Halo Progress, Welcome Home Kit NewFO, and A Creative Tangent with the PhotoSketcher App

Hey there, quilty peeps!  Hope you are enjoying a wonderful Memorial Day weekend if you're in the United States, and I hope the weather is nicer where you are than it is in Charlotte, North Carolina right now.  Rain, rain, and more rain!  Good thing I have a bright and cheerful project on my design wall since the view outside my window is so drab and dreary.  

Halo Blocks Still In Progress

This is a Jen Kingwell pattern that is suitable for either hand or machine piecing.  The pattern is found in Kingwell's Jenny From One Block pattern booklet and you can find that on Amazon here (this post contains affiliate links).  

I'm fascinated by the way Kingwell organizes her seemingly random scrappy compositions so studying the way she alternates between "organized chaos" vs careful control within the same quilt is my primary fascination with this project.  The curved piecing challenge is just the icing on the cake.  In Kingwell's version of this quilt, most blocks are totally scrappy except for three blocks that are created with all one fabric for the backgrounds, all one fabric for the rings, and all one fabric for the triangles surrounding the center square.  Whereas the circles at the block intersections predominate throughout most of her quilt, those three blocks that have planned matching fabrics pop out as squares that help your eye travel across the surface of the quilt.  Here's one of my blocks that I'm hoping will function that way in my version of Halo:

One of My Favorite Recently Finished Halo Blocks

The dark pink arcs were cut from one of the Tilda fabrics in the fat eighth precut pack that started me off on this tangent.  The rest of the fabrics in this block are treasures from my stash.

$80 Down the Drain: Psychotic School Portrait Photographers Strike Again!

So, it's that time of year again, when the school pictures come home and all the proud mommies and daddies are posting them up on Facebook for friends and family to admire.  My kids' school pictures came home last week, too -- $80 is what I spent between the two of them, for 8" x 10" and 5" x 7" prints to go in frames on our mantel and to be passed out to grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  Well, this year, the school pictures are not going to be passed out to anyone.  They will be shredded and destroyed.  The only thing they are good for is a few laughs, and I thought I'd share that fun with you in case you thought YOUR kid's picture was bad this year.

First up, my adorable little Anders.  A second-grader.  ALL second graders are cute, and it is practically impossible to take an ugly picture of a cute little second-grader -- unless you are a highly trained, professional school photographer, that is:

Anders' School Picture, Second Grade 2010

Don't these photographers have a digital preview feature on their cameras?  How could anyone think that was a decent picture?!  It's a grimace, for crying out loud.  One wonders if the photographer's assistant was dismembering bunny rabbits in the background, and the photographer yelled, "You'd better smile, kid, or we'll do the same to you!" before snapping the picture.

Picture of Anders taken the same week as the school photo

It's not like Anders isn't photogenic, either -- he looks great in every picture except the one they took at school.  How did they manage to make him look so emaciated and sickly?  I thought the camera was supposed to add ten pounds, not subtract them!  Do school photographers have a special software editing program for that?

Next up is the older brother, Lars-of-Ours.  He looks dangerous in this picture, like he might bite you, doesn't he?  And again, when they saw this picture in the preview pane, why didn't they take another one?  I'll tell you why -- it's because parents have to purchase the portrait packages before picture day, without seeing a proof.  No one cares if it's a good picture or not because they already have your money.  Grrr...  And why didn't anyone think to ask him to take off his jacket before they took the picture? 

Lars's School Picture, Fourth Grade 2010

Can we all just scream together?!!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHKKKK!!!!!! 

This is what my sweet little boys really look like.  Can anyone recommend a good portrait photographer in the Charlotte, North Carolina area? 

Lars and Anders On Location at Lowe's Home Improvement Store

We're trying to cut back on screen time for the kids this summer, yet shopping trips continue to be a challenge for them.  By the time we leave a store, every employee and customer in the joint knows my kids' names and is glad to see us leave.  Ahem.  So in the past, I've brought the Nintendo DSi game systems to keep them calm and out of mischief, but like I said, I'm trying to cut back on that, so we tried something different when we went on a family shopping trip to Lowe's Home Improvement store yesterday.  I let Lars bring his little Lego digital camera that he got for Christmas last year.  It looks like it's made of Legos, and you can customize it by adding additional Lego bricks, but it's an actual working digital camera with a flash and everything.  So Anders mugged for the camera while Lars played photographer.  I uploaded Lars's pictures after we got home and thought I'd share a few of the highlights -- I know his Opa will get a kick out of his grandson's budding interest in taking pictures of EVERYTHING!  All of these pictures were taken by Lars using the Lego camera.  Here's Anders doing a Batman impersonation outside the store:

Next we have Anders trying out a John Deere tractor, because it is green:

And of course then Lars asked Anders to take his picture sitting on the Husqvarna tractor, because it is orange:

Next we have Anders shopping for power tools.  That red "Z" on his forehead was self-inflicted with a red ink pen, and is supposed to be a Harry Potter scar.

And now, Anders/Batman being a tough guy in the gardening aisle:

Unfortunately, all of this good clean fun devolved into raucous bathroom humor and inappropriate photos when we got to the toilet displays in the bath fixtures section of the store.  I had to confiscate the camera at that point, so I'm not sure I'll be bringing it with us the next time we head out shopping.