Red and White, snow and hollyberries

Still feel like I don't have enough RED and WHITE stuff! I am just loving the red and white this Christmas season. So I decided to whip up a little throw for the back of the sofa. My challenge was to use just what I had on hand and not buy ONE THING for this project.  Heaven knows I've got enough in my fabric stash to make many a quilt...but there is always just one thing you want to add to it and the next thing you know you are at the fabric store buying lots more fabric!

So here it is. It took 2 days.

I really whipped it together. It's 8 inch squares, with  machine zig-zagging all around...including the binding! I had no idea how that would work or look but I like the effect. I would like to do this with deep browns and greens, next! Use up some of that fabric stash!

A Santa Sighting!

Yesterday I went to meet a friend for Sushi Lunch. It required going on the Business 80 past the Arden Mall Corridor which means MAYHEM and MADNESS on the highway.

It can take 10 minutes to merge onto the freeway and then another 15 just to get to the next exit where more people are trying to merge onto the freeway.

In the middle of all this merging the retard designers of the freeway itself have placed 2 lanes that END abruptly and you have to merge left because there is nowhere left to go.

So it's always a bottleneck and during Holiday Shopping Time it's just awful.

Yesterday, I was waiting and waiting to merge...creeping along slowly because my lane was going to END in an embankment if I didn't get over...and nobody was budging whatsoever. It's like their attitude is: I'm in a lane that works, screw you!

When suddenly, what should appear behind me but a small red vehicle being driven by...SANTA CLAUS! And he waved me right in! And I merged ahead of him and looked into my rear view mirror and sitting beside him in a bad white hair wig was MRS. CLAUS! You don't see them out for a spin together very often!

They both had Rosy Red Cheeks and Santa, who was not wearing his hat in the car, had flowing white locks and a very beautiful snowy white beard! Very real! And perched on his nose was a lovely pair of gold wire rim glasses.

It just gave me the happiest day, in that moment!

Santa is an excellant driver!

Out with the Old In With the New!

 
Oh I love it when I get to salvage something and fix it up and make it brand new again!

Last year I managed to get bleach on my Christmas PJ's! 

Out Damned Spot, OUT I say!

But they are barely worn and still so cute and the colors are bright and merry...

So I cut the good part out of the t-shirt and sewed it onto a new t-shirt and VIOLA!! I have re-made, re-tread Christmas PJ's!

Winter Blues

Yes, I've got a case of the Winter blues!  Or maybe I should say the Silver and Blues!

I have been dealing with a big flare-up of my fibromyalgia, and with that comes a good deal of depression. Work is slow right now, I'm always on the verge of homelessness anyway, and it all starts to pile up on me in ways that dry up my creativity and make me feel very, very blue.

And yet, I love these dark days of winter! I do not mind the grey, grey skies or the rainy nights. I don't mind the cold or the dreary drip-drip-drip of water falling off the trees. All that seems minor if you've grown up in the Midwest and know what REAL cold weather, gloom and winter feel like! HA!

Occasionally I like to close my eyes and imagine I am  back home again in Indiana, walking the icicle streets on one of those silverthaw mornings. So I guess that is what inspired these new blue cards, which I will be using for my New Years Greeting Cards! Which is just around the corner, isn't it? New years.

Anybody want some unmounted rubber stamps? The theme is Victorian clip art. They are very cool! They are already mounted on cushion. I used these with a plastic block and double sticky tape for stamping. I'm selling the whole grab bag for 20 bucks. It's at least 40 stamps, very good quality, too! It's just time to ring out the old, ring in the new! And this year I want to pare down my 'stuff' to even more minimal stature. I've just got TOO MUCH STUFF!



I have had some fun lately: it hasn't all been pain and plodding! I got to meet a blogging heroine of mine: Kimberly Morales of "Poor Girl Eats Well" She is a local woman who creates her own recipes on the tightest of shoe-string budgets and comes up with some wonderful edibles. She lives only about 8 blocks from me and had a garage sale this last weekend. So I tracked her down and introduced myself and it was really neat and fun. Go check out her blog (on the sidebar) and she is also on Facebook.

I hope you are all having a wonderful, blessed, light and love filled pre-Christmas pre-solstice Holiday Season everybody!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

Sometimes things just come together and make magic!

I love how this turned out! And it was just a fluke when I put it together.

I took my normal pitcher: because I can't live in a world without pitchers, can you? and I decided to use it for the handful of poinsettias and plastic holly that I got last year at the Dollar Tree.

And then I just decided to string some teeny white lights through them. Because teeny white lights that are twinkly but not BLINKING are very pretty and make everything look like fairyland, don't you think?

It Grows on Trees

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful, blessed and THANKS-FILLED Thanksgiving! Here are some items that are grown on trees around here.  Okay not the candle. And not the beer. But the apples, pomegranates and the leaves! AND the mandarin oranges which I picked right out of the back yard!

Finished!

First, I felt like my bedroom was dingy and dull and boring. So a quick swap-out of quilts and here's the before and after:

Much warmer for this long winter, I think.

And I finally finished up my Christmas quilt. It definitely looks like I hurried. I had all kinds of trouble with it and I'm just glad it's done.  I took it to work to show my 98 year old today and she liked it very much...however, she said, "All these chimneys and not a Santa in sight!"

And I had to agree. So as soon as I find some appropriate Santa Fabric I will be appliqueing one or two on a rooftop here and there.

I also happen to think the back looks as good as the front! Fun, anyway!  Happy January, folks, from we here at the "Still celebrating Christmas" Cafe!

*Oh, and PS: Anonymous in the Brown Coat: Of course I knew who it was right away! Are you still dog-sledding in Alaska? Drop me an email sometime and tell me how you found my blog!

Happy New Year!!!!

Yes, I still Live and all that. Just been busy working and playing Yoville. It's so addicting havin that little avatar running around everywhere!

Here's a Mackie pic and my latest quilt project!!!

Mackie loved 'his' Christmas Cactus. He ate tons of it, and then promptly puked up a piece of tinsel. I thought it was magic! The magic of Christmas!

Yes, I have two Trees. It's the Ponsonby Way.

It took roughly 4 hours to draft this first block. The old grey brain cells, they aint what they used to be!!!

But then it took only 5 more hours to make ALL of these. I'll keep you posted on this project. I just felt the need for a Christmas Quilt to be done by next year, hopefully!

Look what Santa baby brought me! A Sony Bravia HDTV

And Since We've No Place to Go...Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

Well, I had a routine doctor's appt. this morning and while I was there I thought I'd mention I've been hacking up a lung for more than 5 days, so Dr. Lu listened to my lungs...and she listened to my lungs...and she listened to my lungs...and then in her non-alarmist way informed me that I have a partially collapsed lung!

"You are squeaking!" she said, and gave me a Z-pack.

So, since I've no place to go, I'm in my Christmas Pajamas early, lights lit, candles burning, fully relaxed just me, Mackie and my Collapsed lung, ready for a very lovely Christmas! And I Hope you all have one, too!

God Bless Us, Everyone!

I like how it appears Mackie has miniaturized himself and is sniffing the end of my red snowflake sock, when in all actuality he is across the room just walking past the tree.

Percentages

This whole percentage thing started back in the 90's when employers expected you to give your 110% on the job. I always had a problem with that...because I was all like: Will you be paying me 110% of my wage? Dude?

And frankly?

I need at least 70% of myself for myself. Heck, I need 30% just for peeing. Eating takes up at least 45%. Watching Netflix gobbles up the rest of it and somewhere in there I still manage to wedge sleeping, travel time, and updating this blog.

That whole 110% business pretty much went by the wayside. Now they just close the plant with one day notice and don't give you your severance package.

However, percentages started creeping into other areas and once again, nobody but me seems to find this annoying and unfair. Let's take milk, for instance.

Life was so simple when you had MILK, half and half, heavy cream and buttermilk. You could figure out easily what strength milk you needed. Plain milk for cereal, half and half for your coffee or tea, and heavy cream for whipping. Buttermilk was used for something but since I equate it with Eggnog I don't know and don't care.

But now. Some fool or fools out there decided that MILK wasn't any good for you anymore, even though they also tell us that we need a gallon a day or our bones will turn into dry kindling. So they came up with Percentage Milk.

You've got Vitamin D Whole milk. 2% milk. Reduced Fat milk. 4% milk. Lowfat milk. Nonfat milk, and Fat Free milk. I can never figure out what order they come in so I just get half n half and use it for everything; that way I can pretty much avoid having to learn what percentage everything is. For my clients I just go by the color coding on the milk carton. Miss E goes with the yellow carton, Miss B uses the blue milk, etc;

But now. Right here at Christmas Time when life should be joyous and contain lots of baked goods, I've run up against a Percentage Problem. One that required me to pin a poor Trader Joe's employee up against a stack of boxes while I laid out an assortment of chocolate bars and asked her to put them in order. Fortunately she was really sweet about it, and even showed an interest in my chocolate dipping experiences.

You know what I'm talking about. We used to have Milk chocolate and Semi-sweet chocolate. As far as I knew, semi-sweet and dark chocolate were just interchangeable terms. Well, maybe they were different. Semi-sweet are for baking Toll House cookies and the dark chocolate was for avoiding in the Whitman Sampler.

But NOW! We have percentage chocolate! There is Milk chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, 54% chocolate, 62% Cacao, 73% Milk Solids, etc; For all I know there are even chocolates in the 90 percentile range. Each brand has it's own variety of percentages, too. So if you are looking to blend a Guittard with a Ghiardelli, you'd better know their different percentages.

I have learned that the higher the percentage, the nastier the chocolate. You'd think that more percent would be more yum-factor but it's just the opposite. Like with employers, I'm not willing to go with the 90% chocolates. I bought an 80% chocolate bar one time and it ended up in the trash. Chocolate is supposed to be sweet and melt in your mouth, not taste like burnt rubber tires.

As far as I know, no one has yet come up with 110% chocolate.

Another Hatred Confession

Everyone who reads this should know by now how weird I am. It's not a secret. I freely share my odd quirks and opinions; that's what a blog is for.

And for the most part you all tolerate it. I got nary a rebuff for declaring I hate Frank Sinatra. My opinion that unwed mothers should be FINED not rewarded with welfare and all kinds of medical benefits probably just stunned folks into silence, but whatever the reason I didn't get any guff about it. Even my disclosure that I HAVE CRACK was accepted with some tolerance.

But now, today's revelation? Bound to set me beyond the pale. It will place me firmly in the ranks of those who are on the outside of enough. Those to whom the boundaries of polite society are forever closed.

I HATE EGG NOG.

That's right. I've said it. Cast me out, oh my people! I don't care. I hate it and that's my Final Answer.

What is it, anyway? A glass of milk with raw egg, 2 cups of sugar in each glass and a sprinkling of gritty nutmeg on the top. Purchased in a carton that cleverly disguises itself as normal milk. Thick enough to be liquid pudding. BLECH I say! Disgusting.

I've been told there is a grown up version, though. Loaded with booze. Very tasty. And yet the idea of combining dairy, sugar, alcohol and raw egg seems to me to be sheer insanity. Who ever dreamed this stuff up? Russians who ran out of goat yogurt?

Well, there you have it. My True Confession. Shun me if you must in public, but try to be kind at the Christmas parties. You can be happy because it means there will be all the more eggnog for you!