The elephant roaming next to a pile of receiving blankets

The elephant napping on the receiving blankets

A closeup of the little guy sleeping

The whole set, minus the PJs

For the sewing junkies out there, Yenari has some notes for those looking to make their own receiving blankets.  She used one layer of flannel and did a hemming stitch around the blanket and folded over the corners to make mitered corners, as shown in the second picture.  For the elephant, Yenari got inspiration from a pattern she found online (but can’t seem to find now) – the floppy ears have pink fabric on the inside  (visible in the first photo), the eyes are hand-stitched with black thread, and the little guy is filled with cotton.  Now only one question remains…what sewing project will Yenari pick up next…

After a trip to Jo-Ann fabrics, she added 3 borders around the original pattern and a backing fabric and was able to finish the sewing project that started decades before we were even born!  Since we don’t know the gender of the baby yet Yenari hedged her bets and bordered the original quilted design in yellow, pink, and blue.  Here it is:

Old quilting project brought back to life as a new blanket

Closeup of the quilting and the back of the blanket

Here’s the promised belly shot – Yenari at 14 weeks and a couple days:

14 weeks belly shot

And…if you thought this might actually be a post without a reference to sewing, here’s Yenari modeling her latest sewing creation – a pair of pajamas with an extra-wide custom pregger waist band:

Yenari in her newly made PJs

She thought it was a pretty sad sign when a loose pair of pajamas gets a little tight around your belly (which her other pair did), so she had to remedy the situation.

In other miscellaneous news, we went to the doctor last Friday – we heard the heartbeat and everything was looking good in the checkup.  Also, Yenari has been feeling a little rumbling in her tummy, so it seems that she’s catching the first movements of the baby – exciting stuff!

They start it off by checking your height, weight, and doing some balance tests.  After the tests they told Yenari that her BMI was 22, putting her right in the middle of the normal range.  Next I went, but I wasn’t so lucky…the first day my BMI was at something like 25.1 – just on the edge of overweight!  So the 12 week pregger (after gaining 8 pounds) totally showed me up!  Luckily the next day I was in the normal range, but I have to get working to keep in that normal range.  Here’s a photo of our characters:

Skinny Yenari and Fat Greg

Next, the Wii Fit asked us to enter fitness goals in terms of the weight we’d like to gain/lose over the next 4 weeks – this was a funny one for Yenari because she had to enter in a goal of gaining weight, something the game probably isn’t too used to.  Unfortunately they don’t have a mode for pregnant people, so the Wii Fit is going to be mad at Yenari for gaining weight and losing her balance control.  We saw postings on web forums where pregnant women were pissed that the game thought they were getting out of shape, losing balance, and asked them to lose weight!  Here’s a shot of Yenari Hoola-Hooping:

Yenari Hoola-Hooping in Wii Fit

To counteract all this great exercising, we had to eat some serious food today…a light sunday brunch at Palace BBQ, an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurant where the buffet is filled with raw, marinated meat that you grill for yourself at your table.  Pork, beef, squid…we had it all, and lots of it.  Yenari thought I was insane for putting rice on my plate – it was an all meat meal for her.  Here’s a shot of her grilling up some kalbi:

Grilling kalbi at Palace BBQ

After about an hour straight of eating Korean BBQ I was about ready to pass out – the photo looks a little blury, but that’s probably because I was shaking from a beef overdose – sorry.  Yenari kept eating for a good 15 mintues (6 more short ribs for her) after I finished up.  When we were leaving I was ready to go home to pass out for an hour or six, but Yenari insisted that we walk next door to the Korean market to buy tons of food – picking up six sweet potatoes, some mushrooms, and some bean powder for making fresh noodles.  It’s all kind of a blur to me, my brain had been called in to help with digestion.

Just as we were leaving she spotted some Korean rice cake which reminded her that she wanted to go to EWHA Dang Rice Bakery, a shop that specializes in the stuff.  We drove 5 minutes to go to the shop but they were closed (even though their sign said they should have been open), so Yenari was pissed…but luckily she spotted a bubble tea place and was able to continue the food fest with a mango bubble tea:

Yenari drinking bubble tea

I mostly wanted to write about this because I think that picture is hilarious.  Yenari is totally zoned out in bubble tea land.  She hates the photo, but it’s staying!  Internet, I hope you enjoy.

Lest you think a post can go by without detailing Yenari’s sewing habit, she has been sewing up a storm…several blankets, some hats made out of sweat pants legs (weird, huh?), and she just bought 8 yards of flannel fabric in order to make some PJs for herself and a couple other blankets.

Alright, enough writing for today – back to digesting…

Yenari was inspired by A Chelsea Morning’s post on making burp cloths and decided to dip into her endless pool of pajama and scrub scraps to make quilted burp cloths.  With almost three weeks left before she goes back to work, Yenari is wondering what else she can make.  Ideas?

5 new bibs

Here’s a closeup of one of the bibs – Yenari made up the pattern herself.

A girly blue bib

As she did last time, Yenari used an old shirt of mine for the backing fabric.  After 6 bibs, that shirt is not doing so well…here I am modeling it:

The sacrificed shirt, from the front

...and from the back

Not much left of the shirt, but Yenari thinks she can still get another bib out of it, after that I don’t know what she’ll do.  The other day I caught her eyeing another of my dress shirts (straight out of the dryer) and she asked me whether I still wear it…so I better start locking up my shirts or putting them up somewhere high where she can’t reach them!

Yenari is all about recycling and making the most of all of the left over fabrics she has from previous projects.  She found a tiny bit of racing car fabric that was left over from a pair of pajamas she made for Duncan for his birthday last year.  It’s a little boy-like, but she decided to go for it anyway and make a bib – here’s a photo:

Front of the bib

For the backing, she stuck with the leftover theme and used an old dress shirt of mine that had a big hole in the elbow and was beyond repair (believe me, she tried repairing it many times).  The shirt, a Brooks Brothers non-iron shirt, was a gift to me from Yenari and was one of my favorites.  Here’s a photo of the back, and also of the original shirt.

Back of the bib

Original source of the bib backing

For the ultimate in leftover fabric projects, I present the following: a baby blanket Yenari made (months before our wedding, even) out of a huge assortment of leftover pajama fabrics from years worth of presents.

Left over fabric blanket

Luckily the Pjs were a mix between blues and pinks, so the blanket should be good whether it’s a boy or a girl!  The great experimenter Yenari didn’t know how to do quilting – this was a total improvisation based on about 10 minutes of watching quilting videos on YouTube (can you imagine more boring videos than quilting videos?).  Yenari’s favorite quilting video would definitely have to be Quilting with Buck – it’s a winner.