Best of 2023

Good morning, my friends. Hopefully, everyone has recovered from Christmas festivities. We had a lovely holiday here, and I hope you did too. Today begins one of my favorite linky parties of the year. My thanks go to Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Designs for hosting this party for the past nine years. Thanks, Cheryl!

It's been a good year, all-in-all. We had a good mix of staying-at-home and traveling. Our biggest trip of the year saw us ATVing in Colorado and Utah with lots of sight-seeing along the way. There was also plenty of time for sewing and relaxation. Our vegetable garden was fairly productive, although we were plagued by critters this year. It's caused us to become more creative with our critter-discouraging tactics for the next time around. 

In choosing these posts to re-share, I went through the list of comments on my dashboard and selected the ones that generated the most "conversation."

1. Looking way back to February 1st, it was the reveal for my latest art quilt for The Endeavourers. The prompt for the challenge was "Portrait." I selected this image of my husband, taken while on a fly-fishing trip in Idaho. 

This was the resulting quilt I call "Catch and Release."

You can read the reveal post right here.

2. The next reveal was for a quilt I call "Full Circle." It was another art quilt for The Endeavourers. The prompt for this quilt was "Maps." My quilt ended up as an "autobiography in six quilt blocks," as I "mind-mapped" my years growing up as a Marine Corps brat. You can read about my quilt right here. The "art" in this art quilt was really in the quilted line drawings representing unique memories I have of each place my family called home.

3.  When the flowers are blooming in our neck of the woods, I'm often posting pictures of the latest blooms. I was just beginning an art quilt when I wrote this post "We're All in our Places, " and it was our 48th wedding anniversary. You can see the flowers and read about a young couple just getting started right here.

4. One of my favorite art quilts was this one I call "Fantasticat." Prompt for this quilt was "Collage." Mine was created from an illustration by a NYTimes artist and illustrator, Angie Wang, who graciously gave her permission for me to render her art into fabric. You can read my reveal post right here.

5. Finally, this post about a scary story with a happy ending when one of our kitties went missing. We ended up finding Miss Sadie in the end, but we had several anxious hours trying to locate her. You can read about Curiosity and the Cat right here.

And this gives me an opportunity to thank all my readers and followers for supporting another year of my incessant prattle. I'm hoping we can all meet up here again next year to talk about all the good things to come. Please stay healthy and let's make the coming year the best year ever.