A Work in Progress

Have you heard about Small Business Saturday ?  I hadn't until I saw it on the website of my local quilt store.  I'm planning to support the economy a little there today.  I haven't bought any quilt fabric in over two months as I've been trying to use my considerable stash.  However, I need some backing fabric and if I can find what I need on the sale shelves, both the store and I will benefit from Small Business Saturday.

  Today is one of my favorite days of the year.  It's Black Friday and I'm not out shopping.  We live approximately three miles from the largest mall on the East Coast.  Said mall sits at the intersection of the PA Turnpike and two other major roads, one running north/south and the other running west. You can imagine the traffic.  We rarely venture out of our neighborhood on Black Friday.  Being "forced" to stay at home makes it feel like a snow day and I always get so much accomplished by staying in the house.  I'm looking forward to some extra stitching time and finally getting started on the exchange piece for my sampler guild's meeting on December 10. I'm a purist. I love Christmas, but not a single note of a holiday song or a Christmas decoration of any kind is allowed in my house until the day after Thanksgiving. We put the decorations up on the first Sunday in Advent and leave them up until Epiphany (January 6). I love the lights, ...

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you in the US!  May you have a wonderful time with family and friends and celebrate all your blessings.

Grace Mason Verse (over one) Lower left corner Grace Mason (Of Female Worth) is coming along. My hope was to finish this by the end of October, but as usual, I underestimated the amount of stitching and overestimated my stitching time.  I should be able to make some major progress on this over the long Thanksgiving weekend and I'm pushing for a finish by the end of the year. 

That's the big sigh you may have heard from me as I eased into the weekend.  This is the first weekend all fall that did not include traveling (can't really count the weekend of the snow storm as we were supposed to have gone to a cross country meet that Saturday).  My house is also breathing a sigh of relief since it's been cleaned and my husband is thankful that I actually cooked a meal tonight.  It's the little things, you know.  So now the dishes have been washed, the laundry has been folded and put away and I've even done some ironing.  Time to settle down at the sewing machine for a bit and make two more of these blocks.  Then I can assemble the twenty completed blocks into a top.  The pattern is Sweet Sixteen although I can't recall at the moment who designed it.  I got the fabrics in a kit awhile back and as I'm trying to use what's already in my stash, it seemed like a good candidate for  a leader/ender,  Exc...

I haven't abandoned blogland, but I've continued to be really busy at work and with my children.  I spent last Sunday on the road to visit my son at  his college (as if we haven't seen enough of him during cross country meets this fall) so we could discuss his next steps after graduation.  This past weekend, I went to my sampler guild meeting on Saturday morning and then headed to my daughter's college to hear her play in her jazz band concert  Saturday night.  Although she had a major paper due today, she took some time to have breakfast with me yesterday and we had a wonderful time talking about, among other things,  the possibility of her studying abroad next year.  The weather was lovely and the drive back went smoothly, but by the time I arrived home and took care of a few things here, we were out of of daylight.  Therefore, I don't have any pictures of my current work.  I've been plugging away on Grace Mason and binding quilts, so as...