Hello, dear friends! I'm so sorry I've been absent here for so long! Summer has been so wonderfully busy and full of joy. We have been doing lots of things and also lots of nothing, and it has been just perfect. Pool days, fair days, lazy days, work days. Many afternoons at our favorite Thai restaurants playing Uno and eating pad Thai. Many afternoons riding bikes up the road and getting hotdogs, playing videos games, going to movies, getting boba tea. Days at the pool, nights jumping on our neighbor's trampoline. Campouts with air mattresses on the living room floor, playing video ..read more

Oh dear me, it's already the end of June! I am finally here with my summer design! She is, without further ado, SUMMER BREEZE! This is my dream of summer: A beach house. Clear skies. Butterflies and kites soaring on the wind. Lazy days spent by the daisy-bordered lake, swimming and playing with our friends. Aspirational, yes, but truly heartfelt, as I hope your (and my!) real-life summer includes all of these dreamy things. The design area on this (and its two season companion pieces, Evening Skate and Full-Moon Planting) is 8.63"w x by 10.5"h (22cm x27) on 32-count fabric, or 138 s ..read more

Good morning! It's summertime! Wow! School is out, the sun is shining, and the flowers are blooming! I hope you all are well. We've been busy and I got a new computer last month and have been trying to get all my ducks in a row on it. I knew it would be messy, and yes, it has been messy. I hadn't gotten a new computer is over ten years. I hate getting new computers. I went from a PC laptop to a MacBook Air. The Mac is nice, and I have an Apple phone and iPad and I've had Macs before, so I am not new to them. But there's still been a bit of a learning curve, getting all my ..read more

Oh, we have had a busy, busy few weeks around here. Amelia's ballet school performed Don Quixote over the weekend and it was just fantastic. I'd never seen that ballet before and I loved it. Andy and I watched three performances of it (one on Saturday with Amelia, so she could see it, and two of her performances on Sunday) so — luckily, we loved it! They were looooong. Two and a half hours each. But wow, they did a great job. The costumes were just gorgeous — the skirts on almost every costume were just layers and layers of fantastic ruffles, and the colors were so pretty. Salmon, mi ..read more

Good flowery, rainy, thunderstormy morning to you! I’m writing from here in my office where we’ve had all manner of thunder and lightning this morning. This is very unusual for Portland, Oregon, where rain tends to fall as a dull curtain of mist instead of a dramatic, rolling cacophony of sound and shattering light. I have a new app on my iPad called “My Lightning Strike” and I kept my neighborhood moms’ chat punctually informed of all nearby strikes (one just 700 feet from our house, and one across the street from Rebecca’s) because a bunch of lightning happening right as everyone is getti ..read more

Thank you so much for the spring orders! I truly appreciate every order and every comment on my new designs. Thank you! I hope you are enjoying making them! I just mixed up some no-knead bread (pictured above) and covered it with a towel to rise for the next 90 minutes. Why did I do this? Why did I cook all of this food over the past week, and take pictures of it? Because I've decided to self-publish a cookbook and I want to include the recipes! As you do! Are you familiar with self-publishing? Like Kindle Direct Publishing? I had never really heard of this (I'm really n ..read more

Good April morning! It's a cold, wet, flowery morning here. My hands are freezing and I'm sitting on a heating pad, but outside I can see my apple tree is starting to leaf out. In that spirit, I have spring designs for you! The first is FULL-MOON PLANTING. Have you ever heard of moon gardening? It's the practice of planting depending on where the moon is in its cycle. The theory is that just as it causes the ocean tides, the moon also affects the amount of water in the soil.  To take advantage of its changing influence, it is said that fruits and vegetables should be planted while the mo ..read more

Oooo, my stars, it seems I actually have a day to myself, and it’s a chess day (so I don’t pick up Meems until 4:15). I literally can’t remember the last time I had time to blog. It was probably March 1, the date of my last blog post. More like a million years. Nashville is over and everything is back home except of course for the one box filled with patterns that got lost and never made it there. Lost forever, according to USPS. In the weeks since, I’ve spent the days unpacking, creating electronic orders from handwritten order forms, establishing accounts, writing thank-you emails ..read more

Oh HELLO! Hello, hello! It's March 1, oh my. March 2023. March 2023! Gosh. I need to let that sink in for some reason. All of you, first of all, we truly thank you for every one of your kind and gentle comments on the loss of Andy's beautiful mom. I always think of each of them as a small prayer and they bring us comfort and make us feel less alone in our sadness. Thank you so much. It has been almost a month now and there are so many moments in the day where I just want to tell her something, or send her something, or send her a picture of Amelia, or tell her something funny that ..read more

My beautiful mother-in-law, Suzan, passed away unexpectedly last weekend. We're heartbroken and I hardly know what to say. She and Andy's dad were just here a few months ago for Amelia's birthday, and I'm so grateful for that. It was their first visit since Covid started and it was a wonderful visit. So many things remind me of her. So many toys and clothes and books and stuffed animals and dollies and cute, purple, soft, darling little sparkly things that she gave Amelia. She was a generous and doting grandmother, endlessly patient, endlessly loving, always up for a party, truly tireless w ..read more