Welcome to Winter!

 

Happy shortest-day-of-the-year, my friends! We're looking at cold temps and sunshine today before a big winter storm blows all of us out of the frozen water. Looking at the forecast, it looks as if we'll miss the worst of it. Nevertheless, the storm has freezing rain in store for us, if the weatherman can be believed. I'm just hoping it doesn't put the kibosh on our family get-together Christmas Eve. I'm on tap to make two desserts in the next couple of days, and wouldn't it be just terrible if Mike and I had to eat all of it? Perish the thought. I'll say more about my desserts as I make them. Only one is from a new recipe, but I always make an old standby to serve as the emergency back-up dessert, if necessary. One must always be prepared for dessert emergencies, especially on Christmas Eve.

We barely survived our trip into town yesterday, and I'm glad we've put that behind us. It was getting pretty crazy at the grocery store with still several days left. I pity those who have to wait until Friday to do their shopping for the weekend. We also ended up going to one of those little postal outlets, rather than the regular post office. There, I found just one person ahead of me. Fortunately, picking up bird seed was no problem at all.

When we got home, we both needed naps, and then I went to work in the sewing room. First, I finished off the second of the barn blocks. This one wasn't difficult, but it had a lot of little fiddly pieces. I'd lost my patience for it the day before.

Here are the two blocks I have for this quilt so far. There will be 12 in all.

Then I remembered I needed to fix 6 of the Shop Hop blocks I'd sewn together wrong. I'm doing them two at a time. It wasn't too bad...it took about 15 minutes to do these two. Recall that I'd sewn the gray strips on the sides with the two different widths reversed. I'll do two more today and two tomorrow, and then I can forget that ever happened.

When those were finished, I turned my attention to the fourth section of the Purrfectly Pieced quilt. This is the section I'll be working on today.

Each section of the larger quilt can be made as a stand-alone wall hanging or doll quilt. This one is a little more involved than the ones I've done so far.

Section 4 includes some applique and some hand-stitching. The original quilt was created to be done in wool. I'm using scraps from my stash. Yesterday I did all the cutting, and now I'm ready to start sewing it together.

I'm approximating the fabrics used in the original quilt. One of the fabrics was to be white with polka dots. When I found that white with the black paw prints, I knew I'd chosen wisely.

I expect this will take me most of my sewing day. What I don't spend on the piecing, I'll spend on top-stitching the applique and hand-stitching the "Home Sweet Home" portion. With the cutting finished, I can just start having fun with the sewing.

It's a laundry day, and there is one other housekeeping chore. I've played all my word games this morning, and I'm ready for breakfast. I hope you enjoy your first day of Winter. Get ready for some cold weather. Stay safe and warm. If all else fails, I suggest Spanish Coffees.

It won't do much to warm your house, but it will warm your innards.