Merry Christmas!

It's a cool, rainy day here in Southern Arizona, and I'm loving it! Such a nice Christmas Eve! I've got a slow cooker filled with Chili Rellenos soup cooking for dinner. Perfect soup weather! I love soup, I love cool weather, I love rain, yes, it's a great day!

Tonight our visitors will be two of the granddogs, which we'll have for a week. Tomorrow I'm planning a small holiday meal with DH, my MIL, and my sister. Our big family Christmas won't be until January 3rd. 

I'm down to the last Christmas project, and I'm almost done that!

My last holiday project is some bibs made out of hand towels. This style bib is hands down my favorite. My mom made them for my kids, and I've made them for the grandkids. The only thing left to do is to sew the shapes down, they are already fused, and the ribbing on the collar is done. Adding the ribbing to the collar is the only fiddly bit to these, since I take the easy way out on applique and use fusible with a sewn zigzag stitch. I'll go back to sewing once I finish writing this post. 

I do have another finish for the year, it's number 15. This was made from leftover blocks from a larger quilt. I used the narrower border stripe in the border of this quilt, where I had used the wider border stripe on the other quilt. 

I am about 1/3 of the way done quilting another queen/king quilt. This one stays at my house, so it's kind of amazing it is actually being quilted! Stuff for us is usually the last done. There's a chance I could finish that quilt in 2025, but we've got a few things coming up, and I'm not sure how the dogs will handle me sewing, so we'll see. Even if I have to write 15 finishes as my total for 2025, it's more than I thought I'd get done, between so many of the quilts being huge, and traveling four months this year. 

I'm still working on my 2026 goals. I'm not certain how much traveling we'll be doing next year, we do have one long trip planned, but a couple others are possibilities. I know how much I get done is largely dependent on how much I'm actually home, and since that's a bit of an unknown, I'm going to try to be kind to myself and not overdo it on the goals. 

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas, and may your quilty dreams come true 😃

HUGE Project Off my To-Do List

Mid 2024 my SIL's house burned to the ground. The house went up quickly because the fire was being fed by a gas line. They thought their dogs got out of the house, but they hadn't. They did get all the people out, but they lost everything. I had already started quilts for a couple of them, and I decided after this trauma, I wanted to make sure all of them had a quilt for the new house. 

I needed to make five queen/king quilts, a toddler quilt and a baby quilt to make sure all of them had a quilt. I just finished the last quilt. I have showed the other quilts as I finished them, I just didn't mention who they were for. 

This quilt is 102" square. 

I think they will be moving into the new house in the next week or so, so I finished just in time!

Some of these quilts are replacements for ones that burned, not the same fabrics or patterns, but for people who already had a quilt from me. The others are quilts for the members of the family I hadn't gotten around to making a quilt for yet. Up until now I had been making my nieces and nephews quilts when they got married, but I decided this was a good time to just give them all a quilt. My only never been married nieces and nephews are in that family. 

I hope they like them, and really hope they understand that wrapping them in quilts is my way of showing them I love them. 

It feels really great to get such a huge project done. 

On the Christmas front, I'm down to the last two projects, so I think I'm good to go! We aren't doing family Christmas until January 3rd, so I have a few extra days anyway, but I think I can get everything done by Christmas Day. If I do, I can spend the last week of 2025 working on whatever I want!!!

Simplifying Christmas

 Once upon a time, when my kids were young, we did a lot of the Christmas things. I baked all kinds of Christmas cookies, we made gingerbread houses, there was Christmas decor all over the house. As our kids have grown and gone, things have changed, and I'm all for the changes. Sure, we have a few grandkids in town, but I figure most of the Christmas stuff should be done with their families. We had Christmas before we had children, and we'll have Christmas even if it's just the two of us at some future point in time.  Don't get me wrong, I have made gingerbread houses with the grandkids, I just don't consider it my job to do so. My grandkids are also growing up, so doing things like that is not as big of a factor anymore. 

I've been looking for ways to simplify Christmas. We do get together with the local family, but never on Christmas Day.  Families with young kids are busy, busy in December, and I don't want to add to their stress. This year, "family Christmas" will be in early January. The plus side of that for me is that I get a few extra days to get the presents sewn for the locals! 

Last year I did some brutal decluttering of Christmas decor. It's not a popular thing to admit, but I hate decorating the Christmas tree. I don't like having to rearrange the living room to fit a Christmas tree in the room, and why are most Christmas ornaments heavy, but the branches of either a live or fake tree can't handle the weight? 

OK, so I've admitted I don't like decorating the Christmas tree, but I have some Christmas ornaments that are really special to me. I debated making a quilted wallhanging, and attaching the best ornaments. I figured I could put the hanging loops over buttons or something, but then I started thinking about the weight of the ornaments again. While surfing the internet last year, I came across this post about a salvage wooden Christmas tree. I showed the post to DH, and told him I'd like him to make me something similar to that, but I'd still like to have Christmas lights, and a star on top, and I wanted to hang our ornaments from the knobs. The salvage tree was my inspiration, but I wanted it to be more us. 

Some people have designer Christmas trees, and if that's what you like, fantastic! I have always wanted my Christmas tree to be more meaningful than pretty, and very personal. For 41 years now, we've hung an "Our First Christmas Together 1984" ornament on our tree. If I purchased a new Christmas ornament, it had to have some kind of meaning to it, like the S'mores ornament I bought the year we started camping. I'm not sure quite how it started, but we started buying ornaments every time we took a trip. We took the kids to Disneyland, got an ornament. Went to a Broadway show, bought an ornament, went to Hawaii for our 25th anniversary, bought an ornament. DH went a medical mission trip to Ecuador, he came home with an ornament, DS the Elder travelled internationally quite a bit, and he brought us ornaments from Australia, Japan, and Egypt. We went to South Africa for DD#1's wedding, we bought an ornament. DD#2 did a mission trip in Peru, she got us an ornament. Our Christmas tree is not designer in the way that everything matches and is coordinated. It does, however, have a design, in that it tells the story of our lives. 

Several years ago, DS the Younger asked me why our tree looked like a homeless person's tree. I looked at the random stuff hanging on it, keychains from trips, handmade ornaments people had given us over the years, and I could see his point. It did look random, and even when I had the opportunity to buy fancy ornaments, I often opted for more meaningful ones. 

When we went to South Africa, I saw gorgeous ornaments, but what did I actually buy?

I bought this angel made out of a soda can! And it has such a great story, I've kept the tag on it all these years!

One of the stores we went into in South Africa had these amazing hand carved ornaments, but I came home with a soda can angel. Could I have bought both the fancy ornament and the soda can ornament? Sure I could have, but the soda can angel meant more to me. 

DH has been working on my Christmas tree for a few weeks now, but he finished it yesterday. 

Here it is with the lights and mismatched hardware. All the wood is from one pallet. Most of the knobs and other hardware I got at Hobby Lobby, but some we found at thrift stores and a couple thrift shops that sell leftover building supplies to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. We could have left it just like this, and it would still be fun, but I took our best ornaments, and hung them from the knobs and drawer pulls. 

Now it looks like this, and DH and I had fun decorating it, talking about all the trips we've taken, or the people who made the ornaments for us. 

I was never offended by the homeless people's tree comment. I knew our son was young and he didn't understand that the tree represented the course of our lives, the people we met, the places we went. Our tree is more mismatched and random than ever, and I love it! The only rearranging of the living room was to move the quilt rack over a couple feet, and this tree isn't an obstacle to take up massive amounts of space. 

I decorated the fireplace mantle, hung a wreath on the door, and put a couple decorations in the kitchen. It's simple, easy, and still feels like Christmas. It went up in just over an hour, and I could put it all away in less time than that. Instead of six totes and boxes of Christmas decor, I have two, plus the wooden tree. It's enough, it's simple, and it's us!

Rearranging and Thinking Ahead

I did get a couple Christmas gifts sewn this past week, but I've done far more rearranging than sewing. Our new bed arrived, so our bedroom needed to be rearranged. We can't fit our nightstands with the new bed, and our old bedframe was much nicer than the one in the guest room, so both the nightstands and the bedframe were moved to the guest room, which, of course, necessitated moving the old stuff out from the guest room! Now the guest room has been upgraded, and our bedroom has been upgraded. We put the guest room bedframe out and someone snagged it right away! I'm glad someone can use it. 

My desk got moved to my craft corner in the living room.

I'm so used to using my computer in my bedroom, that using it in the living room is going to take some time to adjust to. 

I mostly use this craft area in the evening while DH and I are watching TV. I'm not very good at sitting and watching something while doing nothing with my hands. I mostly do things like subcutting strips or trimming here. pressing a zillion units usually happens here too. I've got a small ironing board next to craft table, that I take out when I need it. This is also a handy place to work when I have the grandkids, which I do this weekend. I can keep an eye on them and still get a few mindless tasks done. 

This week my mindless cutting project was taking the backs of DH's scrub tops from his nursing career and cutting them for a quilt. 

I decided to use this pattern for his scrub tops and all the rectangles are cut the same size. I'm going to use a darker gray for the background. He had too many black scrub tops for me to use black. I'm also going to make it rectangular by adding another row of large blocks to the bottom. DH had so many scrub tops that I had made him over the years, that these rectangles weren't going to use much of the fabric I had saved from the backs of his tops. I decided to cut 10.5" squares too, and I'll piece those up for the backing. 

Now instead of a teetering stack of scrub top backs, I have some rectangles cut for the front of his quilt, and the squares I'll piece for the backing. Tonight I plan on doing the math for the background fabric, and next week I'll try to get that cut. He's been retired almost a year, it's about time I started working on his quilt! 

I'm already thinking ahead to next year as well. I typically do a declutter in January, and that is my goal for this coming January as well. I'd like to get a few things rearranged in the sewing studio too. One thing slated to be done then is already pretty much done. I wanted to empty a drawer or two where I store bias binding, and move my thread cones to the space I free up. I decided to add some pegboard to the quilt closet.

I just estimated where to put the hooks, but I think if I rearrange them a bit, I'll be able to put up more rolls of bias binding. The closet ceiling is dropped, so I don't have a lot of vertical space, and because the closet is quite narrow for a walk-in, I didn't want the pegboard too low on the wall, and be walking into it all the time. One thing I liked about adding the pegboard is, I'll just leave it if we ever move. With a narrow walk-in closet, it would come in handy to have pegboard on that wall, especially if the room is a bedroom again. 

One of the goals I had for this year, that I didn't do, was to make 100 pillowcases. I only made about 20. I think cutting out the pillowcases in January would be perfect, because I'll be able to get some yardage off the shelves that is earmarked for pillowcases, and I can put away some fabric that I haven't been able to put away, for lack of space. I know with directional fabrics I'll end up with scraps, but with non directional fabrics I'm hoping for some empty spaces. I'm really hoping to get a bunch of quilt tops quilted next year too, and quilt backings is where I typically see the biggest dent in the stash. 

It's funny, I simultaneously try to make dents in the stash, and am so thankful I have it. I was looking for some Pokemon flannel to make a couple of my grandsons pajama pants. The cheapest Pokemon flannel I found online was $17 per yard, and I'd need 3 yards to make them both pajama pants! Yeah, I could buy them already made pajamas for far less money. I can't even imagine trying to build a stash at today's prices! I'm 58 now, and I figure my stash will last most of my productive years. It's a big stash of fabric, but I am a prolific quilter, so I'm not going to stress about the amount of fabric I have. I'm just going to enjoy using it to bless other people.