Fellow blogger Samantha Warren is having a blog scavenger hunt to celebrate her 30th birthday, and I’ll be part of it, both here and at Jen’s Writing Desk. To participate, go to Samantha’s blog (click on the picture above) where … Continue reading
Christmas decorations patiently waiting for me.
I love Thanksgiving and I love Christmas, but I’ve never rushed to put up Christmas decorations Thanksgiving weekend. In fact, I usually start with just Christmas music for a week and THEN decorate. And the tree goes up about a week later. The week of music was on purpose, and the week of decorating was just me dragging things out. But I thought this time would be different.
We moved back from Ireland last November and spent a couple months in a temporary apartment. The only Christmas decorations I had were a few small items we included in the small air shipment. Everything else was coming by slow boat, or was left here in storage in the first place. So this year, eager-me wanted to bring the Christmas boxes down two weeks ago.
We visited out-of-state family on Friday, so Saturday my ever-willing husband and son made multiple trips from the attic: boxes we’d had in Ireland with figurines, ornaments, wall hangings and table decorations, plus boxes I hadn’t seen for three years, including a relatively new artificial tree. I put Christmas music on and . . . sat down in a funk.
After all that anticipation, I wasn’t ready for Christmas!
Yes, I had to push on homework assignments for my college classes. I had normal grocery shopping to do to catch up after Thanksgiving. I had contractors in and out with a bathroom make-over project. But mostly I think I just needed time to shift from one holiday to the next.
It’s Wednesday now. I’ve put the Christmas music back on (Amy Grant’s “A Christmas to Remember” right now), and it feels right. The boxes are piled next to the piano and last night I pulled out pieces of my favorite nativity set. I have lots of work to do today, but tonight? Haul out the holly – Christmas is arriving at the Jensen home!
When do you decorate for the holidays? Does everything go up Thanksgiving weekend or do you stretch it out? What’s your favorite part about decorating?
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PS: I’ll be part of a fun Blog Scavenger Hunt next week, hosted by Samantha Warren. It runs from Dec 4th to Dec 10th, her 30th birthday. She’ll have prizes for finding answers on participating blogs, including A KINDLE! I’ll have a prize or two here as well – check back for details!
Shop locally for Christmas!
Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas shopping season is well under way. I read something recently that really had me re-thinking my gift list, and it works for all my out-of-town family, too.
The whole point of gift-giving is (or should be) to give pleasure to your friend/family member, and to show them that you’re thinking of them and you love them. It shouldn’t have to cost a lot of money – sometimes the best gift you can give is inexpensive but exactly what they want, and sometimes it simply involves time, not money.
With that in mind, what about making your shopping help out your hometown economy, too? Instead of spending money at big chain stores or ordering it from out-of-state, here are some ideas that will support local businesses and be a delight to give:
I’m still budget-conscious, and I’m sure I’ll still do a bit of Amazon.com shopping (although that helps us out locally, too, since my son works in one of their shipping warehouses!), but I’m off to scope out my small town stores. And for my parents, who live in another state and don’t need extra clothing or clutter, I really like the idea of setting up some car care certificates for them.
What about you? Do you have a favorite local store? What special gift have you given or received that was locally made? What’s your best idea for this year?
Not my favorite pattern or color combo, but fine to start with.
This really shouldn’t be hard, should it? I mean, I’m an intelligent woman. And I’ve sewn off and on through my life: my daughter’s dresses, a few shirts for my husband, skirts and shirts for me, and even a jacket. And while I haven’t pieced a quilt before, I have tied many, so I should be able to combine the two skills, right?
It all started when we spent a Friday evening up at Kim’s and she mentioned she was starting a block-of-the-month quilt the next day. “Why don’t you come, Mom?” she asked. Too much to do, a 45-minute drive up there – lots of reasons not to. But by the end of the evening I was considering it, and by morning I had made up my mind. It would be fun to do together and I could do it a section at a time, instead of spending several hundred dollars on the makings of my dream quilt and letting it sit there for two years. Which I have already done, but that’s another story.
We paid our fee and got our starter quilt block packet, and the first dilemma popped up: to pre-wash or not to pre-wash. If you don’t, the seams will pucker a bit when you wash the quilt, an old-fashioned look that some quilters like, and some don’t. I’m a Don’t. If you do pre-wash, the edges will ravel and you hope that it doesn’t ravel so much that you can’t get the right size squares out of your strips.
So I pre-wash, iron, and take it to cut out at another evening at Kim’s. At which point I realize I’m missing one strip. It must have gotten caught up with one of the sheets in the wash. Kim cuts and pins everything, I cut and pin what I can. I go home, unfold three sheets (and two of those were fitted bottom sheets!) and can’t find the missing strip anywhere. Which means the store forgot to put it in, and I need to drive the 45 minutes back to get a new one.
A week goes by and I never get back up there. Neither do I get to JoAnn’s to buy replacement fabric for the color I don’t like. I decide to at least sew what I have, but I search high and low and can’t find the Ziploc bag with my pieces! So I go to the second-month meeting and pay $5 for my next block set because I haven’t finished the first one. I also find out there were several of us missing a strip.
I come home and wash the new fabric strips, NOT putting them in with sheets this time, just in case. And I finally make my overdue visit to JoAnn’s,which requires two trips because I forgot my 40% off coupon. I’m not buying $9.99/yard fabric without my coupon!
Kim warns me that this block is harder than the first – there are a lot of points that have to meet right. Also that I shouldn’t go back and do the first one first, that I should use the time to get the second block done. Great, I get to start on the difficult one.
Still Wrinkled!
So this time, like a good girl, I start early and iron my strips. Which is when I discover that if you pre-wash and don’t pull it out of the dryer right away, you can iron and iron and iron, and some wrinkles are STILL set in stone! I let the strips hang over the back of a chair while I stew for two weeks.
A non-stewing Sunday rolls around. I set up the cutting table and bring my never-used quilt supplies downstairs (remember the dream-quilt purchase?): cutting mat, razor-sharp rotary cutter, and a nifty clear-plastic, gridded, wide ruler-thingy. Ready? No – I can’t find my directions! I search my purse, my office, the pile of papers on the kitchen counter . . . nothing. I’m about desperate enough to call Kim and ask her to fax me hers, but I don’t want to make her think I’m a total ditz, even if she already does. The directions finally appear in my purse, sans the Ziploc bag they were supposed to be in.
Before I begin cutting, I take her other tip to heart: spray the strips with starch to help them keep their shape when you cut. I mean, what person in their right mind expects you to cut exact squares and sew precise straight lines, when the material is stretchy? I thought stretchy only happened with bias-cut fabric, but maybe expensive quilt fabric is different. So I spray.
Now, mind you, this isn’t any old spray starch. We moved, and movers don’t like moving aerosol cans – they tend to explode at inopportune moments. Besides, my old can of Niagara Spray Starch was, well, old. Positively ancient. And one of the things included in my several-hundred-dollar dream-quilt purchase is a bottle of special quilting spray starch that stays clear. $7.99 for a small bottle, and I stand there spraying like it’s water out of the tap.
Smooth Success!
When my strips can almost stand on their own, I lay them on the cutting table and begin. Which is when I realize that 1) hurray! the spray starch took out all the wrinkles, 2) the fabric stretched while I was ironing it, and now it has hills and valleys where there should be a straight edge, and 3) you have to lean harder on the gridded ruler-thingy than you do on the rotary cutter, or the ruler-thingy slides. And you have to keep remembering that, over and over. Needless to say, I’ve got a few squares that are more like parallelograms. And a few squares that may be a smidge small in one direction because I had to cut the raveled part off and it didn’t leave quite enough.
It’s been more than two hours now and I have pretty little stacks of mostly-squares. I had wanted to pin them together so I could sew next session, but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. After all, I’ve still got two weeks.
Leaf bouquets = heart smiles. (No, this isn't my daughter)
I love autumn. Our front maple tree is turning slowly to vibrant red, and the tree across the street is a blazing yellow. The fall colors are something I missed when we lived in Ireland, and I give deep sighs of enjoyment as I drive through the community, both for the visual pleasure now and the memories of autumns past.
My three children brought me gifts from nature when they were small. The boys would pick anything they thought was unique – grass, weeds, poison ivy. You name it, they brought it. My daughter, however, took care to gather beauty in her small hands. One year she brought me a bouquet of carefully chosen autumn leaves, scarlet and orange as bright as any summer flowers. She insisted I put them in water so they wouldn’t wilt, and then was disappointed when they eventually drooped anyway, without even turn crunchy.
A few years earlier, while visiting grandparents in Oregon, she picked a beautiful bouquet of dandelions for me. I took them from her sweaty hand, filled a small juice glass with water for them, and put them on the windowsill – the place of pride for flowers. Her grandfather, a horticulturist, came in and immediately wanted to know why there were weeds in the window. “They’re not weeds, they’re flowers,” came her three-year-old reply. There followed a back-and-forth argument: “Weeds.” “Flowers.” “No, weeds.” “No, flowers.” Followed by a foot stomp, complete with hands on hips. Grandpa, of course, didn’t back down – a weed was a weed was a weed. But #1 Daughter was determined. They were beautiful, therefore they were flowers.
What gifts from nature have small hands presented to you? What favorite fall memories do you have?
I haven’t had my own horse for about eight years now. Some of the time I ache to go ride, but most of the time I’m too busy to miss it. So why is it that when I do get to ride (last Saturday evening, thank you to Tony, Nancy & Trotter), I come home glowing and happy? And it shows enough that when it’s planned but I’m too tired to want to go, Hubby kicks me out anyway. Wise man.
Other horsey stuff gives me thrills, too. Here’s a YouTube video of Frédéric Pignon and his Fresians doing gorgeous liberty work. I love the rapport between them!
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This isn’t an article about finding snippets of time to write in an already busy schedule. That’s a very common, on-going situation for many of us, and I’ll write about it later. But sometimes life throws you a curve, or … Continue reading
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