Category Archives: Family memories

Glorious Spring

Spring is like youth. It’s beautiful and fleeting. When you are young, you spend all your time trying to be older and then when you are really old, you wonder where the years went.  Youth is wasted on the young, one famous person once said.  Maybe not wasted, but we don’t appreciate being young while we are.

Spring is so like that. It comes  and goes so quickly, you hardly have a chance to enjoy it.  Right now everything is in its glory.

The Viburnum is especially pretty this year.

The Daffodils have been so pretty, but their days are almost over for another year.

I love PInk Flowering Almond.

The Redbud. One of the first harbingers of Spring. And they grow wild here in Indiana. Aren’t we blessed?  I did plant this one which came up in our back yard years ago.

Our Jeep goes right along with all the Spring colors!   By the way, the Jeep’s color is called Snazzleberry.

Our neighbors’ lilac is so lovely and we get to enjoy it, too.

I’m preparing my little garden outside my shop.  I find that if I plant things here, they won’t be dug up by pups.  They dug up three of the peonies in the back yard. We did replant them and put a fence around them, but peonies don’t like being moved, so it might be a few years before they do any good.

We went to Lowes yesterday and I bought two more large flower pots, some pansies and three other plants that I can’t remember their names at the present, but I will show you once they are planted.   One is a low growing, spreading grass and I don’t know where we will plant that yet.

Easter came and went so fast I can hardly believe we celebrated it. Our church choir sang a cantata which was lovely and then we had dinner with nine family members.

Our granddaughter and her husband(I still find that funny to say) were here. They have almost been married for a year already.

Our daughter and her family.  These are our “youngest” grandchildren now.

Our son and his wife and son were here as well. We didn’t get their pictures for some reason.  I always mean to get pictures of everyone and I always leave out someone.

David picked Daffodils for the table.

The Christmas cactus bloomed for Easter, too.

Our son and his wife had visited a nursery the day before and was I surprised when they gifted me with some presents.

This is the top of the garden stand.  Looks like angel wings, doesn’t it?   I could put birdseed in it, but it’s too pretty to have birds pooping all over it so I will probably just set it in the garden where I can enjoy it.

 O

Our son thought he got the best present for me, though.

A rooster windmill.   Yes, I do love it.

It’s been given a real workout with the windy days we’ve been having.

They also brought me a Russian Sage to plant. Or, as my son calls it, a Ukranian Sage.  He even printed it on the tag.  Our son, by the way is a Russian linguist and said he wishes he could go back into the military to help fight.  I’m glad he can’t because I worried enough about him while he was serving in the Air Force.

Miss Honey Sugar Dumpling,   Sugar, for short. She is such a sweet dog.

Cocoa Lucy Belle or Lucy for short is always and I mean always wanting to play. In fact, as soon as I finish this post I’m going outside and throwing her some balls.

It’s been a special time and now we are getting ready for all the work planting gardens and keeping the yard entails.  I’m also busy sewing for my Christmas sale. I know it seems far, far away, but the time goes so fast, it will be here before we know it.  I also got more fabric.  I don’t think I have enough. Ha!

Hope you are enjoying Spring or maybe it’s Fall where you live. Sometimes I can’t get my mind around the fact that when I am in snow, others are in Summer and when I am in Summer others are freezing.  Enjoy every day of Spring. I know I plan to. Bye.

 

 

 

Snow Days and Sew Days

We finally got snow!  Wonderful, beautiful, white, shining snow!  I was so happy. Quite joyful, really.  I know all you who have to get out and shovel and try to drive in snow weren’t as pleased as I was to see snow, but we haven’t had a substantial snow in soooo long.  I was really hoping for a blizzard and at one time as I watched the snow blowing off the roof of my shop and saw the snow so thick at times it was hard to see very far, but it didn’t last long and after a day it was over.

I’ve been wanting a day like this for a long time.

And looking outside my shop, I was so filled with happiness. Nothing is cozier than being inside warm and snug and watching the snow fall.

But we didn’t stay inside all the time while we still had snow. We went to the hills to watch grandsons sled down them.

Driving back roads, through woods and over hill and dale, we finally came to the hill where the grandsons wanted to sled.

Playing with snow is so much fun.

A lake lies at the foot of the hill and it was frozen solid.

Our grandsons and their father walked out on it. I was a little worried that it wasn’t solid enough, but our son-in-law grew up near the Adirondacks in New York and is well aware of how thick ice should be to walk on.

Ready to go.

Dad and son coming down!

Watch out!

 

Our daughter.  She is so photogenic.

Me, not so much.  I am always caught in the most horrible poses.  I look like I could bite someone here and I was really very happy.  I brought hot chocolate and marshmallows for everyone to drink.  Please, look away from the picture now before you turn to stone!  Some day I will show you a good picture of me. I’m really not that scary.

The snow will not last, sad to say. It’s supposed to be almost fifty degrees tomorrow.

We have done so much already this Winter.  We went to see a Van Gogh exhibit where you are immersed in the pictures. It was wonderful.

People sat around on the floors and watched as the pictures changed.

The pictures seemed to melt onto the floor.

I wore my Van Gogh shirt with these irises on it.  So I blended in well.

Van Gogh was a prolific painter, but he sold very little of his work.  He died a pauper.

At one point he was into chalk drawings.  The drawings appeared to be drawn on the floor at one point.  Some of the pictures came to life, it seemed.  Birds flew. Thunder sounded.  It was all amazing and wonderful.  I could have sat there all day and looked and looked. There was so much to see.  If you get a chance to see this, do.

I took one art class when I was in college and I liked it, but I have never been artistic in this way.  My art is in my quilts.

Speaking of which.   I mentioned I was hoping to have a Christmas sale this year so I have been very busy in my shop making things.

This is what my table looks like right now in my shop.  When I am working on a project fabric gets flung from here to there as I look for just the right fabric piece I need.

I have been making pillows.  I made several of these for Christmas and they were a hit.  I’m also making pillows of my own design.   I plan to make lots of pillows, aprons, pin cushions, pot holders,  small quilts, table runners and anything else I can think of to make.

And because I have been sewing a lot and because you NEVER have enough fabric when you are a quilter, I ordered more.  The line I ordered from is called She Who Sews.

I am absolutely in love with this fabric.   David ordered me a bunch of it for Christmas and I just got it this week.  A  late Christmas present.

Here are some of the other pieces in it.

Each piece has a Bible verse hidden in it. Can you find the one here?

I love, love, love this!

Believe it or not and I’m sure you believe it now, I have ordered more fabric from another company and am waiting for it as it was a pre-order also.  This company sends its fabric all wrapped up in this.

Tissue paper.  I love when companies give that little extra service that makes you feel they care.  This is a great company also if you are looking for fabric.

David got a couple of puzzles for Christmas from the Diary of an Edwardian Lady.

Winter and Fall. He completed them both in record time so I ordered him the Spring one.

And he finished it in a couple of days so he went looking in our closets for another puzzle and found this one.

Different quilt patterns.

Which was only 500 pieces and he finished it in a day and a half.  I’m going to sell this one since he’s done it.    I got my dining table back now and he’s going to have to find something else to do!

I had to buy this book.

It is a facsimile of Edith Holden’s diary she wrote in the early part of the 1900’s. She wrote about the flowers and animals all around her and did water colors of many.  She was an exquisite artist and married a sculptor later in life. She lost her life tragically while searching along a riverbank for some more things to draw, fell in the river and drowned.  She has left us this wonderful  book of her drawings and writings along with poetry and latin names of most of the things she drew.  She was very intelligent.

To be able to draw so beautifully is such a blessing.

Each page is a treasure.   She left us something wonderful to read and beautiful puzzles to do.

February is going as fast as January did so I will be keeping very busy in my shop until warm weather and then it will be time to get back outside and plant flowers again.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. You are loved so very much by the very One who made you.  Bye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Granddaughter’s quilt and a Happy New Year 2022

I said I would show you the quilt I gave our granddaughter for Christmas, but first a few more pictures of the holiday at our house.

I loved our tree. David wrapped every single present you see except for his own presents, which I wrapped, but not nearly as neatly.

This angel has stood atop our tree for many Christmases.

I actually did not remember I had this Santa holding Labrador dogs, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found him among other Christmas decorations.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care.

A sailboat that we got in the Virgin Islands a few years ago nestles in the tree.

We always had Spritz cookies at Christmas when I was a girl. I got a new press from a Pampered Chef party a couple of years ago and I tried it this year or rather, David pressed the cookies out. He has more patience than I do.  My daughter mentioned remembering them when I use to make them years ago.  Don’t know why I stopped making them.  I think my old cookie press was not very efficient and I lost all patience with it.

Here is the quilt I gave our granddaughter.

Thirty blocks of Little Garden Girls. Each one different.  Each one holding a bouquet of flowers I embroidered or sewed on.  Almost every one has old lace or eyelet sticking out from under her dress.

Here are just a few of them.

This is the label I sewed on the back.  I already had another label on it telling when I started it and when I finished it. It took me two years to complete this quilt.  A labor of love, I tell you.

This the quilting on the front. All hand quilted.  I echo quilted around every little girl. When I first started, I told David I didn’t know why I was quilting so close, but I had to continue and now I am glad I did.  I love how it looks.  Once I got started quilting it, it was relaxing.

 

This is the backing.  Perfect for a quilt about garden girls.

Now it is New Year’s Eve. People keep saying how horrible 2021 was. Unless you got the Covid or had a death in the family, I hope you think it was a good year.  We had a very nice year actually even with some health issues and other things. It’s life. Not all is good, but hopefully not all is bad, either.  I pray for health and safety for my family and myself and that the year 2022 will bring less turmoil, more peace and happiness to everyone all around the world.   God bless everyone who reads my blog and may you find joy, peace, good health and love in 2022.  Bye.

 

 

 

What I Made and a wonderful Christmas

I hope your Christmas was as wonderful as mine. It’s always good to have family around and eat good food and open presents.

I worked up to the day before finishing presents.  It was a work of love, for sure, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

First of all, the socks. These are a few of the socks I have knitted this year.  I hang some of them on the mantle and let people pick out the pair they want.  This year I knit over twenty pair of socks and had some left over.  I have already started next year’s batch.

I made this pillow for our daughter. My mother made the Dresden plate many years ago out of her old dresses and aprons and  one of my dresses.

The purple fabric is from a dress I wore when I was little. I remember that dress well. I loved it and hated when I outgrew it.

I made patchwork pillowcases for some.

Another pillow I made.

A small quilt with four barns on it with four different quilt patterns in the door.

I made several pillows from this pattern from a book I got from Country Threads.

I love this one with the moon where the star should be.  I have already got a request for another one.

I also did one in Christmas colors.  These were so much fun to make, I could not stop making them.

My daughter got a new kitty before Christmas. She lost one of her sweet dogs and the kitty helped her so I made her this quilt.  I had this quilt pieced for years and never finished it, but when I saw her new kitty, I knew that I would have to finish it for her. The fabric was in my mother’s stash that I received after she died.

This was the backing. You know how sometime you make something to give away and you hate to give it away?    This quilt was one of those.

This isn’t all the things I made, but I haven’t given away some things so I can’t show you.  It was fun making everything and I have ideas for next year, but first, I am going to work on things for a sale I want to have next October or November. I plan to make lots of pillows, small quilts, socks and other things to sell in my shop.  Kind of a one woman Christmas bazaar.  I will see what I can get done and whether I will make enough to have the sale.

David made picket fences and birdhouses for everyone and they were pleased to get them  I used the one he made for me as decoration on our front porch with garland and lights on it.

Went to the eye doctor and he said my eye was doing very well, but he wanted to see me again in six months.  I asked him if I was going to have to see him every six months forever and he asked me, “Don’t you like us!”  Ha.  I like them, but that doesn’t mean I want to go there every six months. It’s a forty-five minute drive and several hours wait for a five minute checkup so no, I don’t like seeing them!

We had a very nice Christmas with the grandchildren. We gave them these balls that fly and return to them, among other things, and they were a hit. Balls were flying everywhere!  I  gave our granddaughter a quilt I made several years ago and got a blue ribbon at the county fair.  I told her at the time that when I died she would get it, but I got to thinking maybe she may not get it after I died, so I gave it to her for Christmas. I took lots of pictures of it and I will show you my next post.  It’s a Little Garden Girls quilt.  Another gift it was hard to give away, but I’m glad I did.  I know she will cherish it and take care of it, maybe for her daughter one day.

Here’s to Christmases past and present and may we always have a reason to celebrate because we do.  Bye.

 

 

October is Going, Going…..

I can’t get over how quickly the months have passed this year.  I don’t know if it’s because the stores rush us from season to season with things to buy that they want to sell, or if it’s just my age and the time passes much faster.  Remember when you were a child and it was the last couple of weeks before Christmas how long it seemed?  The time seemed to stand still then although it really didn’t and went no faster  or slower than it goes today. Still, I really wish the days were longer sometimes. Especially now that David is getting off work in the early afternoon and I still have things I want to do besides prepare dinner.

I have really grown to hate cooking the last few years. After all, I’ve cooked for various people every meal almost in the last fifty years and it’s getting old.  I never liked to cook in the first place and it gets worse for me the older I get.  Those pre-packaged, ready to cook meals I see on tv look more and more appealing to me, but I know David, with his finicky eating would not like most of them because there are VEGETABLES in most of them.  Not the kind of vegetables he likes such as corn and green beans. Well, those are the only vegetables he likes.  I eat just about every kind of vegetable there is because I was brought up on a farm and we raised all our vegetables and we ate what was put before us.

I don’t know how I got off on that tangent. Oh, yes, the shorter days and having to stop to cook, Ugh.   The days David doesn’t work he will sometimes prepare a meal and I love it. His meals tastes better than mine.  Are you that way?  The food you cook doesn’t taste good, but someone else could make the very same meal and it’s yummy.   I made roast pork loin, green bean bake and mashed potatoes with apple crunch for dessert today.  None of it tasted good to me, but David ate two helpings so it must not have been too bad.

Well, to change the subject.  I have been working on an Autumn quilt for the past month. It has twenty fifteen inch square blocks. Each block has about one hundred pieces in it. It’s been a fun one to make.

David came into my shop the other day and said, “I know you know what each pile of pieces are for, but to me it looks like a jumbled mess!”  I laughed and pointed out each pile and told him the size of the pieces in each one.  There is a method to my madness. I can work in chaos and come out with something in order.

This is just one of the blocks.  I now have the quilt top completed and will show you when I get a good picture of it.  As you can see, there are many different fabrics in this quilt.  I love the Fall colors so much.

Here is a stack of the blocks I had done that particular day.  There was a LOT of cutting of pieces for this quilt. I made a smaller version of it a couple of years ago.  It’s on a chair in my living room so I can look at it all season.  I will really try to remember to get pictures to show you my next blog. I notice I have promised to show things in the past and completely forgotten about showing them when I write new posts. I will try not to do that this time.

Now that I am done with that quilt it is on to making Christmas gifts. I  was going through my fabric boxes getting ideas for what to make and found material I had completely forgotten about but that would go very well into the projects I have planned.  They say the store shelves may be emptier this year for Christmas shopping so I am preparing to make a lot of my gifts.

We had a beautiful rainbow the other day.  We could see it from our front porch. We have been having some rainy days recently.  Yesterday and today have been rather dreary and cold.  But then there comes a rainbow.

We took a drive up to some property we have in the hills of Brown County.  We still don’t know what we will do with that property. We would love to build a log cabin and I have designed exactly what I want, two buildings, one for the living area and kitchen, bath and laundry and the other for the master bedroom and bathroom with an enclosed dog trot between them. And I want another building just for storage and my quilting.  One can dream.  Always.

This is part of our property. It runs down a hill to a little stream at the bottom.  David wants to go over there sometime and bush hog some of the land to make a path to walk.

One of our grandsons played in the championship game of his soccer travel league.

 

We took our lawn chairs and blankets and watched behind the fence.  It was a pretty good spot as his team spent most of their time at this end and we saw a lot of action.

Here he is with his medal.

It is a very nice medal and we are so proud of him.

As we were leaving the game we saw the Hunter’s Moon above us.

It was so beautiful with the clouds all around it.

I managed to get some pretty good pictures of it with my little camera. Looks like Halloween. Do you see the witch flying across its face?  When I was a child and there was a full moon, my mother would scare all us kids by saying she saw the witch flying across the moon.  I was so sure she was right that I saw her, too!

Hope your October has been happy and you have enjoyed the Autumn Days.  Hopefully our trees will be changing their colors in the next week.  Happy Halloween!  Bye.

 

 

 

An Anniversary and a Wedding

David has been on vacation the last week and it’s been a busy one.  We celebrated our fifty-third wedding anniversary on the 7th with eating out and that is about all.  I was not feeling well for three days, nausea and just the blahs so I didn’t feel like eating much.  I’ve pretty much given up fried food because it always upsets my stomach so we went to Olive Garden for their  soup and salad lunch with breadsticks.  It was so good.  I felt like I kind of missed our anniversary in some way, but the week got better.

My granddaughter’s wedding was three days after our anniversary and as they were not having a wedding cake she asked me to make a few cakes, so I did. I made an orange chiffon cake, a chocolate cake and a magic pumpkin pie cake and I also baked seven dozen sugar cookies and iced them.  I was in the kitchen for two days making all this.  Other people brought desserts also so there was a table laden with them all.   There were so many desserts at the reception they were begging people to take pies home.

The wedding was in a church in Anderson about an hour away so we packed up Saturday morning and drove up.

Pictures were taken. This David and I with the bride and groom and our daughter’s family. I look a little grim here. Don’t know why.  I so hate my picture taken. Always have.

First time all three of our children have been together in years.

The bride with her red headed brothers and the groom with his brother.  His brother caught the garter at the reception and his girlfriend caught the corsage so maybe there’s another wedding in their future.

These ladies provided the music for the wedding.  I can’t remember the song the bride came in on, but the music the bride and groom left the church was from Star Wars!

The reception was held in a museum in Anderson.  It had beautiful architecture and there were interesting paintings on the walls.

This beautiful fireplace graced one room.

These were a couple of the paintings for sale. I really like the one with the chickens and for three hundred dollars I could have it.

After the meal there was dancing.   Everyone looked like they were having so much fun.

Mother of the bride.

My son and his new wife.

He danced with his daughter to the song, “Daddy’s Little Girl,” which brought some tears to my eyes.

Back to real life the day after and our pups had found a treasure while we were gone.

Both Lucy and Sugar were anxious to show us their treasure.

While we were gone they had dug up a huge mole in our yard.

Lucy was running around with the mole in her mouth with its feet out one side of her mouth and its head out of the other.  Ugh. Thank you, Lucy, but you can keep it for yourself. Every time I went into the yard today she ran up to me trying to give it to me.

My little garden in front of my shop is blooming.

I trimmed the lavender and it is coming back again.

The zinnias are blooming.

These are blooming, but I don’t know what they are called. Ever plant something and then wonder what you planted?  Happens to me all the time.

I bring this Begonia in every year and every year it gets prettier and prettier.

And some more flowers coming up that I’m not sure what they are.

David has another week off so we are going to try to celebrate our anniversary some more.  I know that Red Lobster is in our plans.  And Mexican.

Here’s to anniversaries and weddings.  May they always be celebrated. Bye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Good Christmas

I’ve had many happy Christmases in my life.   This year’s was no exception.  As long as we have family around and gifts to give them, I’m happy.  This year I decided to make all our grandchildren something, but that comes later.

First was the decorations.  It seems that we hardly get the Autumn and Halloween decorations down than it’s time to put up the Christmas tree and all the other decorations. I like to spread Christmas quilts I’ve made all around the house.

This is a Bullseye quilt i finished this year. I had made our grandson one for his graduation also.  But I never got mine completed until just a few weeks before Christmas.

I love this quilt for it’s simplicity and all the different Christmas colors that are in it. It was fun to make and to quilt.  I did it all on the sewing machine.

All my favorite Santas came out.  Those two red ones belonged to David’s grandmother which she gave to us.  They are celluoid and very old.  I think of her every time I put them out.

Santa in his canoe is my very favorite one.

My little village. My daddy made all the houses and the church and I treasure them.

The cubby holds small Christmas decorations. If you can see them, there are three little wooden Santas altogether that our children received on a flight to the Virgin Islands about forty years ago. They’ve lost their beards, but I still put them out every year to remind me of the good times we had that year. The house quilt behind the cubby I made years ago and is probably one of my very favorite quilts that I have.

Christmas does bring out memories, doesn’t it? Some good and some not so good, but we take them because they did happen.  The year before David and I were engaged, his mother wanted him to move back down to the Virgin Islands. He had been living with his aunt and uncle, but it wasn’t working out.  When I thought he was going to move away, I cried for days. He went down to visit his family and they made arrangements for him to move in with his grandparents so he could finish his senior year up here.  I was so glad.  Then we got engaged, he joined the army and the rest is our history.

I love putting out my Christmas quilts. This is my chicken quilt.

A sheep quilt I made years ago.  These little sheep were fun to make.

I made a special block with this Bible verse on it. We are His sheep if we choose to be and I choose to be.  He takes care of us like we were His sheep. He does not want one to be lost. He will leave the ninety-nine to find the lost 100th one.

Finally all the gifts were wrapped. David wrapped every single one of them. We say if he didn’t wrap them, they would never be wrapped and if I didn’t shop for the gifts, there wouldn’t be any, so we make a good team. I did most of the shopping online. It’s so easy. Almost too easy.

Everyone in the family is getting taller than David and I. I am one grandchild short of being the shortest person in the family and by next Christmas, that will happen.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care. I knit about twenty-five pair of socks this year. I hang them and let everyone choose a pair.

I love knitting socks. I’ve already started on next year’s.

What they called the Christmas Star.  I imagine the real Christmas Star was much brighter. Two planets, Jupitor and Saturn.  I saw a picture on Facebook of the planets taken using a telescope and it showed Saturn and it’s moons.  We don’t think about the wonderful things all around us sometime.  It’s amazing how wonderful our universe is and it’s still expanding because God is still creating.  But He chose this one planet to place men on and to send His only Son. It’s all pretty miraculous if you think about it.

Then it was time to give out the gifts.  My favorite thing to do.

Years ago I got a magazine with the quilt pattern called Grandmother’s Fancy. I’ve made a quilt or two from it, but never for the grandchildren. So this year I decided to make them all quilts with matching pillow and pillowcases.

He loved his new pillow.

Our granddaughter who will be getting married next Summer.

We gave our daughter and son-in-law a shared gift and David wrapped the present in two different wrapping papers and made each of them unwrap their side.   That sweater our daughter has on, a lady knits these and sells them. It looks so warm. I wish I could knit something like that.

Now it’s the day after Christmas. I always enjoy this day almost as much as Christmas Day. No stress and no worrying about a meal.  I slept in this morning and have been watching my favorite tv show, The Incredible Dr. Pol. It’s about a veterinarian in Michigan, his family and his fellow vets and all the animals they attend. I always thought I would have loved to be a vet until I see those young girls putting their arms in a cow’s butt to check on their babies or whatever.  Then I decide, no, I would not make a good vet.  I’m really impressed by those lady drs., though and what they can handle. My niece is a large animal vet, so I guess she probably does the same thing these girls do. .  I’ve got all the shows taped and have been watching all day.

Well, I hope your Christmas was a good one.  I will wait a few days before I start thinking about the next one and what we will give as gifts.  Merry Christmas and may your new year be healthy and happy and may the Covid virus soon be a thing in our memories and no where else. Bye.

 

You Can Tell it’s Almost Here

Right after Thanksgiving and even before, hints of Christmas start showing up. Usually the stores are months ahead on every holiday and Christmas is no exception.  I really wish the Christmas season was longer. I’m just getting my house decorated, the tree up, my mantle decorated, the nativity showcased. I pretty much love everything about Christmas and I love buying presents and trying to give presents I know will be well received.

A couple of years ago, we gave all our grandsons Hover Boards.  Probably the best gifts we ever have given and the looks on the faces and the “wows!’ we heard was worth it all. They all rode those Hover Boards with ease. I tried getting on one and almost killed myself.

Last year we gave the younger boys jumping shoes. They could wear them and bounce all over.  Also all the boys got hats with beards and/or hair attached that made them all look like lumberjacks.  My daughter told me later that her boys wore the hats and the jumping shoes to the park and everyone was laughing at how they looked.  Another good gift. This year the younger boys are getting something I found online, but I can’t tell what it is, yet.  It must be popular because when I went to try to buy another one it was out of stock everywhere.  All my grandchildren are getting something that I can’t tell yet, but after Christmas I will show you what it is. I’ve been working on it all year. My grandchildren may read this so I have to keep things secret, you see.  This year our only granddaughter and our oldest grandchild announced she was getting married next year. Another great gift for her grandma.

I  have never been able to surprise David at Christmas, but he surprised me one year.  It was years and years ago and I was at home with the children and someone knocked on the door. When I answered it, a man was there who said he had a piano to deliver. I told him he had the wrong house, but he assured me he was at the right one. David had bought me a piano for Christmas!  I was so surprised.  I don’t play the piano well, but I like to try. I never took piano lessons, but I was always playing on the piano when I was a girl. One time the man who worked on the telephone lines told us our phone had been off the hook and all he could hear was children playing the piano and laughing. It was my younger brother and I.  He was a friend of the family and his daughter was my best friend at the time and they all got a kick out of hearing this about us.  Those were the days of the party line so the whole party probably had heard us!

Christmas was so magical when I was a girl.  And there always seemed to be snow. We haven’t had a white Christmas for a few years.  Every year we would take a trip to town and visit the toy store called Veach’s.  It was the most wonderful toy store piled to the ceiling with all kinds of toys, dolls, trains, etc.  I remember one year looking at bicycles. I had learned to ride a bike that Summer when I was nine years old. I learned on one of my older brothers’ bikes coasting down the driveway in the barnyard.  I was hoping for a bike that year and I got one!  It was a blue Schwinn with padded seat and a place on the back for someone else to ride.  I rode that bike all the time up and down the road in front of our house. We lived in the country and there was very little traffic so I had the whole road to myself.  I pretended my bike was a horse galloping up and down.  I was only allowed to go so far.  A friend of mine lived only about a half mile from our house over the hill. If the hill hadn’t been there, we could have seen her house from ours, but even at that, I was not allowed to ride there except on special occasions. My sister lived about a quarter of a mile the other direction and I got to ride to her house. My sister was eleven years older than me and was married and already had a baby so I loved visiting her house.

My dream was to receive a horse for Christmas, Every year from the time I could remember, I asked for a horse.  I would dream of waking up Christmas morning and running out to the barn and seeing a beautiful horse in a stall just for me, but it never happened that way. What happened was that when I was about eleven, one of my older brothers, Fred, knew a man who had two horses for sale. One was a Clydesdale and the other was an Appalousa.  Fred told me if I had any money, he would put up some and buy the horses for me. So we went to the bank where I had a very small savings account and I took out money and Fred added his and we bought the horses.  They were delivered and I was so excited.  The Clydesdale we called Charlie and the Appalousa I named Tornado and he lived up to his name in many ways.  Tornado was a stallion when we got him and stallions have a temperament and you couldn’t trust him to be gentle so Daddy had a vet come and castrate him to calm him down. Otherwise I probably would not have been able to ride him. I rode Tornado bareback all that Summer and that Christmas I got a new saddle!  Another wonderful Christmas.

I love Christmas because it is the time to celebrate Christ’s birth.  We always had a nativity on the table. My daddy had made my mother one and it had a straw roof from straw in the barn.  The figures were made of some kind of material that would break if you dropped them, Mary had a crack on her head where someone had dropped her.  Baby Jesus lay in a bed of straw. A soft blue light glowed in the stable.  I loved looking at it and imaging the holy family having to stay in a stable. A newborn king, no less.  One Christmas after I had had our first little boy, our church did a live nativity and our baby was Baby Jesus. A teen-age girl carried him and I remember hoping she wouldn’t drop him!

I have so many wonderful memories of Christmas. Sometimes I wonder how I would celebrate if I was all alone.  I probably would not put up a big tree, but I know I would decorate and listen to the carols and read the Christmas story in the Bible.  It will come, whether we celebrate with a crowd or all alone and Jesus will always be the center of it all.  It really isn’t all about the gifts in the end.

I would love to get a Christmas picture with me and the dogs, but I’m not sure how they will co-operate.  So keep watch and see what happens.

How do you feel about the election? I still believe it is being stolen from our president.  Too many lies are being told by too many people and there are way too many discrepancies in the votes to believe Biden really got more votes than our president.  If is it stolen, we all should be afraid of a government that can do that to us. Even if you believe your guy won.  Just think about it. President Trump got eleven million more votes than he did last election, he got more votes than Obama did his second run for president and yet, Biden got more votes than them both. You got to really kid yourself if you believe this vote count was legal.

Here’s to Christmases past and to elections in the future. May we still have them.  Bye.

 

 

It’s a Beginning

I love to start quilts almost as much as I love to finish them.  I love every part of quilt making. The picking the pattern.  The choosing of fabrics. The cutting out of the quilt.  The piecing of the quilt.  And finally, the quilting or tying of the quilt.  It’s called a comforter when a quilt is tied. At least that is what my mother always told me.  It’s only called a quilt when the fabric, batting and backing are sewed together in tiny quilt stitches.

If you have ever made a quilt, you understand what I am talking about.  And once you make one, you almost always have to make another one and another one and another one.

Right now I am working on a certain quilt that I have made before called Grandmother’s Fancy.  I found the pattern in a quilt magazine I bought almost twenty years ago.

I use to buy this magazine all the time. I don’t know if it is still sold.  It always had some interesting stories about quilters and at the back it had several of the quilt patterns that were shown in the magazine.

As you can see, I wrote Grandmother’s Fancy on the front so I would know this particular pattern was in this particular magazine.  I have done that a lot through the years when I wanted to keep a pattern I found in a magazine.

And I write myself notes in the pages while I am working.  Sometimes I write something I have heard on the radio or some advertisement I am interested in. My quilt magazines became sort of diaries through the year.

This magazine was good about showing how to put each quilt together.  This may look hard to some, but it’s really an easy pattern.  I would love to make one for each of my grandchildren, but the ones I am making now are for our bed.  As it’s a king size I haven’t made very many quilts for it because it’s getting harder for me to quilt a big quilt on my home sewing machine.  I may have to hand quilt these.

This was the first quilt I made from this pattern.  I made it many years ago and it’s been used and washed several times and is beginning to get the vintage look I love in quilts.

It is on our guest bed in our guest bedroom.  We haven’t had too many guests to stay here for a while and the bedroom started to look like a storage room until this week when I put everything away and cleaned the room and made up the bed again.  I’m glad I did because I like how it looks.  Maybe now I will have guests again.

This is a king size version of the pattern.  I plan on finishing it this year.  It’s on the top of my list of quilts to finish. Because…….

I’ve made enough of the blocks to make yet another one.  One that will be more Spring like.  I really love making these blocks.

I still have a few more I want to make before I decide what fabric I want for the borders and sashing.  I’m thinking I’ll use some shirting material for it.  I’m reading a book right now about some people during the WWll times and one of the women in it is a seamstress and she said, “Textiles are a woman’s delight.”  I wholeheartedly agree with that statement.  I delight in textiles.

David took a week off for his birthday and we thought we might do something, but we haven’t done a darn thing except go out to eat a couple of times, but that was all right with both of us.  It’s been so cold all I want to do is stay in where it’s warm and work on quilts or knit and David has been working on our taxes and almost has them done.  I’m so glad he likes to do that because I would be lost if I had to do them.  I’d have to hire someone to do my taxes even though I actually took a class on taxes in college. A lot has changed since then.

We did go see our two youngest grandsons in their orchestra concert.  Children from all the elementary schools, middle schools and high schools in Bloomington joined together to put on the concert.  Each class had a song to play and at the end the whole group played together. It was awesome. The middle school group played a song from Star Wars and their bows were lit up and they turned down the lights and it was just wonderful.

This was his debut performance on his cello. Our youngest grandson.  He’s so cute and funny.

For some reason the picture is sideways, but that is his brother smiling. This is his second year of cello and I am proud to say he has signed up for orchestra in middle school next year.  I love that they are learning an instrument.  My biggest regret of my life, and I have very few regrets, is that when I had the chance to take piano lessons I refused to take them and my poor mother could not talk me into it.  Now, when I hear our church pianist play, and she is wonderful, I think to myself that could be me up there if I had listened to my mother.  I can pick a few songs out on the piano and can read music a little, but not like I could have if I had taken lessons.  I did take violin lessons when our boys took them.  I was in the same class with them at one time and I could play somewhat well, but I found that getting the time to practice was getting harder and harder and violin fell by the wayside.   I gave my violin away.  Now I wish I had it again.

David and me and the parents of our grandsons, our daughter and son-in-law.   Sara took piano for eight years and violin for a couple of years.  Jeremy plays the drums.   Out oldest son played cello in orchestra and our youngest son played the Bass.  I use to haul them to class every week, the bass bigger than our son until he grew into it.  They both were pretty good. I guess you could say we are a musical family.

What have you been up to?  Do you have any projects you are enjoying these Winter months?  Here’s to musical grandboys and quilts to made. Bye.

 

 

Remembering 2019

The end of the year is a time for remembering and looking forward.  While there were many blessings in the past year, I must admit it was not the best year I’ve ever had what with spending so much time in doctors’ offices and in the hospital. Having a pacemaker put in was not on the top of my list of fun things to do, but it was a last resort sort of thing so I did it.

But now that is all past and just  a memory as I look back on Christmas and the wonderful times we had with friends and family.

We had Thanksgiving with family and friends. This is our oldest son’s girlfriend’s son with his dog, Annie. Annie is so cute. I made her some scarves for Christmas.

My son and his girlfriend. They love Disney World and last year they had a season pass to it and were down there almost every week it seemed.

The tree was up with the help of two of our grandsons.

These two are growing up way too fast.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care.  I knit 24 pairs of stocking this year and I’ve already started for next year.   I just let everyone pick out the ones they like.

I was gifted this beautiful Christmas cactus. I saw one on Facebook that was one hundred years old and had been in the same family all that time. It was huge.  I’m not sure this one will make it that long, but I hope I can manage to keep it going until next year.

This was our front entry this year. I bought the cubby at an antique store and it held a lot of my smaller Santas and other paraphernalia.

My daddy made all the little wooden houses and the church years ago. He use to make them and sell them and they were quite popular.  I made the trees from a pattern I found on Ann Wood’s blog.  She’s a very talented and creative artist who provides free patterns as well as selling them on her blog.

Packages under the tree and I just love the way the sunlight comes in this window in the Winter.  This is the room I most often am in, cutting out quilts or knitting or just watching tv.  It’s not the warmest room in this old house though.

While hurrying to make gifts, wrap gifts and prepare for the holidays, I  sewed this pillow from a dish towel I bought in Nashville.  I don’t know why I always have the urge to sew something entirely not to do with Christmas when I’m right in the middle of the hustle and bustle, but I always do.  I think it’s my way of calming myself because sometimes the days can get hectic. I really tried this year to slow down, take it easy and just enjoy the real reason for the season.  I tried reading the entire book of Luke in the Bible. There are 24 chapters and if you read a chapter a day before Christmas, you’d get the full story of Jesus and why He was born and how He died for everyone.   I didn’t get it all read, but I’ve read it countless times before so I know the story.

This is the time of gray, cloudy days, but we have had some beautiful sunsets.  I can’t get a picture of just how beautiful this one was, but it was gorgeous.  This is our lone tree we have that was left after our neighbor cut down all the trees on his property. This one set right on the property line and I asked him not to cut this one down.  This makes me think of that one scene from Gone With the Wind where Scarlette and her father are talking about the land and Tara is in silhouette.

I did most of our shopping online this year and I think I found some very good presents for my loved ones.

David likes to play Santa.  He wears this hat at his workplace and all the children think he’s the real one.  True story. We were in line at Wal-mart and there was a little boy about three years old sitting in a cart in front of us and he was eyeing David up and down and then he blurted out, ” You’re not the real Santa Claus!”  His mother was so embarrassed, but David looked at him for a few seconds and then said, “No, I am not. I’m one of his helpers.”  Well, that little boy just kept starring at him.   It was so cute.  David gets a kick out of things like this.

He also likes to play Santa at our family Christmas gift giving.

He surprised me Christmas Eve with this….

Flowers that I used for a centerpiece on our table.

I love watching the grandkids opening their presents. The big hit this year were woolen hats with beards attached.

Oh, my.

Our daughter’s son thought she ought to wear one of the beards, soooo….

She did!  Everyone had fun with them.

He looks like he belongs to the group ZZ Top.  And guess what movie we are watching on tv.

Our granddaughter got a beret. She looks so cute in it.

This is an alarm clock that has a sonic boom sound when it goes off. It can also shake your bed. I bet this will make my grandson popular in his dorm at college next year!  Ha!

I always seem to get a chicken themed gift every year.  I don’t know why?!

So, Christmas is over for another year. Sometimes I wish it would last longer and that the days before were not so hectic.   I’m going to try to buy gifts throughout the year so that I won’t be scrambling for gifts a week before Christmas.  I believe Christmas has become way too commercialized and I want to get away from that and focus more on what it means.  It’s like no other day.

So the new year is here and already almost a week old.    We did some antiquing yesterday at one of my favorite antique stores.

We found this little buggy. David thinks it was for some rich little girl’s dolls at one time. Part of it is missing, but I thought it would be something I could decorate for Christmas next year. And it fits right in with our old house.

The little Radio flyer wagon behind my snowmen was another find.  This is my small collection of snowmen I put out after Christmas.

I found this little snowman at the antique store.

A friend gave me this Jim Shore snowman years ago and I love him.

I also found some red fabric at a booth where  the lady sells all things to do with quilting and sewing. I have found a lot of fabric at her booth.  I just completed a quilt with flannel backing from flannels I found in her booth and I’ll probably be back for more.

January brings seed catalogs. Even deep in Winter one can dream about the garden.

I’m thinking I want to try to grow pumpkins again.  My last try was a bust.

So many kinds to choose from. If I had a lot of acres, I’d plants lots of pumpkins.

So I hope the new year will be good to you.  I hope your dreams will come true and God will pour all His blessings on you and your household. Happy New Year!