Holiday Aftermath

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We had a lovely Christmas! I love Christmastime, it is easily my favorite holiday, but once it's over, it's over. My mom always left her Christmas tree up until after New Year's Day. I've been known to take ours down Christmas night! I usually wait until the next day though ;-)

I had extra reasons to take the tree down early this year. My kids chipped in and bought me a 7 ft air hockey table! I'm not posting a pic of it today, but suffice it to say, a lot of furniture had to be rearranged to fit it in.  It is all set up though, and several games have already been played on it.

I thought I'd pass on an idea I had of how to store my Christmas lights. See the bolt above? It is from some binding that already had prairie points on it. I had purchased the whole bolt at a local store that sells everything sewing related. When I used up all the binding, I re-purposed the  plastic bolt to hold my Christmas lights, and it works great. No tangled lights at my house!
 

I have a thing for metal sculptures, and my husband had this one custom made for me. He wanted it to have orange flowers, and the designer hadn't made any with orange flowers. After a chat between the designer and my hubby, I have one with orange flowers. I think my husband associates me with orange, because I am always saying orange is a happy color. Honestly, I can't think of a happier color than orange, which is likely why I use a lot of orange in kids quilts.

Another Christmas gift from DH? An extension table for my Featherweight, all made to match. I wanted this smaller one so it will fit in my sewing trolley. The featherweight is my travel machine, though I do use it at home too. Yes, DH did a good job on gifts this year!

I received fat quarters from several different people, along with a couple of remnants. Fun new fabrics to play with!

    

As I've had time, I've been working on all my floral/cream blocks. I finished sub-cutting all the strip sets I had sewn, and I finished these paddle wheel type blocks. This stack has 96 blocks in it, so I thought I'd set it 8x12. That would have worked great, until I looked up and saw I had one more block on the design wall, so I have 97 blocks! I think I will make two more blocks and set them 9x11. These blocks were really an afterthought, I realized if I sewed an extra 14" of each strip set, I could make two of these blocks out of each fabric set. I'm going to end up with a twin sized quilt for very little effort! Sewing the four patch blocks together was really quick! I have almost all of my sub-units for floral/cream blocks made, just a few more HST's to sew up. 

Tomorrow Clue 6 comes out for the Easy Street Mystery. I am not likely to sew tomorrow, but I should have some time this weekend. I'm making some progress on all my projects, and hey, at least the Christmas stockings got finished in time ;-)