Christmas Sorrows, Joys, and Unfinished Gifts

For the first time ever, I am taking down the Christmas decorations before New Year's Day.  I always like to have them up as long as possible because Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year, but this year I just don't want to see them any more.  My mother-in-law died early in the morning on Christmas Eve  this year.  It was very unexpected and very sudden.  From the time we heard she was in the hospital with pneumonia to the time she was gone was about 12 hours.  No time to talk to her, no time to get down to Arizona to see her one last time, no time to process anything at all.  There's no other way to describe it but that it 1 million star sucked. 

But God is gracious and gave us a really nice Christmas Day.  I could literally feel his comfort and grace surrounding our family all day.  In the afternoon, all the kids and I went out on a little photography trip with all of our photography swag and we had a really fun time taking some photos of beautiful stuff.  I'll post some of them when I get the film developed but here's one I took of us reflected in the mirrored glass of a building with our various cameras.

Four of the Meader photography geeks all in a row

On to unfinished gifts.  Well, like I thought, Al ended up getting a box with lots of quilt blocks in it for one of his presents.  I just ran out of time.  Yesterday I laid it out on the floor of our bedroom (my only option for a design wall right now) and arranged everything the way I wanted to sew it together.  I only got about a third of it sewn though so we had to carefully walk on it and around it until I got it all put together today. 

    

Here it is in all it's quilty goodness

Here's a closer shot

I'm looking forward to getting it sandwiched and machine quilting it so it can be finished and Al can use it before it starts to get warm.  I was pretty surprised that I matched the seams as well as I did since it's been so long since I've done any patchwork.  Thankfully it's a pretty simple block.  I still don't really like the process of sewing patchwork though.  I'd rather do a freeform art quilt any day.  :)

The cat seems to like the quilt too.  She's been sleeping on it all night.  :)

Merry Christmas Yayas

"The things we do for love."
-10cc song

This first post is for my yas, one of whom (I won't name names, Cindy) has been gently hinting and nagging nudging me to start a blog.  I have to be honest and say it's been kind of fun so far.  I'm still not sure how well I'll do keeping up with it but I guess since it's my blog I get to pick how often I post.  :)

I've been working on a few projects for Christmas and December birthdays and I just realized that I wrapped most of them  without taking pictures of them.  Silly Girl!  Good thing I made them easy to open--all under the guise of "artistic" wrapping too! 

Table runner  and placemats 

Paris Journal with souvenir envelope pasted on the inside of the back cover

Fun candles made from wine glasses and a teacup

Stitch markers

I've also been working on a lap quilt for my sweetie for Christmas.  Kinda stupid to start it 10 days before Christmas gets here, huh? Especially since he is on vacation now and is around the house all the time.  I've had to work on it when he goes to sleep because the studio has glass doors into the dining room and is also where you walk through to get to the garage so there's no way to hide what I'm doing.  Definitely not conducive to making much progress.  :) Oh well, I'll just get as much done as possible before Christmas and wrap what I have.  I'm using a disappearing nine patch block from a tutorial I found here.  http://quiltsatcs.blogspot.com/2007/04/disappearing-9-patch-tutorial.html

I have a lot of small pieces of fabric and thought this block might be a good way to use some of them (although not nearly enough of them) and I like how complex the final quilt looks.  I finished sewing and squaring up the nine patch blocks today.  Now to cut them in fourths and rearrange!  I think that will be the fun part--well, minus the having to hide

One of the finished nine patch blocks.

   And here is a block all cut up

I really love how this looks!

Well, that's it for my first post!  I'm tired tonight and am going to take a break and read for awhile instead of cutting more blocks.

Hugs yas!