After the Mayans and the "fiscal cliff"...

Happy New Year (a little belated)!  Despite the Mayan warning, the fiscal cliff, and an extended family Christmas down south for eleven days, we made it to 2013.

December is quite a blur right now...as a church musician, it is a very busy time, even without the other madness of the season.  Then there was the last minute gift finishing, decorating, and we decided to throw an "end of the world party" on December 21 (you know..."party like there is no to-maya").  I doodled the picture above for the invites, but thankfully no asteroid hit.

I managed to finish seven gift table runners by Christmas Eve...even hand quilted them.  I took time to photograph two of them.

Then I made several pairs of earrings for gifts...why is it that I have to drag ALL the beads out before I can work?!?

The creative part of me loves the over-stimulation, but it drives the OCD neat freak in me CRAZY!!  There was nowhere to work.

Then, I tried my hand at another yo-yo Christmas ornament.

I have enough yo-yo's made for ten of these tree ornaments, but only had time to finish one...so I have a good head start on NEXT Christmas.

I love using those Karen Kay Buckley "Perfect Circles" to make them...a yo-yo will finish about half the diameter of the circle you start with.

I put the last hand quilting stitches and hanging sleeves on two small pieces for gifts.

"No Crows" by P3 Designs and a Christmas Sampler wall hanging.

One of my sisters had a baby while I was home for Christmas, so that was really special, but the trip is always so hectic and I start the new year burned out and exhausted.  I managed to see my parents, great aunt, all six of my siblings, and six of the seven nieces and nephews on my side of the family...and put almost 2000 miles on the car.  (We also slept in four different places, and I cooked in three different kitchens.)

It is good to be home!  I am SOOOOOO behind on answering email...so please be patient with me.  I also have not sent out the Christmas cards yet...typical, so typical...  

I am working on two more "Baltimore Rhapsody" blocks simultaneously.  Yep, there is a grapevine on one of them...with 150+ grapes.  I didn't do much on the project for about 3 weeks, which makes me completely nuts.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season!  I have made my typical promise to start earlier next Christmas...yeah...right...

In stitches,
Teresa  :o)

The groom has appeared...

Hi!  I'm back!  I finally got to do a little sewing, for a change!  This is an original groom I drafted to go into my Civil War Bride Quilt.  He's the fifth block I've finished, so I'm officially done with one quarter of the blocks (oh yeah, then there are the borders....).

Here he is with his sweetie:

I may re-do him, as I was hoping they would look better together...I'm thinking his block is too sparse.  It looks like SHE uses "Miracle Grow" and HE does not.  (She should dump him for a better provider!!)

I have not been doing enough personal sewing lately...that makes me a little grumpy.  I did manage to make Riley a Halloween costume (she was Prof. Umbridge from the Harry Potter books/movie #5). 

I also had to design and make a couple of items for the shop's Holiday Dash, which is coming up in a couple of weeks.  This year, the Holiday Dash quilt is a Christmas row style quilt, so I needed to come up with small projects using our block in case our stash dashers wanted to complete something smaller with their set of collected patterns.  I made a l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g wall hanging (12 x 56 - that's CRAZY long, but we wanted to show customers they could make a SLICE of a row quilt!).  I also made a more normal sized table topper (that's my rug you see on the corners!).

In stitches,

Teresa   :o)