Good Bye Christmas, Welcome New Year

Yesterday was devoted to cleaning up – putting away all the Christmas decorations back into their storage boxes, taking down the outside lights – getting the house back to normal.  You know I miss the Christmas tree.  During the month of December that the tree is up it was a habit of mine that as I walked through the living room in the morning on the way to the kitchen to make coffee I would stop and plug in the tree lights.  I like the way they look – my living room is often dim if a cloudy day and the lights just added such a twinkle.  I so enjoy how over the years the cool – lights were made instead of the old lights that would heat up and was dangerous to leave light for hours.  With the cool lights I leave the tree light up all day.  Now some how that corner of the room looks empty even thought I have moved the quilt rack loaded with quilts back into that area.  I know I will get use to it quickly though – always do!

Yesterday and the day before I did get more four patches done in between clean up work.  I also have gotten two more Dear Jane blocks finished – that quilt is coming along nicely I am almost done with row 9 leaving only 4 more complete rows to make and then of course that border!  That takes a year by itself!

200 4 patches - pressed and squared up -- 115 more to make for sure and who knows if there will be more for a border. I have not decided for sure if I will be making the border that is on the pattern - all of the little houses around that are not quite "me" so not sure, I will decide that later

120 circles ready to go. One thing that I have found surprising in the box of Moda Bake Shop Sampler is I thought each individual square was not repeated - a "charm" box creating 480 different blocks. Wrong - in the second bundle of squares I found several repeats and in the 3rd bundle of 40 I have found at least 4 or 5 repeats. This isn't a charm quilt that I am making but if it was I would have been having to be very careful and take out the repeats as I found them. So be warned if you want to make a charm quilt this box has repeats in it and you need to look as you use.

Insanity Revisited, Row 9 blocks 9 and 10. On the last quilt block 10 was pieced, on this quilt I have been sometimes using different methods - just because I feel like it - so this block this time I appliqued. I decided I liked it better pieced though on the first quilt though, the applique was easy to do, I just preferred the lines it gave on the pieced block as a pieced work. Some of the blocks are very difficult and you can make them a little easier to do if you eliminate some pieces and redesign the block slightly.

Today is a very cold day outside.  We have been warned by the forecasters that the first half of January will be very cold.  All of you guys in the north I do feel for you as I know you are about 20 degrees or more colder than we are here.  I heard that North Dakota where Crispy lives is way below zero — keep warm girlfriend!!  Here we woke up to a balmy 22 degrees – warm compared to what it might be later in the week, I heard we might drop to 14 degrees one night.  Daytime’s are supposed to be around 32.  Too cold for me, we in the south have to be careful when it gets that cold because most of us do not have our water pipes deep in the ground like they put them in the north.  Around here I bet most are only about 12 – 24 inches deep!!  Also a small percentage of  people in the south live in “manufactured” -  (what use to be called trailers) homes.  These homes have very little insulation around the under side so have to leave water dripping in faucets to make sure they don’t freeze.

I hope the whole winter won’t be like this!!