Merry Christmas

 I hope everyone is warm and safe!  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!!

I Like #283

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

We're getting clost to Christmas and I'm slowly either wrapping up pre-holiday things or just admitting they're going to turn into post-holiday things.

My friend Brett and I went to look at Christmas lights again this past weekend and this is a picture of one of my favorite lit trees at the local Methodist church.

The pups are doing lots of snoozing and stretching and cuddling just as much as ever!  Spooky did destroy a couch cushion though.  On Sunday I went in the evening to our church's children's Christmas pageant (which was wonderful), and was only gone an hour so I figured it would be ok not to remove the couch cushions, but that was a mistake!

I love my Christmas cacti, they provide such a wonderful shot of color, and excitingly (and weirdly), I have one that has both red and pink flowers this year!

One exciting task I got finished this week was mending a hand knit sock Spooky had partially eaten,  I love my hand knit socks and I'm always glad to be able to rescue them.

And of course today starts the arctic storm blast.  We had a little tiny bit of snow overnight but mostly it's just very very cold.  It was 7 degrees (F) as I was driving to work which is very cold for our area and I think it's supposed to hover around 5 for most of the day.  Very very windy, but luckily not much precipitation so the roads are ok.

Hoping you are all staying warm and indoors!  For more things to like, head over to LeeAnna's!

I Like #282

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  I was still sick for the first part of this week but luckily I'm feeling better now.  

The most exciting thing to love this week was our annual Advent service of Lessons and Carols at church.  It's a service of alternating bible lessons and choral music that walks through all the advent lessons about the coming of the Messiah.  Our (small but mighty) choir sings several choral anthems and hymns every year for it, and it's a wonderful part of Advent for me.  You can currently watch it on our church youtube channel here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1jXWvAwqKA&t=21s

At the beginning (before the video part of the recording starts, you can hear our church's recently reconstituted handbell choir. I love playing handbells, even though we're all a bit rusty.

I'm currently loving my new insulated water bottle-  it was an early Christmas gift from a good friend and as a dog person, she knew I'd love it! 

It's been chilly and very rainy and grey outside which isn't too nice, but inside my Christmas cactus is bringing a wonderful burst of color.

And of course I love the pups.  They've been especially snuggly this week.

A short list this week since I don't have too many pictures, but I'm loving the Advent season as usual, especially now that I feel better.  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #281

 I've been sick most of this week,  not COVID, but some sort of fall crud that's really been a pain in the neck.  So just a short post today.

Last Friday, before I got sick, my friend Brett and I drove down to Chickasha OK to see the lights.  They have one of the best holiday light displays in the states.  It was really great, I love Christmas lights.  I didn't take that many pictures, but here are a few.  I especially loved that snowflake made of scissors!

On Saturday I made a bunch of origami gift boxes out of old calendar pages,  I love being able to reuse the great pictures.

And I'll leave you with a picture of my snuggly pups.

Hope you're all having an ok week! Visit LeeAnna's for more from our group.

I Like #280

 Welcome to another week of  things to like!  We're celebrating advent now which is one of my favorite times of year, but last week of course was Thanksgiving.  I got to go see my family and after a variety of snafus it was a lovely weekend.

My parents' house got ~4-5" of snow on Thanksgiving day which was beautiful and my dad drove us back up into the National Forest to get Christmas trees the next day.  It was gorgeous.  My uncle and cousin and I hiked up the mountain to pick trees for me, his family, and my parents.

While hiking in the forst with my parents the next day we cam across these fantastic dried pods!  I know they're probably weeds, but I thought they were so cool! I pulled them out of the snow and took them home with me.  Such amazing structures!

Spooky and Blue went to New Mexico with me, and they had fun running around in the snow, but the doggy highlight of the trip was meeting my parents' new puppy Quark.  He's definitely a handful but so adorable!  He's still very little and my dogs were very bouncy (Spooky scared him at the beginning) so we're going to re-introduce them again at Christmas.

Upon returning home I got to enjoy decorating my house for Christmas which I love.  I've gotten a small tree the last few years and have too many handmade ornaments so I hung a few from my houseplants this year!  Unfortunately the tree still has to be surrounded by the doggy fence since Spooky would eat all the ornaments if permitted.

The outside trees here are just gorgeous right now too- I love all the color.  Mostly bright reds around campus.

Lee Anna's prompt for this week was what was our favorite or traditional holiday movie or tv show.  One of my favorites from childhood is the 1961 Babes in Toyland, which I think is probably considered a classic.

I also have always been attached to the early 90s version of Good King Wenceslas starring Jonathan Brandis.  When I was a teenages I thought he was super cute.  That one is harder to find now.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving and is having seasonable but not excessive weather!  For more things to like click over to LeeAnna's!

I Like #279

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

I'm in the earliest stages of figuring out how to migrate my blog over to run through my squarespace website, I'm so aggravated by not getting emails when kind people leave me comments.  It may take a little while, but stay tuned for that.

It's been a challenging few days here, late last week my parents suddenly and unexpectedly lost their beloved dog Jordy.  He was only 8, and evidently had an aggresive and unknown spleen cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.  He was the best good sweet friendly boy.  So very attached to my dad, he followed him around everywhere.  He loved to roll in all the smelly stuff in the forest and stayed right with you while hiking.  It was so tough on my parents to lose him, especially after already losing their dog Shooter a few months ago.

A week or so ago (before losing Jordy) my parents had rescued a stray puppy they found while hiking, but they weren't in the place for a new puppy so they took him to the local shelter. After Jordy passed, they felt like maybe the puppy was meant to come be with them, so they went and adopted him.  He's named Quark and is super adorable.  Here he is curled up with my parents' other dog Swatch.

Unfortunately, after only a few days he came down with Parvo.  Everyone has fallen deeply in love with him, and this just feels like one more emotional blow.  He's in the vet hospital and my dad is good friends with the vet and staff so we know he is receiving excellent care, but Parvo is hard on puppies, so we are all just praying he makes it through.

My puppies are fine, and they went and got extra parvo (DHPP) boosters yesterday since we are headed to my parents's place next week.

We have had several nights with hard freeze starting with last Friday night, so on Friday morning I went out and cut all the flowers that were left in my garden.  One last hurrah.

I'm so glad I cut everything because by Saturday morning this is what the garden looked like.  I'll need to do some garden cleanup at some point but so far I'm just enjoying the flowers inside.

Some good things this week amid the stress.

On Saturday night my friends and I went out to eat at a restaurant that's inside the lobby of this gorgeous historic art deco skyscraper in downtown OKC.  I'd never been in there before and it was just beautiful.  So many beautiful architectural details, I'd have liked to just wander around taking pictures.

Then yesterday I made a batch of red chile sauce in preparation for a winter's worth of posole-making.  I even managed not to get chile in my eyes.  The whole house smelled lovely while the chile pods were cooking.

I also blogged about a new quilt this week whose theme is trying to stay grateful.  Feels timely.  Read more about it here.

Thanksgiving is coming next week, and we're all just hoping and praying that Quark gets better.  

Click over to LeeAnna's to join the conversation, this community she's created is definitely something I'm always grateful for!

New Quilt-Grateful

My blogging catch up continues!  Last week I blogged about my two ice quilts which I actuall made and finished this summer/early fall.  More recently I decided I wanted to try to make a piece for the SAQA call for entry called Minimalism.  I'm not exactly a minimalist but I'd had this idea for a white quilt with intertwined rainbow ribbons in my brain for a while and it seemed like the time to try it.  I'd never really been sure how I'd make it, whether I'd piece or applique something, but I decided after doing this yarn-covered Alleluia Alleluia piece earlier in the year that I would do it using couched yarn. 

I started with a blue fabric/batting sandwich and first couched down all the rainbow ribbons using stash yarn.  

My goal had been to use all stash stuff for this project, but I decided that I should have one color of white yarn for the background and since the quilt is fairly big, I did buy a new skein of inexpensive white acrylic yarn.  I started filling in the background- you can see below that I just sort of meandered around couching down the white yarn until the entire piece was covered.  

There are letters in the white yarn, it says "I will be grateful for today."  In the picture below you can see the word today at the end, but the words are very subtle and hidden in the final piece because they're couched in the same color as the rest of the background.  I think it's a good mantra, although I'm not always that good at remembering it.

This happy guy joined me for one of my marathon saturday quilting/couching sessions!

After finishing the white couching, I went back and put down another layer over many of the colored ribbons since some of them had gotten a bit over-run by the white and were receding into the background.

It was a hard quilt to photograph with all that white, but here are a few detail shots of the final thing.  I enjoyed using different colors of top thread to couch down the white yarn so there are some subtle variations in color across the background. 

It took quite a while to fill in the entire quilt with courched yarn, but I find quilting to be very calming and meditative, and I enjoyed the process a lot.  I love the texture that comes from the yarn!

Here's the final piece, it's 48" wide x 31" high.  I have no idea whether it will get into the show, but I'm pleased with it and very much enjoyed the process.