Post #81 - A quick catch-up post.

So we didn't post at all in November and now
December is nearly half over and I bet you think 
we've forgotten about the blog. 
Again. 
Au contraire!

It's just that a blog post isn't much without pictures and I haven't been taking many pictures lately. I've been living in the moment more and documenting the moment less.

But here is a glimpse at what I have been doing 
for the past month or so.

 The celery that I started in my window sill back in February?  
I harvested it from the garden just before the first frost. 
Yummy!

 Hubs took me to Amish country to hunt for fabric stores. 
We found them. 
Wow!

 We saw a beautiful sunset on the way home.
Wow again.

 Brutus had his appointment at the Vet's office and 
needed a name tag for his crate. 
He got one.

 We held a wreath-making class at church and had a blast!

 I started a quilt.

 We went to see the light shows in two different towns. 
Pretty! 

 I worked on the quilt.

I wish I could say I finished the quilt and started another one. 
Moving along...

 I made a snowman decoration for my front porch.

Kudos if you spotted Lizzie at the door before I pointed her out to you.

And I decorated.

Now if it would just snow it would feel more like Christmas.

Post #80 - The annual Decorate-the-Sugar-Cookies-Day was this week.

Every year my Mom would make a big batch of sugar cookies and we'd get together and decorate them. Last year was the first year I can ever remember not doing that. So this year my kids asked if we could decorate cookies. I agreed and boy-howdy did we have fun. It was a lot of work, but I'll do it again in a heartbeat.

 At first everyone was concentrating on creating a masterpiece.

 And there was some pride when it was accomplished.

 Many cookies were consumed during the melee.

 We laughed and enjoyed each others' company.

 And just look at the masterpieces that were created. 

 Of course, we'll never know what the ones that were
eaten right away looked like.

 But they probably didn't look much different than the ones that survived.

 But I'm just guessing.

And then just like that there were no more cookies to decorate.

 This pan of cookies?  It holds...

the final cookie with the last of the icing.

I believe there's a bird cookie underneath that pile of blue.

But it didn't last very long.

We're definitely doing this again next year.

Post #79......She's back!!

Hey! Sooo.....mom's been doing all the posts the last few weeks because I've been pulling my hair out with a quilt. And hand embroidery. And the Puppet team. And the Youth Group. You get the picture.

I'm one of the Youth Leaders at our church now, so they keep me on my toes. And recently the Youth Group found themselves leading our church's Puppet Team, and since a)I'm a youth leader and b)I used to be in this particular Puppet Team, I'm now leading the Puppets, with the help of another former Puppeteer.

In addition to those fun adventures I've also started embroidering.
My first project......

This pattern originally had mums instead of the pumpkin 

but I didn't like how they looked. 

And I do what I want. 

This was my next project. I found this as a coloring page and loved it. 

   

I loved how the stems turned out!

It's a picture of PUNKINS ;)

I've also been working on my first quilt. Everyone that knew about this project has been looking for the pictures of it, and now that it is finished I will post them all. 

This was me laying it out on the table. About half way through I decided I'd run out of room so I ended up using the same pattern and just flipping it reversed. 

This is around the halfway point. For some reason the blocks didn't line up right so I off set them even more to make it look like I meant to do that. ;)

I was so happy when I got the top done!

We had to roll the rug back and wet mop the floor so we could lay out the top, batting, and the back and pin them together. While waiting on it to dry Lizzy explored. When we did lay it out both her and Brutus thought we'd laid out a new bed for them. We were to busy keeping them off and pinning to get a picture though. 

We interrupt your regular crafty blog post to show you this snake. That we thought was dead. That I picked up. I wanted to see the bottom so I could tell if it was male or female, when I flipped it the darn thing flipped back over. I looked at mom and said "dead snakes don't flip themselves over" 

Now Back to the quilt......

Since I didn't get the rows straight the edge wasn't straight........

this was a problem.

After much laughing, and almost peeing pants, we decided the best way to cut a straight line was tape three yard sticks together, then lay down masking tape along them. Then just cut along the masking tape. 

To bad I can't sew a straight line on my binding.

This is where I snapped.....literally. I even snapped at dad. And almost threw something at the poor cats. Eventually did get them all sewn and mom helped sew it onto the quilt. The whole binding situation happened the night before we left for vacation (pictures from that are another blog later).

It looks so purty on the bed.

This is a Picture of the back (flannel), the binding, and the tie 

(I voted to tie it instead of machine quilt it)

And the fancy seam mom's machine did. 

Well, that's all for now. Going to start work on my second quilt as soon as I get all the fabric. Anyone care to guess what the theme is? 

Post #78 - Savannah, the "LOOK UP" tour

I could post a bunch of pictures of our time in Savannah, Georgia that would look like everyone else's touristy pictures (no I can't) or I can post a bunch of pictures of what I found to be of interest (now that, I can do). 

So...today you will see what it looks like to see the architecture when you look up at it. Don't complain, give it a chance...

We went by horse-drawn carriage. It was very relaxing.

A church steeple.

 No doors on this balcony. Apparently there is (or was) a door tax, so they just put in tall, tall windows instead of doors. 

 This building had a natural blue stone worked into the tops of the building. 

 Spanish Moss is everywhere.

 Beautiful ironwork is everywhere. The tour guide said Savannah was second only to New Orleans in the amount of ironwork. 

I love this shadow of the scroll ironwork. 

 Lots of very old buildings. Savannah survived the Civil War without being burned, so the buildings survived in tact. Since then there have been fires and hurricanes though.

 Another church...from the side (top photo) and from the front (bottom photo).

 It looked like they were getting ready for a wedding.

Oh, speaking of weddings, we saw a proposal in progress in one of the park squares. A private horse-drawn carriage driver told our driver about it as we passed by him. I think he was their driver.

Anyway, it looked like it went well and she said yes. 

A theater--the first building in town to have air conditioning.

We are having a good time on our Mother/Daughter vacation at my sister's house.  I really appreciate my sister taking us shopping and touring. We've had a lot of fun enjoying each others' company.