Thursday, December 8, 2016

I did a little making and a little wrapping today and there is no contest – I like making a whole lot better than wrapping.

I finished a project last evening and decided there was time for one more quick thing this morning. I did a search for a pattern and found several online that would have been fun to try, but speed was the biggest consideration so I opted for the simplest pattern. The pieces were as quick and easy to complete as they promised (that sometimes isn’t the case). It was fun picking out fabrics that I thought would be good for each of the grandkids.

I wanted to get as many packages as possible wrapped and in the mail today in case we get a lot of snow tomorrow and I don’t feel comfortable getting out to the post office. The packages that I mailed today won’t go out until tomorrow because I missed the cut-off time; they still have lots of time to arrive at their destination though. When I was still in the planning stages for my projects I wish I had considered how easy (or difficult) things would be to wrap and ship – maybe next year!

I’ve got more packages to wrap this afternoon and then I may do a quick clean-up in my sewing room. Things are a real mess and it is getting harder and harder to find things when I need them. I’ll be on to some cards next and it would be nice to start them with at least a clean cutting and ironing board.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

I woke up this morning to the sound of sand and salt trucks going up and down the hill so I decided not to venture out to the bee. I get a lot more stitching done at home than I do at the bee, and I need to keep making progress.

I finished the binding on my cards last night and spent all morning finishing up three more gifts. At the end of the day yesterday I did a trial project that worked out quite well so today I’ve got nine more ready to stitch. What is wrong with me?

The good news is that tomorrow I’ll have some packages to mail out. I’ll finish off my Christmas shopping while I’m out and then the parcels should start coming together relatively quickly. After they go it is back to more cards.

I ran into one problem today. If you had a glue gun and used it about once every three or four years, where would you store it? I found lots of extra glue sticks and I’ve search high and low but the gun itself is nowhere to be found. I can manage without it but it bugs me that it isn’t in any of the spots I thought I would have stored it. I guess since I haven’t found it yet I haven’t looked in all my hiding places!

Back to the machine – there is still a bit of time before supper!

Monday, December 5, 2016

It has been snowing for most of the day but I think it has stopped now. There is some accumulation on the roofs and grass, but the streets look fine. I guess if the temperature drops low enough they could get icy but I didn’t have anywhere to go today so it didn’t bother me a bit.

I’ve been working all day and I’ve made some good progress. I knew last night that if I could just “get the hang of it” my three projects would go quickly. And that is exactly how it worked out; I had all three ready to have the ends buried by the time supper was ready. I spent some of my evening tying in the knots and couldn’t believe it when I found two mistakes in the first one – that was the one that gave me all the trouble to start with. I was sure I had fixed it all. It was a quick fix this morning as I reverse-stitched the pieces that were wrong before I went to bed last night.

So I have three gifts to finish some hand stitching on and three cards to do the binding on. I finished another project completely and I’m working on a companion piece to go with it. I have another small gift that needs the glue gun but I’m not sure I’ll have time for that this afternoon.

I brought a new book home from the Guild library about quilting with your walking foot. I glanced at it quickly and did a couple of cards using her freezer-paper technique. It ended up being a bit like paper piecing because you still had papers to pull out. For the third card I did a bit more reading and realized I was doing it wrong; card number three worked much better.

Our dishwasher is on the blink. We tried and tried to get it to run last night with no luck; I know if we could just get it started it would work fine. We called the appliance repair this morning but he won’t be able to come until Wednesday. The full load of dishes couldn’t wait that long so my lunch break was spent doing dishes and peeling vegetables for a soup.

So it was work, work, work all day long – no wonder I’ve made progress!

Sunday, December 4, 2016

We had such a good time at The Dickens Banquet last night – good food, good friends – and we won the trivia contest! There were a few questions we weren’t sure of the answer to but between the bunch of us we came to the right decisions. How many reindeer in the original “Night Before Christmas” poem? Thanks to the librarian at the table we realized Rudolph didn’t make an appearance. Who shares the sleigh in “Jingle Bells”? Fanny Bright. I had just that afternoon listened to Barbra Streisand’s rendition; the table that came in second erred by saying it was Fanny Bryce! It was a good hunch (again from our librarian) that egg nog was invented in England, and who knew that marshwort was the key ingredient in cranberry sauce? Pat did! We each won a $20 gift certificate to the Laughing Oyster; someone joked that with the certificate dinner would only cost us $50 each!

We woke up to a bright sunny day and the snow on the mountains across the Strait was gorgeous. That snow is getting quite low down the slope and it may get even lower. They are predicting snow for us tonight and over the next week. It was +2 this morning but Pat said it “felt like” -1! When Pat got home from a grocery run I asked if it was cold. He said it wasn’t so I made a quick trip across to the library with just a sweater and shoes (no socks). I guess we have no right to complain.

I hoped to get a lot more done today than I have. The morning went fine and I expected to finish three gifts this afternoon. So far I’m still working on #1. I swear I have sewn the piece in every configuration possible and it is still not right. My pattern is missing some key notes and if I ever get the first one done correctly I’m sure the others will go faster.

Back to it!