laid back days

At left, Pippi, of course, but on her sewing room perch. She still likes the bedroom one best but at the moment is doozing atop my pillows---smart girl, she is on the softer one. If you look close you can see the backyards of the subdivision. Not much of a view past those overgrown bushes.

Not a lot going on around here. I guess I am still in holiday mode in a way and just doing some handwork on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The sampler quilt is parked on the sewing table all neatly folded and inviting for kitty snoozes---it is not going anywhere. I really have NOT been in the mood to wrestle with it. It's my quilt, there is no rush for completion. Not like the commissioned quilts and facing a deadline where I had to push myself through those when I was sick for two plus weeks. Now I can kick back and take it easy before the donation quilts push start up again in a couple weeks.

DJ and I had a nice Christmas meal---leftover ham is in the freezer for some future meals but ground up for ham loaf and chunked up for omelets, breakfast pizza, whatever. I made Ham Scrap Casserole for supper and promised to make something that DIDN"T contain ham tomorrow night, LOL.

We watched some holiday themed movies two nights in a row. It is rare for me to sit/stay out in the living room for long. He put a brighter bulb in the lamp and moved it to a better position so I could work on my hand stitching. It is hard for me to just SIT---I feel like I am wasting time. It is rare too that we could agree on what to watch---his tastes run to sports and action/drama movies but he was good and didn't do a lot of channel surfing in between on the one we watched on commercial TV.

This is what I have been working on--the bluework snowmen. A redwork list that I co-own had gotten permission to use these blocks this past year if we handstitched them. They are still available online HERE but are meant to done by machine. Norma and I are going to challenge each other to make these this next year. I had the January one done already and teeny bit of the February one done. Obviously it is finished now and I finished the March one this morning. I prepped the rest of the blocks for the year yesterday. The blocks will be trimmed down from the 11 1/2 inch squares that they are at present. I had to laugh when I went to print May through December. Out it came page length high--enough time had elapsed that I had forgotten that I had told the printer to print at a height of 8 inches and scaled the width in proportion to it.

Before I had started back to quilting my 30's sampler I had thought about getting this little Santa redwork
finished up. It just needs a pieced border done but obviously I made a different choice of what I wanted to work on. Now I am starting to think of other options. In May I had finished Betsy' adapted Oxmoor house Christmas quilt top but I also have one of my own started that I had also redesigned in EQ. At the moment I am leaning towards possibly combining these two projects into my version of that quilt. It is a combination of all different sized blocks and techniques. Why not??
The feathered star block was the original one I was going to pass around for the round robin. I substituted the fall themed one and set this aside for my own use. I can see using this instead of the Memory block or another Christmas star. Or not, LOL.

I am narrowing down my Top 12 choices of personal projects that I would like to move along this year--hopefully one a month. Depending on which one I chose, it could putting borders on and pinning the top, completing the quilting, finishing the top to "flimsy" stage. I've got 10 listed so far and maybe that is a more realistic number knowing me.

If I don't post again before we leave for our family gathering in Tennessee, I wish all of you the best of everything in 2007. Happy New Year!