Winter Storms are here!

And the ocean is H*U*G*E!  We saw waves coming over Rainbow Rock a few times yesterday - and that is over 100 feet above the water level!  It's hard to decide where to look - so many sea stacks, so much ocean!!  Tee-hee!

DH is healing, walking over 2 miles a day - 20 minutes at a time.  We're both struggling a little with a healthy diet.  I'm not an adventurist cook!  And that is an understatement!  Rick and I used to tag team groceries and meals.  I've been on my own and I don't like it!!  Grocery shopping 2=3 times a week is NOT my idea of a good time!  But, life will get back to normal, or a new usual soon.

I can't believe I have left the Year's Review til now - but here we go!

There was a new addition last June!  Miss E made her appearance!

The boys came to the beach two times.  With their parents and their first "Camp Nana/Papa".  I love this tidepool picture!! Brothers do come in handy!!

                             

But it wasn't all fun and games - the Chetco Bar Fire roared down the mountains and we were evacuated!  Luckily for us, the wind changed at just the right moment to send it back on itself. 

 

The BigKids' Camp Nana/Papa was great fun and ended with a cousins sleep-over where they got to meet Miss E! We also got to share the Eclipse Event with with them!

Let's move onto Projects!!!

A&J's crew is designing their own stuffies - so besides my usual animal repair work, I learned to manufacture animals to very exacting supervision!! Here's our Saber-toothed tiger and some Anti-Hero who's name I can't remember!

I was active in MailArt fabric postcards.  I was in seven exchanges, creating over 30 postcards.

Valentine's Day fun with rubber stamps, "Love" stamps and my fancy machine embroidery stitches!

 Lighthouses.  Done by CY's method. Crayons and markers for details. Black lines are added by machine!

Quotes!  I had so much fun designing this card. Tracing a couch and then stitching in details.  Finding just the right font!  I may have been  my favorite!!

My favorite selvedges card.  I made a bunch of these - and I'm using them for the Birthday Fabric Post Card exchange in 2018!  Who wouldn't be cheered up by these!  And I draw a birthday cake on the other side!  Fun!

I used Riel's selvedge Mummies for my Halloween cards!  Love them!

Patti and I both have Italian penpals through The Quilt Show's Intl Miniature Exchange.  We turned the leftover lighthouses into Christmas cards!  I never heard whether my Penpal got hers - Rats!

My favorite postcard was the one I entered in the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show's Make a Card contest.  My little heart was picked to be framed and sold in their auction!  It was beautifully finished.  AND it sold for the maximum bid just the second day of the Silent Auction!  $250!!  Way above my budget to buy it back!

 

Favorite quilt projects were:

QOV mystery quilt.  We had several of these in the QOV presentation we held at the quilt show in May!  It was the first time we presented and it was so moving.  I ended up being the MC - and I was so nervous.  It was well attended, ran out of chairs twice!!  All those people ... too late to back out now!  So I simply focused on the front rows where the veterans were seated and talked to them.  We presented 17 quilts and it was so-o awesome!

L wanted some things in her etsy shop, we decided on baby quilts.  So I made/finished six of them.  Also gathered antique tops to "release into the wild!"

I found "Kelsey's quilt" on Pinterest.  Yep, I'm still addicted!  It uses charm squares, I love this one.

  

Girlie By the Numbers.  Great fun to put all sorts of squares and shapes together.  By cutting only certain sizes, they generally all fit together without much angst!

Baby Rainbow - one of my favorites.  Just love the colors and the scrappiness!  AND that it's asymmetrical!

Beach Baby was a design I came up with after making "Pies and Tarts"  I thought the circles looked like beach balls!  What do you think??

It's a Jungle out there! was an idea after seeing a fellow Stashbusters' baby quilt setting.  I saw lots of possibilities with this one.  I was on the lookout for some of my favorite kid prints!  The sharks! The monkeys!

Baby Checkerboard - another idea from Pinterest.  I look at the picture, Try to figure out what size blocks I need to make it the size I want.  Then follow their design.

This one turned out too small, so I had to add checkerboards too - trying to keep the pattern in sync was picky!!


The antique tops sold, but the baby quilts have just aged!  So - don't have to try that again!  I loved some of them and was counting my chickens before they hatched!!  Oh, well.

My favorite quilt I made was "Shhhh, It's low volume"  A quilt I started at Finishing School (I get the irony!) and entered into the Newport show.  I love it - it's on my side of the bed as I type!!

 

Last weekend a Brookings quilting friend and I went down to Napa for #CraftNapa.  What fun!  It was DH's first solo weekend and I'm not sure who was more excited about it!!  It rained the first 5 hours of the trip :( so we consoled ourselves with  lunch at Schat's Bakery in Ukiah.  We may have even bought some of their Chocolate Chip Cookies for the rest of our road trip! But not enough!!!  Never enough! For some reason I picture a LOT of trips now planned to go through Ukiah around noon!

But more about that later!!  And perhaps some links to the stories behind these pictures??  We'll see.  Definitely some "Book Talk" too!

Raindrops on Roses and ...

Do you recognize the song?  "My Favorite Things"  And that's what I'm going to talk about today.

We lived in a good sized house in Nebraska.  And I L*O*V*E Christmas!  And just think how many really, really cute Christmas decorations there are!! Multiply that by 44 (adult) years! And I didn't buy them all! - And quilters can figure out patterns and methods.  Alot I just re-created!  AND then came the greatest enabler of them all - Pinterest!!  I'm just saying - opportunities exploded!

Of course, when we moved we downsized, downsized and downsized - I gave alot of Christmas goodies to family and friends.  Sold even more at the garage sale.  Even dropped alot off at the thrift store. But there are favorites you just have to keep!

Our little condo is just chock-full of Christmas!  Here are a few of my favorite things!

Our Nativity Scene - I bought this right after we were married from a church supply store I worked by.  I loved it.  I thought it was the loveliest one I'd ever seen - and 44 years later, I still think so!  It used to sit under the tree, now it's on top of the Barrister's Bookcase full of quilts.

I asked DH which of the decorations was his favorite - and this wall quilt was it!  I made this from an Heart to Art pattern in one of their many Christmas Books.  When I was working on it, DH looked at the cut out shapes and wondered why I was making 8 tiny schnauzers pull Santa's sleigh.  They do have the same body type!  And yes, that is hand embroidery around the center!  It's made to be a table runner, but I (we) like it on the wall, where you can see all the details.  That is one of the 'tips' of living in a small condo - take down the pictures and hang your seasonal wall quilts in their place.

I love Heart to Art patterns.  Cute but not too 'cute-sie'!

I love this wall quilt - found it on Pinterest!  I made the center for my favorite Christmas Elf.  A good quilting friend that was our Christmas party chair for years.  I liked it so much - had to make 'one for me'!!  But it was too small for the space I wanted it in. I just happened to have a bazillion tiny log cabins, so I sacrificed 20-some of them to bring it up to size. The most unusual thing about this little lovely - I finished it the same year I made my friend's!  Ok, lets be honest - how many 'one for me' projects languish at your house?? Yea, me too.

The bookcase is full of Santas and Christmas card pictures thru the years! And Christmas tins!  I used to have dozens of tins - but just since we moved here - I kept only as many as will fit on the bookcase!! (kind-of!)

Mom loved to write things out with Alphabet blocks.  I collected them too and wrote "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year".  DH said, "Where's my sentiment?"  And what would that be??  "Bah, Humbug! of course!!"  So now every year both our sentiments are on the shelf!!

I miss Prairie Schooler.  They retired last year? And I collected their yearly Santa for decades.  In the beginning, I made each Santa religiously!  Then we hit a design I didn't really care for - and you know you had to make them in order!!  So I developed quite the backlog. 

One year I pillowed at least 7 of the them!!  And the downfall was it was easier to do them by batches!  At least you remembered how you did it!!

The second Santa from the left was supposed to be growing Pointsettias, but sunflowers were popular on the prairie - so I [gasp!] changed it!

And although they have oh-so-much-detail they do not have any nasty half or quarter stitches! YAY! I love their eyes and rosy cheeks. I'm sorry to say, I have another backlog of stitched Santas to pillow.  And they are the cutest ones!  Sewing Santas!  Sigh.  But now that the design series is complete, maybe I can talk myself into getting busy! LOL!  The rest of the year they are at the bottom of the To Do list and December is way too busy to do them!!!  But, if I can find them ... this could be the year!

My good friend C has her name on these!  Otherwise, we both fear they will end up at a thrift shop!!! A quilting teacher once said, don't give your best quilts to your children.  They will sell them for a lift ticket!! They grew up with them, they usually don't cherish them appropriately!! There's a little truth in that, even with the best children!!

STOP THE PRESSES!  Look at this great idea for hanging stockings!!  I have two of the low, heavy brass hanging 'platforms' with an adjustable curtain rod between them!  You slide the stockings onto it, space them out evenly and you have space on the mantle for things other than stocking hangers!!  What a concept - add stockings at will! Much easier than finding or collecting (or dusting) stocking hangers for all the stockings!  Thank you, Pinterest!!

We needed stockings the same size as I made for the kids.  We couldn't expect any stocking stuffers if we didn't have clearly marked Christmas stockings.  So I made "Beach Nana" and "Beach Papa" and one for each grandkid to hang at our house. We pack 'Nana and Papa" every year and take them with us on the Christmas trips.  And although we really don't behave that well, there is always something in them!!  Yay!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!!