Quilt for baby?

Some of you know that my goal for 2011 was to learn how to quilt. I have always wanted to learn but I do not have anyone in my family who could teach me so I signed up for a beginners quilting class at Intown Quilters in Decatur. I highly recommend this class. It is taught by Maxine Moore who is a fabulous quilter and teacher. So far, including the quilt we made in class, I have made five quilts. Not too shabby when you realize that two of these were king size. I also made all of those by June. I started my sixth quilt, also a king size, in June. Being out of the country for most of July, returning to work in August, and having "morning sickness" for three months caused me to get a little backed up. Now I am back on track and hope to have this one finished by the first of the new year. Here is a little preview.

This is by far the most intricate quilt I have attempted. The first step was cutting lots of little strips of fabric and then sewing them into blocks. Next, I cut these blocks back into six inch squares and stacked them into stacks of hundreds to keep track of my progress.

Now, I am in the process of sewing these squares into rows and then sewing my rows together to make one very large quilt top. More pictures of the progress coming soon!

One bonus of this project is that I have a lot of extra strips of fabric left over. I am thinking of making a smaller quilt just like this for the nursery. What do you think?

Also, I hope to have an update on the dresser soon. I started sanding this week with my brand new sanders (That's right, I have two. Thanks, Dad!). And we should be getting the primer and paint today!

Paint Colors

I shared the names of our paint colors for the nursery a couple days ago. We got a few samples of the colors to share with you. Again, forgive me for the photography skills. I had a tough time getting a shot that came anywhere close to capturing the colors. You can at least get an idea of the shades we are talking about.

The blue is the interior of the closets, the grey is the main wall colors, and the green will be on the dresser. The bedding will be white and dark grey and I am working on a quilt--pictures coming soon! There will be lots of punch colors, as well, with the rug, alphabet and poufs.
If anyone wants to help paint, call Doug. I have put him in charge:)

Baby Pictures

We had our 17 week appointment yesterday. I am told the point of this appointment was to check out the baby's brain, heart, and other developing organs. The doctor said everything looked really good and gave us a couple pictures.

For those of you who are like me and cannot tell at all what is going on in these pictures, that is the baby's head on the right and then it's little ribs and arm/hand in the top middle. And here is a nice profile shot.

That's a good-looking baby! Doug and I could not agree on finding out the sex. I really do not want to know and he really does. Because he was not able to be at this appointment, I had the doctor write it down for us and seal it. As soon as Doug comes up with a list of names he will get to open the envelope. For those of you thinking you can convince him to tell you what it is, he has sworn to me that he will not reveal the sex to anyone. Not even his mother or my mother who are begging to know.

I am going to try to post another update on paint colors for the nursery later today!

Nursery: Before

I am back, as promised, with a few "before" shots of the room that will soon be transformed into the nursery. Please forgive my sub-par photography skills. And the creepy looking cat. She is really quite sweet and very excited about redecorating. The room is a bit of a mess in the pictures because I took these after we started shopping for a few things this weekend. A few "inspiration pieces" can be seen in the shots, as well. These include the rug (half price from Anthropologie), fabric covered letters (Anthropologie a couple Christmases ago), paintings of safari animals (painted by a local artist in Athens), and the dresser (on sale at an antique/junk store around the corner from our house).

We will be taking down the doors to the closets. One door did us a favor and removed itself. Doug considerately laid it gently back into place so that the next time I tried to open it it fell over on me. What a jokester. Anyway, once the doors are removed we will paint the interior of the closets blue (Sherwin Williams, Candid Blue for anyone who cares). My brother, Spencer, and Doug's dad, Lewis, have big plans to rip out everything that is in the closets now and build more useful shelving. This will probably be the most difficult and time-consuming part of the redo. We are very lucky to have two knowledgeable and skilled handy men in our immediate family. The other walls will be painted a pale grey (SW, Passive). Painting will likely be assigned to Doug and my mom, Susan, since they did such a fabulous tag team job on the basement last year. We also found a couple of poufs to stack between the closets. One will be grey and one red.

The shelving on the right will be taken down and replaced with a floating white shelf and another inspiration piece in a red frame. We are looking into a dark grey glider to go underneath that. Windows and trim will all be painted white (SW, Extra White), hardware will be upgraded to bronze and we will put up white plantation shutters.

We have picked out a beautiful white crib to go against this wall. The three pictures will go above the crib. The dresser will be painted green (SW, Sassy Green) and the alphabet letters will go above it. This will be my task and my BFF, Kenworthy, was nominated volunteered to help! We have also ordered a new light fixture for the room.

So, you can see we have a lot of work to do. Luckily, we have a while until our April 16th due date and very generous family and friends who are willing to help us. I will do my best document it all as our vision becomes reality!

Hello World!

Well, I am finally joining the blogosphere. Better late than never, right? I have never felt compelled to start a blog but recent events have changed my mind. Doug and I are expecting a baby in April and there are some big changes taking place around Casa de Belknap that I want to be able to share with family and friends. Many of the people we love are scattered across the globe so a blog seems like a good way to keep everyone up-to-date on what's going on without plastering it all over Facebook. So, let's begin.

Doug spent the weekend golfing at Lake Lanier. That's a good-looking group. I especially like that they color coded their teams.

While the boys were away the girls kicked off the nursery extravaganza. I had been collecting "inspiration pieces" for several years knowing that we would eventually have need of a nursery. Unfortunately, I was not born with a decorator's eye. I tend to reach a certain point in decorating and then shut down. I also have a horrible track record with paint colors so I like to rely on the professionals. Enter Dan DeSantis. He has helped my mom and me out on several other rooms in our houses so we invited him down Friday to help bring my vision to life. As usual, we are thrilled with what he came up with and I will be sharing our progress on the blogknap.

I am also hoping to convince Doug to write a few guest posts so check back for updates! I am also working on my photo-taking and editing skills so look out for more picture heavy posts coming soon!