I finished the quilt a week or so ago.  I’m very pleased with how it turned out, all things considered.  It’s filled with errors, but it’s a very forgiving pattern, and by and large you really can’t tell there is anything wrong.  L loves it, and since it’s her “present,” that’s certainly important.  She particularly loves the fox.  Machine-sewing around this little guy was perhaps the most hair-raising part of the whole thing:

You can see there were several bobbles, but I think it looks OK.  You also can see the quilting well in this picture.  The top half of the quilt is quilted with clouds and the bottom half with stars.  The quilting was probably the hardest part.  It was physically challenging and oddly really hurt my wrist.  I’m hoping that’s just because I really didn’t know what I was doing and that it’ll get easier with practice.

I picked a dark blue bird fabric for the back which I really like, and you can see the white quilting quite well against the blue fabric.

The quilt against our fence:

We have been having a rough week.  B’s transmission failed, which will be a $2000 repair if we decide to rebuild it.  We’re not sure whether to do that or to buy a new car.  It just feels very rushed to go out and buy a new car.  His car has 160,000 miles on it, though.  I still think it makes the most financial sense to repair the transmission, but we can decide to do the more expensive option and have a nice new reliable car for ourselves as well.  My car is more than 10 years old, so we have two rather old vehicles right now.  I sent out e-mails to about 15 Toyota dealers inquiring about Camrys a couple nights ago, and now we’re fielding calls by the dozen.  The problem is we’re just not sure we actually want a Camry.  We pretty much decided we’d like a mid-sized car rather than a compact, but we’re also tempted by the small SUVs, like the Toyota Rav-4.  Well, by we, I really mean me.

Then, last night our heat pump failed.  To top it all off, the heat pump guy told B that it’s probably been poisoning us for the last couple of years.  Fabulous!  Moral of the story – don’t be an idiot (like me) and get your furnace serviced annually.  *sigh*

Then, in addition, a rather large portion of our back yard fence fell down in the recent storm we had, and I’ve been dealing with deferred maintenance on my vehicle (just got tires, next up brakes and oil change).  My parents are visiting, and I am exhausted.  I’m inspired by the quilt and there are a bunch of craft projects I’d like to try, but I can’t even think about it until we deal with the furnace and car problem.