November update . . .

We spent a very uneventful Thanksgiving. The children were busy with spouses' families. Troy worked some on the fence line behind the garage. We ate pork roast and rice with our favorite cabbage casserole. Not very festive, but I did make a pumpkin pie for dessert. I made a quick shopping run to Kmart for a one-day sale item (a toy for one of the grandkids for Christmas. My wonderful husband woke me up early on Friday and Saturday and took me shopping. I haven't finalized my Christmas shopping list yet, so I wasn't looking for anything in particular. On Friday, he was the only one to make major purchases. Could be because we spent most of our time in Lowe's and Home Depot. Come to think of it, those aren't the best places to find gifts for the grandkids are they? Today I finally spent some major dough, but it was for clothes for me. Since I've retired I haven't bought many clothes for myself and after two and a half years the wardrobe was getting kinda' sparse. On the 'quilting front' I finished the handquilting on a quilt for my newest grandson. It is a preprinted panel with coordinating backing. The picture at the left shows the front panel.The picture below is a closeup of the backing material. I quilted it by using black thread to outline the pictures on the front panel. The border is quilted in slanted lines. Very simple. I found the material for this quilt at a garage sale in Florida. The woman had closed her shop and had bins of wonderful material. I loaded up on some really nice stuff. ( I haven't gotten the hang of putting pictures in my blogs. We can't get high speed internet where we live and it takes sooooo long to upload larger pictures that I have decided to stick with smaller ones for the time being. )

Florida Projects

These are the window treatments that I made for my kitchen in Florida. I got the pattern for the window tabs in a Debbie Mumm book. The pattern called for ties on top, but I thought the button tabs looked more like ME. After I got the tabs done for the window over the sink, I decided that I needed something for the window in the door to the garage. So I basically did the same thing, just wider, and decided to applique more fruit in the middle. The pattern called for fusing the appliqued fruit, but I liked the finished look that the button-hole applique gave it. The small size of the tabs made the hand-stitching more manageable while watching TV in the evenings.

Back from Florida

We got back from Florida Sunday night. Two whole weeks - it was great. We had no big projects, just relaxed and took it easy for the most part. Troy's only big project was trimming the big oak in the front yard. That's a 9 foot ladder against the tree. Thankfully he didn't have to go much farther up to get to the dead limb. He still insists on doing it himself. Since I'm being successful adding pictures tonight, here's a picture of the lifesaver cactus that I bought at the Deland flea market. I've never seen anything quite like it. Well, pictures everywhere. One of these days I'll get the hang of this.