Graduations . . . of a sort

It's graduation week. My son "graduates" from PreK and my daughter from K. Both have parties in need of cakes, so I'm on call to create sand castle cakes (from my miraculous bundt mold, what a great investment) and some triple layer, moussed, chocolate calorie killers. I made 10 cups of swiss meringue butter cream this weekend, so I'm halfway there :)

One of my son's teachers has been so perfect for him while he was in the PreK version of our private elementary school. She completely understands boys, loves pirates, and always had time for him--no matter if it were the nine-billionth time he asked her to draw Jack Sparrow. In the time he's been at the school, he's advanced light years, largely because of her selfless interest in him and his success. So, of course, I've made her a quilt:



I've become fascinated with the new Moda Layer Cakes. This is the Fresh Squeezed line with fabrics from my stash mixed in for the border and binding. I simply crosscut each square, first into four smaller squares, then into eight triangles. I mix-matched the triangles when piecing the half-squares, and then sorted them into pinwheels when piecing these into blocks. I really love how this turned out. The colors move all over, and the quilt is so warm, sunny, and summery. It just screams, "picnic, please!" Piecing all the triangles was definitely a bit of a bore, but I listened to the end of the Spare Wife to get through it.

The quilting is basic in the ditch to pull out the triangles and then swirling curliques in the border in a sherbet-toned variegated thread.

I found two more layer cakes on sale at our LQS over Memorial Day (Maypole and Dandelion Girl), so I'll be playing around with them some more in the future.

Oh, and I got an iPhone!! Yipee :)