Gifties of the Season!

The Santa Express has been busy this year! Look what came into my mailbox! I found a darling snowman card ((I am so in love with snowmen, more than any other Christmas Icon! In my book, Snowmen are appropriate from Thanksgiving all the way to Easter depending where you live!)) with a lovely note from Mona, and look! She sent me a “Birthday Girl” Block from the Quiltmaker Magazine’s 100 blocks vol 2!

I love this so much! Thanks Mona! I especially love how you colored the triangles around the center pinwheel…that adds so much motion!

I enjoyed a wonderful lunch yesterday with Karen and Lisa at a little Irish pub in Winston Salem called Finnigan’s Wake. The lunches there just can’t be beat – they had a chicken pot pie and salad special for only $7.00 And it was to DIE for. Just what I needed on a cold December afternoon. Of course, the cheese cakes served in shot glasses were the perfect finish…I had some caramel pecan thing that was so rich, a shot glass size was ENOUGH, no more! ((Or…..I would have eaten the whole thing regardless of the size, you know?))

Winston Salem has a thriving art community, and every year there are art events and sales, and in so totally KAREN-STYLE…..she surprised me with a lovely handmade piece of pottery. I love pottery!! And….Tada…she filled it with…

3/4” per side hexagons she cut with her creative memories punch from left over Christmas cards!! Isn’t this great?! They are just the size I am using and now I can look at the pictures as I grab each one from the bowl. You can read parts of messages, and get glimpses of what the card might have been before it was repurposed into hexie papers. Thanks Karen!

We are planning some girlfriend sewing time between Christmas and New Years…which means, on top of everything else, I need to spend some time re-shuffling stuff down here in the studio. Over the past few weeks it’s become a dumping ground for miscellaneous fall-out since the last time we sewed.

You know, it’s a good thing to have people over once in a while. It keeps us from letting things become CHAOS ((Cant. Have. Anyone. Over. Syndrome!!))

Last night I *DID* do just what I said I was going to do. I laid low and slow and sat on the couch with a fire going in the wood stove and worked on hexagons while watching a couple movies.

All of the short border sections are added! And I added one of the long star point sections so you can see that coming together! I only have FOUR MORE long star point border sections to finish and this round will be done! I’m thinking how I’m going to fill in the outside edges to make this quilt more square. Or…do I want to make it a rectangle by adding more piecing to just the top and bottom in another motif? I love that look, where they take a square quilt and just add something else to only the top and bottom.

Visions of hexagons are dancing in my head instead of sugar plums! ((What is a sugar plum anyway, and is it any good?)) And I’m semi-calculating - - It took more than my flights to Vegas and back to piece that one long star point. Which means…. 4 more long trips to and from to get the other ones done. I think I’m not as close as I think I am!

Are you tired of seeing this? It’s a SLOW process to do something like this by hand. Very much worth it..but I’m afraid I’m boring you with it! But I love how the 3 blossom units come together in that star point!

Which brings up another question….do you find yourself gravitating to mostly “quick fix” easy/small quilt-in-a-day kind of projects, or do you like things that you can mark the passing of time with? I talked to Lisa about this kind of thing when we were at the beach. She was working on applique sashings for a quilt, and they’ve been her “emergency” project for years. It sits in a basket, and when she goes somewhere and it fits the bill, they just come with her. It’s a no deadline project. And then there are the projects with deadlines ---and we all have those!

But if I were listing UFOs…these long term projects, that are worked on in small amounts of time here and there as a fill in, are they really UFOs? I don’t think so! For me, UFOs are things that have come to a complete standstill, like over a year has passed since the last time I worked on it.  To me it’s kind of like my airline miles. If I’ve used some of them in the past year, it keeps the others from expiring!

I better get going. I’m trying to get into a cleaning mood, but it isn’t working! However, I did wipe down the inside of the fridge the other night…does that count for brownie points at all??