the mid-December gasp

So, erm... yeah.
It's the middle of December. Life is flying by as fast as usual.

Not much else to say, really. I'm living in denial, but making Christmas presents anyhow, just in case the Christmas fairies forget to show up at my house in the next couple of days. The next thing I need to do is to start planning Christmas dinner, since apparently it'll be happening at my house this year...

a glorious sunrise in my rear-view mirror.

frosting.

the perpetually-blooming rosebush.

Ellie's ballet recital.

November: redux

It's time for my monthly gasp... how is it the end of November already?????
There... got that over with.

Here's what I've been up to:

knitting... That's the big one. I signed up for NaKniSweMo... the goal being to knit 50,000 stitches in the month of November. I succeeded. Big time. Like a boss. (yikes! I've been hanging out with my teenagers too much, I think!)

Both of these cardigans are built upon the same basic model... top-down, contiguous (meaning that they look like set-in sleeves, but they're knit all in one piece), and seamless. Ellie is wearing the Tomboy Cardigan, slightly modified, and mine is the Romy Cardigan (with added cabling).

This is a huge accomplishment for me... til now, it's taken me upwards of 6 months to complete an adult-sized sweater.

being sick... not an illness in sight all year (it feels like), and suddenly this month I come down with a two-day fever-thing followed by a UTI. Not fun. On the bright side, though, it did allow me to indulge in the following:

reading... all of the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cromwell. All. of. them. That would be 24 books (including 3 short stories). Why yes, I am a fast reader. Why do you ask?

schooling... it is such a joy to teach a child who has realized that things are easier and more fun if you choose to be cheerful about them. One day, Ellie just decided to enjoy copywork... something that she'd complained bitterly about every single day. Now she loves it. And it was her own decision. She's amazing!!

pinteresting... filling up my pin boards like nobody's business. And actually doing stuff, too. I love that place.

enjoying... a lot of lovely weather. Yes, we've had a lot of rain, and even a storm and some snow, but we've also been blessed with a lot of sunshine. I'm grateful for it.

Ellie and I went for a walk, only to find the path ending abruptly in a small lake... proof that we have indeed had lots of rain to go along with the sunshine.

cooking... I seem to have gotten a bit of my kitchen mojo back again. For a while there I just couldn't think of anything to make. But lately, there's been lots of good things appearing on the table... some of it in my own pottery dishes, too!!

apple-almond pudding in my pie plate.

planning for next month... Christmas, naturally. A thing that, frankly, fills me with a bit of dread. I dislike shopping... I prefer being solitary to attending large gatherings of people... Christmas as it is commonly practiced is not my cup of tea. But I do like to make my family happy, so I do what needs to be done, and try to make it a joyful occasion.  (I feel like such a curmudgeon, even putting this out in type... oh well.)

So, that's November. On to the next month...

(linking up to Megan at SortaCrunchy)

iron craft 1

You may have noticed a new button on the side of my blog... I've joined Iron Craft - a weekly themed crafting challenge. This week is all about lights.

I made a knit-and-felted tealight holder... goes without saying that this one (as with all lighted candles) should not be left unattended; however, wool is naturally flame-resistant - it's actually self-extinguishing. Cool, hey?

The combination of knit and flame is the perfect antidote to the wet cold gloom outside my windows.

in which the sewing room still didn't get cleaned up

Does that bear any resemblance to the stack of fabric in yesterday's post?
I spent a few hours today chopping and stitching it all into Crazy Nine-Patch blocks a la Oh, Fransson!

27 different fabrics. 27 crazy blocks. Fastest quilt top assembly in the history of my sewing machine.

Only problem is, I can't baste it until I've finished with the other quilt I started... all my pins are in use.

Eh, well. I did say this was a year for action, didn't I? Time to get quilting!

doing stuff

Have you ever, on facing a task that looks overwhelmingly huge, just thrown up your hands, turned around and walked out of the room?

That would be me today.

Three times.

At least.

I had decided that my first 'action' of the year would be to tidy up my sewing room. I tend not to put things away when I'm in the middle of a project, and with Christmas just over, there's a lot of project detritus lying around in that room just now.

It's pretty bad.

So finally this evening I managed to convince myself to just get started on it. I folded fabric bits, sorted them out by colour into their stacks, put the little bitty scraps in their basket, threw out garbage, ate chocolate (hey! it couldn't just be left lying around, now, could it?), put tools back in their spots, started cutting out squares for a new quilt...

Wait... what???

Ummm, yeah. I did.

Oops.

busy busy busy

I didn't realize that adding one extra thing to my life was going to make me feel so very frantically busy! It seems that homeschooling a kindergartener, even though it's simple and joyful, has messed with my routines enough that I feel like I'm always behind. And, it has been a busy week.

• Monday... school prep for the week (because I put it off all weekend - my own fault!), choir
• Tuesday... coffee and picture-viewing with the in-laws
• Wednesday... drama rehearsal
• Thursday... stayed up all night keeping Abby up for a sleep-deprived EEG
• Friday... recovery from Thursday night. I'm just too old to go without sleep!!

On the plus side, though, apparently sewing machines do not need to be classified as heavy machinery, and can be used by the half-asleep and brain-dead.

I squeaked under my self-imposed deadline, and finished Ellie's Feliz dress.

This one, I'd say, is not for the faint-of-heart. The instructions are fairly vague in spots, and some of the pattern pieces are lacking in markings.

The embellishments are all left to the discretion of the maker - no instructions are given for them. I put in three rows of ruffles on the back section, all with ribbon trim to hide the raw edges. I also made a flower pocket on the front - something I'd seen long ago on some blog somewhere. I think I'd still like to put a few more decorations on the front of the dress - it's looking a little bare in comparison to the riot of colour on the back!

I love how it turned out, though, and (more importantly) so does Ellie. I'll definitely be making more of these... after I try all the other patterns in the book ;)