No Nap Crafts

Donovan arrived Thursday morning, ate a quick breakfast and promptly fell back asleep on Pop’s chest.

Jac spent Wednesday night here and slept in til 10 am.(yay!)

So the question became how to entertain a toddler and a big girl (Jac insists she’s not a little kid anymore) when they would normally be taking a nap?

We started with dinosaur play-doh  - good for 1.5+ hours of play-together fun -

while I cut pretty paper 

and gathered glue sticks

for our first try at Christmas garland. 

Donovan went back to his dinosaurs almost immediately, 

Leia and Jac got bored fairly quickly - 

Jac isn’t a big fan of anything that gets her hands dirty - 

but Leanne - my crafty girl - kept going and going until she had a huge, gorgeous chain. . . that she promptly took home with her. Wonder if I can talk her into making another one for our house . . .

Frosty

Jackie had more fun decorating herself than the tree. 

Early Finish

With the exception of one gift card, all our Christmas shopping is done.

I’m pretty sure this is the earliest we have ever finished. (One year we did all the shopping on December 23. It wasn’t pretty.)

My plan was to start wrapping next weekend . . . but I started unboxing, and checking gifts off the list . . . and discovered that all but four three items are already here . . .

Six hours of TV watching later, everything is wrapped, ribboned and ready to go. 

Last year we came up with a evil genius idea for what to do with the wrapped goodies. With two curious toddlers, two nosy pre-teens and a cat that eats (and barfs) ribbons, they can’t be under the tree. So, high on top of the bookshelf they go, where the grandkids can see but not touch. Win win!

Swimming With The Sharks

Another round of swimming with the sharks. 

Jac tried to teach Donovan to hold his breath, but he just laughed. 

I love watching these two play. So much imagination and fun.

Merry Early Christmas

It’s been a long year of watching movies at home instead of in a theater. 2021 doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better, so hubby and I decided to treat ourselves to an early Christmas present. 

A 65” LG OLED 4K TV. 

We opted for Best Buy’s professional installation and that turned out to be a very good decision. The TV is a glass screen no thicker than a pane of window glass. Beautiful to look at but easily damaged. Hubby helped get it out of the box and on to the cabinet to the installer’s steady chant of, “don’t bend it, don’t bend it.” 

The original plan was to remodel the shelving unit once we saw the TV in place. I’d like to have the TV set back a little further, both for aesthetics and safety, but I’m not sure it’s worth shifting the TV around. Then again, hubby is braver than me, so I may wake up one morning to a finished job. Or a lot of swearing. 

Thankful

Donovan: A chicken!

Jac: No, Donvey. It has a hat so it’s a turkey. 

We are thankful for all our grandkids, who make us laugh and keep us on our toes. 

Happy Thanksgiving from our home to yours!

Playdoh and Pianos

We’ve had all four grand-darlings all day, every day this week and keeping them entertained has been fun. 

Today we fell back on the tried and true - 

playdoh! 

Easy, creative and fun. 

There’s a reason it’s been a crowd pleaser since 1955.  

Leia wasn’t feelin’ the ‘doh, so she provided musical entertainment. 

Schools going online for so long ended her piano lessons but she still likes to plink around. 

And once she was done, Leanne and the littles demanded equal time, 

 Leia took these shots

which was noisy loud great until Jac decided she need “more light” and I caught her just as she started falling.

 Watching the scary part of Mulan (the animated version) while sharing Grandma’s lap

There’s a reason my hair is turning pandemic gray.  

Snow Globes and Christmas Carols

I usually wait until after Thanksgiving to break out the holiday music, but 2020 has been so awful weird I’m starting Christmas early. 

And with the gift quilts done and gone, it’s time to make snow globes for our house*.

I’m using this pattern as my guide. 

I struggle with keeping snowballed blocks square,

so I’m making mine bigger - starting with 5” fussy cut squares -

and trimming the finished block down to the required 4.5”. 

I’m also using the tried and true - but much slower - method of drawing a line corner-to-corner on each snowball before attaching it. 

Whenever I think how much faster it would be to skip this part, I remind myself how much NOT FUN it is to rip and resew. ‘Cause that’s definitely what I’d end up doing.

If my math is correct (always questionable), I need 72 globes for a throw size quilt. 

 

As of tonight, I have 40 top sections sewn and an additional 24 cut and ready to snowball tomorrow. 

I’ve been planning - and collecting fabric - for this quilt for the past 2 or 3 years. So excited to see it come together at last.

* This is my quilt guild’s Front Porch Holiday Quilt Show challenge. Photos are due December 1. Can you guess what I’ll be doing all of Thanksgiving weekend??? 

Forgotten Quilt

I missed one! 

 “The Thin Blue Line”

I started counting pandemic quilts and realized I’d never posted this one. 

I started it in early January as part of my quilt guild’s “The 3 T’s” challenge, planning to gift it to a friend afterward. 

Completed projects were due in March, just as COVID hit and guild meetings - and the challenge - were postponed indefinitely.

The required “3 T’s” were: use a technique new to you and 2 different types of embellishment.

I chose trapunto, behind the star, for the technique, 

and my embellishments were glued-on crystals (symbolizing fireworks)

and gold embroidery (for the gold braid on honor guard uniforms and flag stands).

I was well into my very square project when I was reminded that the finished hanging had to be rectangular, with a perimeter no larger than 120”. Sometimes last minute surprises aren’t a bad thing - I like this a lot better with the added blue line. 

The challenge was completed in August, during the Guild’s Zoom meeting, and I gave this to Wenona for her birthday in November. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.