To-Do Tuesday #18

Last week's To-Do list was the holiday kind - relax and just enjoy - and I did!

I enjoyed good family times and yummy food.  I read a lot - finished 3 books!  And I hand-quilted my Winter Four Patches.

It's ready for binding today!

But it's New Year's Eve, and I'm ready to actually make some plans for 2020!

1.  I'm working on an inventory of my Works in Progress.  It's very informal right now, but I want to have a post written about it by the end of the week.

2.  I need to take down all of my Christmas decorations and get everything put back where it belongs.    I traditionally do this on New Year's Day, so that's my plan for tomorrow!

3.  I have some snowmen to decorate with for January, and one of them is an unfinished quilty project.  It's time to finish this one up!

I know *somebody* out there will recognize this pattern!  😊

Sharing my To-Do list with at the To-Do Tuesday link-up at Home Sewn by Us!  Happy New Year, friends!

One last little project...

for 2019!

Back in November, just for fun, I started making these little 4 patch in a square blocks.

The tutorial is from Blue Elephant Stitches.

I used odds and ends of fabric that were out on my cutting table leftover from several recent projects.  Even though red and green are Christmas colors, the fabrics are really "wintry" as well.  Snowflakes, pine trees, home.

I ended up making 15 of these little blocks and sewing them together in a 13 x 21 rectangle.

After spray-basting the layers together, I stitched in the ditch to stabilize the whole thing, and then this week I've been hand quilting in the gray and white parts of each block.

This has been my evening slow stitching each day throughout this holiday week, and I'm enjoying it so much!

After I finish up the hand quilting, I'll be binding my little tabletopper with this piece of the Home fabric in black with red and white lettering.

I'm hoping to finish this up this week!  Sharing at Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching.

Best of 2019

It's been a busy year in my sewing room, and I've enjoyed every minute!    Participating in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, several quilt - alongs, and tons of blog reading have provided lots of inspiration for my quilty projects.  Instead of choosing my 5 favorite projects, I picked 5 categories of projects to share.

First - my favorite larger quilt finishes:

Clockwise from top:

 Hello Darling sent to Jack's Basket for Hands2Help.

My Squared Away quilt, the Rainbow Scrap Challenge sampler for 2018.

And my husband's Happy Birds quilt -

Those bottom two are well-loved and used daily at our house!

This year I also discovered some new loves in stitching!

Hand-piecing has been fun to learn, and I've done quite a bit of it!

Clockwise from top left:

Sand, Sea, and Sky

Pumpkins

Hexie Tablerunner

Doll Quilt

Another new-to-me type of stitching I've experimented with this year is embroidery.  I've found I especially enjoy Gail Pan's designs that are combined with patchwork.

Clockwise from top left:

Unfinished redwork embroidery - I'm planning to turn this one into a zipper pouch.

Tiny Christmas Runner

One basket block and my finished Little Baskets.

Participating in quilt-alongs has given me a chance to try out designs from some of my favorite quilters!

Clockwise from top left:

Temecula Tiny Tree

Beothuk Star with Sandra of mmmquilts

Almost Amish with Lori of Humble Quilts

August Blooms with Carole of From My Carolina Home 

And no year would be complete without a bunch of squirrelly projects that were made just for fun and because I wanted to!  

Probably my most favorite in this bunch is right in the center, Circle of Sisters.

Thanks for following along  on my year-long quilting journey!  Hope you've had a great year, too!  I'm joining in with Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs for the Best of 2019 linky party.

Also sharing at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and

Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap.

I Like Thursday #166

Good morning, friends!  Hope you had a lovely Christmas!  Thanks for visiting my I Like Thursday post today.

This past weekend we visited our younger son who lives in a small town in Kansas.  We drove around looking at Christmas lights on Saturday evening - and I love Christmas lights!  A car dealership in town had held a decorating contest, and my son helped judge for the winners.  Here's his front page this week announcing the winners.  They were amazing!

We also went to see the latest Star Wars movie with our son and really enjoyed it!

Christmas Eve was spent with my sister and her family, and my mom who is here from Arizona.  It was so good to see them!  I have to get lots of dog love at my sister's house, because we don't have a dog anymore.  They have three!

Love these sweet guys!

My favorite Christmas present from Mike, who knows what I like!

Lots of fun embroidery projects for the new year.

My holiday wish for you!

Have a wonderful last week of 2019!  Be sure to visit the other "I Like Thursday" bloggers over at LeeAnna's place, Not Afraid of Color.

To-Do (or Not!) Tuesday

 🎵🎶 "Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house..." 🎶🎵🎶🎵

Are you singing along yet?  My choir sang this poem, set to music, when I was in high school, and every year since then (many, many of them!) I still sing it.  I even remember all the words!

Happy Christmas Eve, friends!  Hope all is merry and bright at your house, or even quiet and peaceful, which is what I'm looking forward to.

On last week's To-Do list -

1.  Make some bowl cozies.  ✔  I got a couple of them finished, with plans for a few more!

2.  Finish my Tiny Tree.  ✔  Yes!  Read more about it here.

3.  Covered in Love blocks.  ✔  Yes!  I forgot to get a picture of them, but I will do that this week.

4.  Bake some cookies.  ✔  Yummy!  I took them along on our visit to our son and we enjoyed them.

After spending the last two weekends with our boys and a Christmas Eve dinner with more family planned for tonight, we will be by ourselves for Christmas Day.  So for this week's To-Do list - just a few things...

1.  Sit by the Christmas tree with a warm beverage and a good book!

2.  Do a little slow stitching each day!  

I prepped this little piece yesterday with spray basting and stitching in the ditch to keep all the layers together.  Now I am hand-quilting it with white perle cotton floss.

3.  Watch a movie like "A Christmas Story."  It's playing all day on Christmas Day and it's one of our favorites!

4.  Make a tasty Christmas dinner.  Groceries are bought and I'm all set for that!

That's as much planning ahead as I'm going to do!   Hope your To-Do list this week includes your favorite things!

I'm joining in with Roseanne at Home Sewn by Us for To-Do Tuesday.

I did it!

My beloved Pfaff has been chugging along like crazy this week, and helped me finish up the Scrappy Sprouts sky section!    You might remember that I finished all the sprouts blocks in 2018, but have struggled this year to figure out the sky part so that it would match the idea I had in my head for it.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I decided what I wanted to do and left off here:

matching the size and value of the sky pieces to the bottom sprouts section.

This I week I finished sewing all of the smaller sections together...

and then into one big panel...

and one last long seam to connect the two sections!

Measures about 50 x 60.

The next step is to finish the centers of the sunflowers and get them appliqued down.  Maybe this coming week?!  :)

Getting closer and closer!

Merry Christmas to all of you, my Rainbow Scrap Challenge friends!  Have a wonderful week!

Tiny Tree Finish

I've been having so much fun sewing along with Temecula Quilt Company's Tiny Tree project this month!  Making one tiny block a day was so doable, and I quickly finished everything up earlier this week.

In all, there were eleven 2 and 3/4 inch blocks, and then triangles added on to create this shape.

A little trimming was needed - 

And then some background triangles and rectangles to pull everything together.

Makes for a fun little finish, perfect for the season!

Sharing at Home Sewn by Us  for Thank Goodness it's Finished Friday and

Quilting is More fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!

Also, mmmquilts' December DrEAMi link-up!

I Like Thursday #165

Happy Thursday!  Thanks for visiting my every-Thursday post of things I've found to like over the last week!  I'm joining in as always with LeeAnna and her group of positive posters at Not Afraid of Color.

At my quilt group's December get together last Thursday, we had a fun gift exchange!  You can see what I gave in this previous post.  Here's what I brought home - a sweet little hand-stitched wool mat with snowmen!

I'll leave this out after Christmas and get out more snowmen to join it.

Last weekend when our son was home, we enjoyed going to this movie!

It's one of those interesting murder mysteries with lots of twists and turns!  We had fun talking about it afterwards in the car on the way home, too.

I mentioned in my To-Do Tuesday post that I wanted to try making some soup bowl cozies for last minute gifts.  Thank you to everyone who commented with tips and tutorials for making them!  I ended up using Roseanne's tutorial at Home Sewn by Us, and made one that turned out great!  Thanks, Roseanne!

Now to make a few more!

I've been enjoying my Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar each day this month.  A sweet friend sends this to me every year.  There are fun scenes to visit and activities to do for each day.

This is a screenshot of my cottage in the Cotswolds that I 

have been "decorating" for Christmas!

I meant to share this little tree last week, but forgot to include it!  This is the tree my friend decorated for a charity auction, and the rest of us in my quilt group gave her ornaments and sewing items to put on it.  I think it turned out so cute!

Have a wonderful week, everyone!

To-Do Tuesday #16

Good morning, friends!  December is rolling along, isn't it?  Have you been thinking you were all caught up and ready, and then realized there are several things you had forgotten about that still need to be done?  That is me this week!

On last week's to-do list:

1.  Keep up with the Temecula Quilt Company's Tiny Tree sew-along.  ✔  Yes, I did!  More about that in a minute!

2.  My son came for a Christmas visit and it was a lovely time!   ✔  Favorite activities, meals, and good conversations kept us very busy!

3.  Christmas cards are done - whoo hoo!  ✔  The only problem we ran into there is that we could have used about 5 more than we bought, so a few people haven't been sent one yet.  Oops!  Maybe they won't even notice...

So, what's on this week's list?

1.  I thought of a few more people I'd like to make small gifts for, and I think I will try making some of the soup bowl cozies.  I've never made them before!  If you have, do you have a favorite method or tutorial to share?  I found this one on Quilting is more fun than Housework the other day.  I do have the Pellon Wrap and Zap batting for them.

2.  Finish my Tiny Tree!  The top is made and layers basted, just need to quilt and bind.

3.  Make some blocks for Covered in Love's November/December block drive.  I pulled some fabrics yesterday and cut enough for one block.  I like to make at least three.  These will be good as leaders and enders.

4.  Bake some cookies!  I haven't done that yet, and we'll be seeing younger son this coming weekend, so it would be fun to have some to take to him.

Hope your week is getting off to a good start, and you're not feeling too overwhelmed with the holiday to-do list.  I'm sharing at Roseanne's To-Do Tuesday link-up at Home Sewn by Us.

Slow Sunday Stitching

I've been working on a series of small embroidery designs from Patchwork Loves Embroidery by Gail Pan.   I have ended up doing them all in a variegated blue, which I really love!

Here is the latest -

Sweet hearts and flowers!

I have an idea about what I might do with these, and it involves the hand-pieced blue and white star blocks I've also been working on for awhile.

I'll be stitching on my blue and white projects for today's slow stitching!  Sharing at Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching.

Christmas Gifting

Every year for our December meeting, my quilt group has a gift exchange.  I think I've probably written blog posts about these fun get togethers each December since I started blogging back in 2013.  It's such a fun event and I enjoy figuring out something to make for it every year!

This year, I've been on a roll with Sandra's wonky trees, so just kept going and made several of the 6.5 inch size blocks in fun Christmas-y colors - red, green, white, and turquoise.  I think I shared this photo of them a few weeks ago.  The fabrics are all Grunge Stars except for the green which I couldn't find in the stars design.  I used scraps from the gray Grunge that I've been using a lot lately for the tree trunks and some cornerstones that I needed for the final layout.

I love turquoise with Christmas colors!

I thought these trees would make a fun tablerunner, so after adding contrasting border pieces to each tree and those gray cornerstones, I figured out the layout, and it stitched up really quickly!

The backing and binding are from the Holiday Lodge fabric in green with white snowflakes that I got for my Virtual Cookie Exchange blog hop mug rugs.

I packaged this tablerunner up with a cute plate and some Christmas tree candy, and took it to my quilt group get together on Thursday.  Hopefully, my friend who went home with it will enjoy having it!

Sharing at SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and

Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!

I Like Thursday #164 - Holiday Likes

Good morning, friends!

We decorated for Christmas inside and out the other day.  I'm liking how our outside lights are looking this year!

Can you see the red and green sparkles?! 

Last year we got one of those outdoor projectors that displays red and green lights on the house.  We tried shining it on one of our trees, but never liked the result because the trees are just too tall for you to see anything.  So this year Mike pointed it toward the house, and I like it a lot!

A few weeks ago, Shannon at I'm Working on a Project shared the dolls her mom had made, and it reminded me of my Raggedy Andy dolls that my mom made when my boys were little.  I always get them out at Christmas.

We actually call them Raggedy Andy and Raggedy Kevin, because those are our kids' names.  They have their own Christmas quilt to cuddle under!    I love having these dolls and several other things my mom has made for me over the years.

I like my teeny bowtie block made for the Temecula Quilt Co's Tiny Tree project!

How about a whole quilt made out of these 2 3/4 inch blocks? :)

I liked looking out the back window the other day and seeing this bunny warming himself in that sunny patch of grass by the tree.

I don't mind sharing my yard with him!

This time of year, I really enjoy reading the next books in a series - the characters and settings are familiar and you don't have to think too hard to enjoy the story.  I'm reading two right now because they both became available from my library at the same time!  

One for my afternoon reading, and one before bed - enjoying them both!

Have a great day!  Don't forget to check out the other I Like posts at Not Afraid of Color!