Friends…

My husband and I moved to southern Illinois about 8 1/2 years ago.  We lived in Edwardsville, which is across the river from St. Louis, MO.  I left several good and close friends when I moved. Most of them were friends I had made after I began to learn quilting and our friendships involved quilting together.  The quilting community has good people and good friendships.

Yesterday I made a trip to meet up with one of my friends to celebrate birthdays and exchange gifts and spend time together.  We try to meet up twice a year. It was good to see her and we went to the Alco store to do some shopping before having lunch.  We found really GREAT  bargains on area rugs.

My friend has taken up knitting since I left…this is what she made me for my birthday….thanks, Vicki, I miss ya’ and love ya’. Isn’t it gorgeous!

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Where Does The Time Go?

Where does the day go?  I got up at 6:30 this morning, didn’t get dressed and immediately went to the sewing machine to finish the quilting on my new Words piece.  Some days I do that.  I stay in my pajamas. I planned on working on this art piece yesterday…but my husband has been rained out of the field since Sunday afternoon and so I never got to touch the quilt.  After he went to bed last night I worked on it, then got the quilting and squaring up done this morning.  I am still adding paint highlights to it, but here is a sneak peak.

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It is called “Sticks and Stones…but Words Will Never Hurt Me”.  This is my second one.  Rusted cotton sateen, screened designs with procion dyes, handwriting, stamping, and painting.

Oh yeah, Facebook and Twitter now “demand” my time too.  My Twitter name is Katheeann if anyone wants to follow me. I spend too much time checking them since I am new to them.  I always do that with something new…play with it a lot.  I also got a good deal on a new Sony camera yesterday…I’ll probably play with it a lot too.

After the quilting is finished, now I can move the sewing machine back to my messy workroom.  I set the machine up on the kitchen table to quilt anything larger than a tablerunner because I don’t have the table room in my “studio”.  Now I can clean off the table so my husband doesn’t go crazy.  Not that we eat there…we eat in the living room in front of the tv.  The kitchen table is not needed for much of anything.

I need a whole day to clean up and possibly organize my sewing room.  Maybe tomorrow?  Unless I have to mow grass or go to town or clean the house.

Christmas Baking and Other Items…

Last week I did work on the commission proposal like I said I would.  I also spoke to the bank about a time limit on getting it in.  They said if I got it in after the first of the year that would be fine.  Sigh of relief.  So now I can put it aside to work on Christmas gifts and cookies…

Ok, I need some input on sugar cookies.  I have never liked to make sugar cookies with icing on them, because althought they are so pretty, the icing makes the cookie absorb moisture and go limp.  I see all these pretty decorated sugar cookies and they look so inviting.  So how does one go about keeping the cookie  nice after decorating it?  I have never had any luck with them.  Also, does anyone know if sugar cookies can be frozen and then thawed to decorate without them going limp?  That’s why, as of now, these sugar cookies are not decorated.  I wanted to try out the recipe.  I like this one very much.  It was on the bag of flour.

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Then I stood for a couple of hours to make these coated pretzels.  I always like to make pretzels as a nice change of pace on a cookie tray. You know…the salty/sweet thing…

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I still have chocolate ones to make (my favorite), but didn’t have any fresh bark  last week.

My neighborhood cookie exchange is this weekend.  My neighbors come over with cookies, we exchange a dozen to each person, we eat a few, and I serve a holiday punch, homemade eggnog,  or special coffee, and we chat.  The past couple of years I have made a hot cranberry tea with cinnamon sticks.  They love it.

There is not very much art making going on.  Every now and then I sit down and quilt on a stack and slash crazy quilt just because I would like to finish it.  I started a meandering job on it several years ago and was not happy with how that was going(I am ripping it out), so now I am using a 12 weight black cotton thread and just quilting around the shapes that are in the blocks.  It’s the worst quilting job I have ever done…and I love it.  How many of you know that you cannot free form quilt a straight line?  At least not without a ruler or something and even then, it would not be easy.  I am free form stitching “lines”;  they are not straight, but it is ok.  It looks like stones and sort of offsets the straight lines of the piecing.  It takes your eye away from that.  I am liking it. It also gave me the idea of how to quilt the inner border…with stone shapes of course.

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Handmade Christmas gifts: A friend made an embroidered patch for me for my niece.  Katelyn had requested a sweatshirt with a panda eating bamboo on it, so….it’s a great story, but Katelyn will be getting a sweatshirt with a panda eating bamboo on it! The only gift I have left to make is a fleece blanket for another niece.  There are plenty of cookies and candy to make as I will make up cookie trays for a couple of households.

And then there’s the dreaded Birthday.  Born just a week before Christmas, I have  a birthday when I’m just too busy to have one or to actually enjoy it.  Why couldn’t I have been born in September?  Some years I have gone somewhere to shop and just enjoy the day by myself, but I am still shopping for Christmas.  I try to just take the day for me and do something different on that day, like… whatever I want that I probably wouldn’t do some other day.  But I don’t do things like bungee jumping or the like.  At least not yet.