep, and centuries-old stone walls.

All of the road signs are in Irish, which makes navigating a bit tricky and we ended up missing one town we wanted to see. Dingle is the place that made C decide that he was done with driving. In many places, the roads are only wide enough to allow one car to pass. It was raining lightly that day so we also had to deal with the mist and fog.

After Dingle, we spent two days in Killarney, which is a touristy town known for Irish music. We’d planned to do a day hike through the lakes and hills known as the the Ring of Kerry, but of course it was the only day of our trip that we had rain. We ended up doing a bit of shopping and pub crawling instead, which turned out to be exactly what we needed to relax before catching our flight back home.

[more Ireland photos here]