HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
We were up early to pull together our food for our usual brunch on NEW YEAR’s DAY (1/1):
-egg casserole with broccoli, cheese, onions
-and sausage
-covered with 20 eggs!
-and cinnamon rolls
We had a small crowd, but it was very conducive to lots of talking….
-Ginny, Chuck, Connie, Joann, Carol & Dixie
-Edee
-Jim & Ann Mary
and we had an unexpected, but totally welcome guest:
-Dennis & Sue
Dennis has been battling serious health issues, and it was absolutely lovely to see him!
My honey went to a matinee with Larry in the afternoon…and I took a TWO HOUR nap!
We had more champagne and leftovers for dinner…and watched a bunch of cooking shows in the evening.
I think I mentioned that BG purchased a long arm…..they had to knock down a wall in their house to fit it in…but everything is a “GO” now…and she had it working…practicing on some dog beds:
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Thursday (1/2) was all about quilting…tons of wonderful food and lots of great show and tell:
I was home around 3 PM and spent time putting away tons of stuff in my sewing room before figuring out what to work on next.
And Leila has her first finish for 2025:
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I spent 2 hours on Friday morning (1/3) getting out a blog, before I decided to pull together my longarm stats for 2024. I did a total of 76 quilts (still more than the 1 per week which remains my goal!) I did 1 Beds=Dreams quilt:
4 charity for others (for example, I generally do several QoV’s for Scrap Happy Quilters, for which I don’t charge), 57 customer quilts,
12 dialysis quilts (some are not yet bound):
and 2 quilts we kept (which were the 2 tablecloths I did for our kitchen table when it is expanded:
For the first time in a long time…I have 4 quilts I quilted in 2024, that were not bound by the end of the year :~(. Hopefully you will be seeing those completed quilts by the end of January.
I still remain thrilled and humbled by what ‘’owning a longarm’’ has done for my charitable endeavors.
Since I got my first longarm, I have completed:
37 quilts for Beds=Dreams
62 quilts for Clinton School in Lancaster
65 quilts for dialysis patients
10 prayers & squares quilts
And an as yet uncounted number of Quilts of Valor
I remain thrilled when I hear of a need, and can come home….whip out a quilt (relatively speaking :~), get it quilted and bound, and deliver it to someone who needs it. At the end of last year, it was a receptionist at a doctor’s office who was battling some type of cancer….this year it is a fellow patient at my chiropractor’s office (who I found out is on dialysis) where I will (hopefully) be taking the completed purple quilt on Tuesday (once I get it bound this weekend).
I read Jenny Doan’s autobiography (you know…from Missouri Star) and I was thrilled to finally have a label….I am not an art quilter….I’m not a quilt show quilter….I am a utility quilter. I make quilts that I hope people will use over and over again for comfort and to feel loved. I make quilts with simple patterns (beginner patterns really) and BIG blocks :~). My output has definitely slowed down over the years, as I’ve gotten more customers for the longarm and as I’ve gotten older and have less energy :~), but having more donation quilts completed in 2025 is definitely one of my goals! I still remember my mother sitting at night and knitting bandages while I was growing up...in addition to everything else she knit…yes bandages….white thread (it looked like thread and not yarn), 4 inches wide….inch after inch after inch. She would roll it up and pin it with a big safety pin to keep it out of the way. Lest you think I’m making this up….just GOOGLE ‘’knitting bandages for leprosy’’. I think she would be proud of me for carrying on her devotion to helping others.
With that all out of the way, I turned back to my sewing. Michael had put up the last 6 blocks on the Beds=Dreams quilt and said he had never seen a quilt that big on the design wall!! I started to sew it together:
While he headed out on errands (post office, CVS, eye doctor to pick up my now-empty cookie tins!)
I had everything sewn into rows by the time he was home in the later afternoon…just in time for another edition of IN THE KITCHEN WITH MICHAEL & DEB. This time the recipe was for rough puff pastry!
We had a little trouble getting a cohesive dough….which I chalked up to it being January, hence dry in the house (with the heat on) meaning the flour also had less moisture in it. A couple of mists of water and voila…it started to come together:
It’s all wrapped up and in the fridge:
until tomorrow night when we’ll see how it performs in ‘’homemade puffy things’’! We’ll probably be making savory palmieries….stay tuned.
It was still early (4 PM), so Michael did a few more chores around the house (filling the bird feeders, which he does every 3 days….and making sure our outside faucets were covered against the polar vortex that is supposed to be visiting us over the next 2 weeks) and I got my columns all pressed.
Is anyone else watching the new MATLOCK with Kathy Bates on regular network TV? She is EXCELLENT!!!
And 10 years ago....if you don't normally read the 10 years ago posts, please consider reading the first one...I think it has some good thoughts for everyone....
*** For the new year….instead of John, I call my bathroom Jim. It sounds so much better when I say I went to the Jim first thing in the morning. ***
*** Thinking back to when ‘’a new hip joint’’ meant someplace I wanted to go on Friday night. ***
So what in the world were those horseshoe looking quilts in the show and tell