Tag: Christmas

Merry Christmas Eve

It has been a slow time here. I have definitely lost the sewing mojo since we got back. I took a class on quilting ruler work, but it didn’t inspire me much. It was just too picky to get the designs. It was more oriented towards domestic machines, and the quilting was too dense. I generally make lap quilts, baby quilts, and bed quilts, and I prefer soft and fluffy to stiff with too much quilting. It was also harder to do than I expected because my thread matched the fabric too well! It was really hard to see.

I have gotten ready for our upcoming trip to Arizona though. I cut out 15 kits of Insul-Bright for making oven mitts, and they are safely stashed in the motorhome. I am teaching a class in Tucson at the FMCA Convention in March, and I didn’t want to take a whole bolt and cut it in the motorhome. It is bulky though! I have it stashed above my bed in cabinets I hardly ever use, but it barely fit. I have a bunch of fabric I purchased at $6/yard from a quilt store going out of business, and my daughter bought me some other fabric too. Everyone is going to get enough fabric and batting to make 2 oven mitts of the same fabric. I intend on concentrating on how to do straight line quilting and then machine binding. I had a lot of fun with the class I taught on making bowl cozies at the last convention in Gillette, WY.

We are also totally prepared for Christmas. We went to church this morning, and we will go again this evening for a Lessons and Carols service. That is my favorite type of Christmas Eve service! The choir is singing one piece of music so I have to be there early. We are having our big Christmas with the kids and grandkids tomorrow. Kevin and I are supplying lunch and my oldest son and his wife are doing dinner. It is a handy approach to dealing with 13 people! We had Thanksgiving at our place, but everybody brought food, and the cooking was remarkably easy. It is nice to have a number of good cooks in the family.

I better get to helping Kevin with food packing. We took all my sewing stuff, his astronomy stuff, and clothes over already. On Tuesday we will take the food and toiletries over. If we get ready fast enough, we will leave then! I am hoping we can do it. The weather has been lovely, and it looks like it will continue during the trip.

On the road again

I said last time I have been in a blogging funk, so nothing has been written. I have been slowly recovering from my shoulder surgery, but it has been slow. I think the soreness is one of the reasons I haven’t been doing as much. We have been doing a few things though! We had Thanksgiving dinner with three of our kids and all six of the grandkids, something that hasn’t happened before! We went a bit non-traditional with a smoked turkey and sous vide sirloin. It was a much more relaxing approach, and I think I will repeat it in the future. We also had Christmas with all four kids, spouses, a girlfriend, and five of the grandkids. Even nicer was the meal was mostly made by my oldest son and his wife, both great cooks. It is time to start transferring host duties.

I have also been in a quilting funk. I have only finished one quilt for my daughter. I was lucky to get time with each of the older two granddaughters, 12, to do some sewing. They each got to pick out fabric for a pillowcase, and then they sewed it by themselves. They were appropriately pretty proud of themselves.

We couldn’t leave right after Christmas because I needed to get a laser treatment on my eye. Nothing critical, just clearing out some film behind the cataract lens. Then we had snow and ice, so we didn’t leave until 30 December. We made it only to Lakeside Casino Campground in Osceola, IA to get the rig dewinterized and filled up with water. The campground has definitely had better days, but it is open all year and in a convenient location for getting things set for the trip.

Bad weather was dogging us, so instead of the two days we planned on to Oklahoma City, we pushed through the 500+ miles in one day. We decided we would much rather be stuck two or three days there rather than somewhere along the road. Good thing because we made it just before very cold weather with sleet and ice! And guess what else we found wrong with the rig? The thermostatically controlled outlet for the wet bay stopped working, and we didn’t have good luck with temps going to mid single digits. Kevin tried some other options like an incandescent trouble light and a heating pad, but we had frozen water by the morning of 2 January. Sigh. I looked at Kevin and said “I want to go south!” So we did. We chose to leave OKC and headed to Abilene, TX. By noon we had water again, and by 3:00 or so we were set up at the KOA. Nice place. While we aren’t far off I-20, I don’t hear the traffic.

We decided to stay 2 nights in Abilene to throughly warm ourselves up. Today we went to the Frontier Texas Museum, and it was fabulous! It has multi-media interpretive displays showing the viewpoints and experiences of the natives and the Anglos. Lots of fascinating immersive exhibits, and I highly, highly recommend it. I also got a bunch of equilateral triangles cut with my Accuquilt for use as what I call “mindless sewing”, an easy way to sew while traveling. I also have a 4” Drunkard’s Path die along with a bunch of fat quarters of fabric to cut. I will use the scraps from that to make more triangles later. The DP definitely isn’t mindless, but I do really like the design. Hopefully I can get two lap quilts done by the time we get to the FMCA rally at the end of the March. They always collect quilts for a local charity in the area of the rally.

Tomorrow we are heading farther down the road, but only 200 miles so we stop ahead of some heavy winds. I promise to post more!

Christmas preparation and aftermath

The truffles were great, best I have made in a few years. The sugared pecans were a huge hit, and I have had to make two more batches. My oldest three grandchildren, 6 and 10, joined me for a cookie decorating extravaganza. I think I made too many cookies!

I made about 10 dozen cookies, way too many!
Notice the fully covered table and fully aproned cookie decorators

Our Christmas cantata at church was a roaring success. The choir sounded fantastic, and the instrumentalists (two violins, viola, cello, trumpet, flute, and a keyboardist filling in for an oboe) brought it to the next level. We might not do as challenging of music as the choir in Utah, but the sound was actually just as good. I guess it does help to be in a college town with a strong music program!

The two oldest girls also came over for a crafting afternoon before Christmas. We made Christmas ornaments with vinyl decorations, decorated multi-purpose boxes with vinyl, and used HTV vinyl applied to shirts they brought with them. We were busy for 4 1/2 hours, and I was exhausted! The girls really did have fun, and they were operating the vinyl cutter independently before we were done. Too bad I didn’t take pictures of the shirts or boxes. We even made a set for the younger brother who just wasn’t quite up to the afternoon.

Christmas was held at my oldest son’s house, and it was also a success. I had three of the four children there plus spouses and most of the grandchildren. Luckily my son has a big house, though we didn’t stay with them (we live only a few minutes away). My contribution to food was all the makings for a pot roast, made in the Instant Pot, plus carrots and red potatoes for roasting. It was delicious, as was the ham and sides made by my daughter in law on the previous day.

I also got some sewing done! The quilt I made for the motorhome shrunk more than I expected, and it was about an inch short on all sides, I added a new 4” border to make up for it. Of course I couldn’t find any fabric of the same design, but I found some that coordinates well enough. It was a real pain, but I have it done except for the binding. I always serge the edge of the my quilt before binding, so it is good for the bed now if I don’t get the binding finished. I plan on getting the binding cut and pieced tomorrow, but I may or may not do the top stitching before the trip. I’d rather spend the time cleaning up the house and getting the laundry all done.

The bad thing that happened was with Lily, our cat. We had planned a preventative ultrasound and a tooth cleaning, but the vet found a small mass with a sore on her leg while shaving it before an IV. The vet had removed a basal cell cancer from Lily’s neck earlier in the year, so she was concerned. They called me, and we agreed to excise the small mass while she was already under sedation. Luckily the mass was benign, but we had one very, very unhappy cat for the almost two weeks it took for her wound to heal.

She already looked like a bit of a bobble head doll because of the neck skin removed in her earlier surgery, but the cone rubbed off even more hair! She will fill it out in a few months though. She is somewhere between 11 and 14 years old, and she has started losing enough weight we have moved her off her diet food to a more traditional senior diet. She had gotten above 10 pounds a few years back, and she should be about 8 pounds. She finally made it to 8 pounds, 2 ounces so she can go back to regular food. She does like her food!

We are now packing up for the next trip. We leave Iowa on Wednesday, New Yearks Day, and pick up the motorhome west of Oklahoma City. We will stay there a few days visiting family and restocking the refrigerator. We have reservations at Big Bend National Park beginning 9 January so we have quite a bit of time to get there. When we were on our way to Iowa, i wasn’t sure I wanted another long trip, but I am definitely looking forward to traveling again.

 

Post Christmas

It has been a while since I posted. Christmas was, as usual, frenetic! We left our home on 20 Decemeber to pick up my son in Bozeman, MT. The roads got a bit challenging north of Pocatello, ID so we took a round about way that added an hour to what is normally a 6 hour trip. We ate dinner and did a little shopping, waiting for my son to get off work. We left Bozeman a little after 6:00 pm and drove to Gillette, WY for the night. The La Quinta Inn is quite nice, but we were out by 7:00 am. We got into our destination in Iowa by 8:30 pm, so it was a long day even with the time change!  We definitely ran into snow covered highways in Nebraska, and there were dozens of cars in the ditches and medians. Oh the joys of winter travel! We did miss a huge snow storm in Utah. I am very glad I arranged for someone to shovel the sidewalk and driveway so my house sitter didn’t have to.

We have stayed at another son’s house most of the time, but spent one night at my daughter’s house too. The holiday was great fun, and today my daughter and I are going shopping for part of her Christmas present. We leave on Thursday, 29 December, to do the drive back to Bozeman over 2 days. I love my family, but I will be glad to get home too. Probably no more posts until we get home.

Pictures finally

I did a reasonable amount of piecing on my daughter’s quilt today. It is lots of little squares, what is called a pixelated quilt. Here are the first 10 rows, all sewn together.

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And here are the remaining piles of pieces.

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There are still another 30 rows or so to go, then I will need to sew the rows together. After that will be borders, followed by sandwiching the front, batting, and backing. Finally I will quilt it and do the binding, so there is still a lot of work to do.

We also went to the Dr. Strange movie today. I love Benjamin Cumberbatch, but the movie was pretty good on its own too. Great special effects as expected in a Marvel movie, but the story was fairly good too.

We put up the Christmas lights a few days back. Here’s a (not so great) picture of those too, or at least part of them. Notice the overgrown roses and silverberry bush in front of the porch. I didn’t get anything pruned last year, and it shows! In January I will prune everything waaaayyy back where they should be.

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