Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice!

It's an exciting time in my family as we're on the verge of a real population explosion.  I'm one of 6 children, and one thing you learn in big families is that when they grow, they tend to grow exponentially.  It's a bit like that "While I was going to St. Ives... " nursery rhyme.  Someone is going to St Ives and on the way they meet a man with 7 wives.  Every wife has seven sacks, every sack had seven cats.. and on and on it goes.  You're left trying to do all that math... 7 wives + 49 sacks + 343 cats + 2,401 kittens, it's enough to make your head spin.  Well, to someone just jumping into this family in the middle, figuring out all the people, who goes with whom can be overwhelming.  To me, someone who has grown up as the 6th child in a family with 6 children, it is all very comforting and normal.  After all, it was already a crowd when I was born into it.  I guess if you were to re-write that nursery rhyme for our family you'd have 2 parents who had 6 children and those children had 18 grand children and those grand children had 3 children with 3 more on the way...  It's now those grand children's (my nieces' and nephews') turn to continue the nursery rhyme.  We [collectively] are expecting 3 new babies, two before the end of the summer and another near the end of October, at which time would have given my parents 6 Great Grandchildren, and I will be a Great Aunt again... its all very exciting.

As I said, I am the youngest and the oldest is 15 years older than I am.  So, you can imagine the older siblings in my family were getting married before I was 10 years old.   And at 10 years old I became an aunt as my first nephew was born.  We then had about an 11 year time when there was a new born baby in our family just about every year.  In those 11 years 12 babies were born.  What am I getting at?  Well, those 12 babies were fairly even in the boy to girl ratio with 5 boys and 7 girls.  Then amazingly, in the last 17 years someone has stacked the deck.  It seems our family can't grow a girl at all, 17 years and 9 babies, all of which have been of the "snips and snails and puppy dog tail" variety. 

Until now!!  That's right, the first of these three new babies due in June our family is expecting the first girl baby born in 17 years!! Our family will finally have another baby girl around and we're all [I couldn't help but say it] TICKLED PINK!

Obviously what that means to me is that I can finally pull out the fabric bins that have all the pink and purple fabric in them!!

I've been holding on to these fabrics for a long time!!

I usually use natural cotton but I went back to the high loft poly for this as I wanted it to be 'puffy'.

Finished, log cabin pattern.. this time set on point.

Another thing I did a bit differently with this one is the double binding.  I usually do a single binding created by wrapping the back fabric around to the front.