Aquarium, you make my heart sing!

I could spend 6 of the 7 days of the week at an aquarium! 

I have a deep need to connect with water creatures -- the habit is supported by two fish tanks at home.  Not sure where the need came from, (and boats make me sea sick) but I don't argue... I just go with it! 

We went to The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT... and had a blast! 

Not your typical aquarium exhibit.. but they had Meercats!!  We quickly found out that early morning and mid-week.... all the animals were still so sleepy. 

Imagine if you sleep like this.  Bet you would need a good stretch after!

They had a whole room full of frogs.  Big ones, little ones.  The poisonous kind.  The loud ones.  Some that were brightly colored. 

This guy stole the show for me!!

They have some gigantic tanks! 

This one towered over my head and went all the way to the ground.  As the sharks swam around it felt a bit like they would come right over and shake my hand.  Errr... um... ask me what's for lunch!

I can never get enough jellyfish either.  They had a dark room with a cylinder tank all light up which really made the jellyfish look like they were dancing! 

I can't get over how delicate and detailed they are. 

One of my other favorite are the clown fish.  It was probably the movie "Finding Nemo" that ignited that love affair. 

Bright and beautiful... I could watch these clowns all day too.  Wonder how often they hear that!?!

I think all the bubbling water relaxes me!  Tomorrow I will show you those silly harbor seals!!

Quilting Rocks my World!

I know it has been all about this chair the last few days, but this is nearly the grand finale.  You guessed it.  I finished the seat!  I have put together lots of savaged bits of interesting fabrics, which turned out to be no small task as I had to decide on the desired shapes, sizes and placements. 

I used an original design for the 'pattern' and to be honest I don't think I'd be able to recreate it.  When you last saw things, I had a lot of pieces cut out and was beginning to join them.  Here is how the sewing started to shape up... 

I pinned additional pieces in place to get a feel for the size I needed to cover the seat.  I also started to get a feeling for how the painted chair and seat complimented each other.  At this point they still feel a little foreign, but I have ideas on how to tie them together.

Next step was to remove the old fabric covering and check out what the base looked like.  Can you believe I pulled out all these staples? 

I was pretty surprised to see that the fabric wasn't the original covering.  At this point, I'm not even sure if the seat and the chair started their life together.  Can you picture a pleather seat for this shape?

This is a great shot of my workspace to include my custom door-desk I originally showed you here.

I wanted to extra cushion on the seat with batting added between another layer of fabric... also, making this more of a real quilt piece. 

Once I had the batting in place and another flowing design laid on with pins I set out to again get the sewing machine humming.

And... fancy music, bells, and fireworks......

...here us the finished quilted seat in all it's glory!

A look of it on the chair...

I'm proud.

It beats my expectations for what I thought I could pull together.

Yup, proud is a good way to express this feeling!!


Tomorrow we will take a breather from all this creativity and I will share our trip to the aquarium!  Who doesn't love a good jelly fish or sleepy seal!?!

Jellyfish

Ever seen jelly fish glowing in an aquarium? Something about seeing their effortless dance = happiness!

Plain and simple, I am an aquarium fanatic! This picture is from 2 years ago at the Boston Aquarium; which is a must see if you are in the vicinity. The jelly fish area was dark, with the exception of a tank taller than me full of these odd sqiushy glowing dancers. Making the experience all that much cooler, was a little dial you could turn to change the colors that the jelly fish glowed.

I couldn't have been any happier at that moment, when I was imagining what all the jelly fish were saying to each other as they danced along! Mr. Happy, thanks again for feeding my aquarium passion!