Blowin' a Gale Outside!!

I better batten down the hatches here tonight and make sure I have a good supply of candles on hand. The wind is blowin' a gale tonight! No rain, no snow (thankfully) but the wind is sooooooo high! How high you say? Well I'm sitting here and I can feel my chair shake from the wind! But then wind is a part of living here on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! I'm just glad there is no snow or we would be snow bound for days!!!

I am happy to report that all my Christmas gifts are completed! wooo hoooooooooooooo!!! This is the first time this has ever happened. Usually I keep telling myself I will start my gifts earlier and still I manage to find myself completing the last of a gift Christmas Eve. One year I even found myself wrapping a gift in the back seat of the car on the way to my friend's house only to have the gift opened 10 minutes later! Now I am thinking okay.. surely I am forgetting something or someone and need to rush at making another gift! NOPE!! I am in shock and two weeks from Christmas Eve too!!!

So Trevor decided to get me feeling like I need to have SOMETHING finished by Christmas so he suggested we have a new set of placemats made for Christmas! He would like something with stripes in it. Since I have no stripe fabric in my stash, we will be heading to the fabric shops this weekend to find a funky cool stripe for his placemats.

In the meantime, I continued to work on my crumb quilt again. I managed to get a few more rows completed Sunday night. I also got back at my Victorian Grandmother's Garden hand stitched project. I should have block #7 of 25 completed by tonight!

I also had two other people at work ask if I had any more tree skirts to sell. I sold out of what I had made, but realized I still had two more tops not layered or quilted. So I will take them out and work on them over the weekend. I hope to complete them by next week. Hopefully they will still want them by then :) Otherwise, I will just hang on to them until next year.

I managed to get another batch of Christmas jam made last night. I now have 16 jars of jam. I am thinking I might want to make another batch, as my list is growing. I plan to get down to Michaels in the next few days to hunt for some nice organza ribbons to decorate my jam jars. Also if time permits I will make up my tags. I am also going to attempt making biscotti this year. My Mum loves biscotti and I would love to put some in her stocking this year. hmmm I'm starting to think its a good thing that my gifts are made.. my list of things to do before Christmas is starting to grow more and more LOL.

Last night I also made up a big carrot cake for the annual Christmas potluck at work. We have over 250 employees and needless to say there is ALOT of food. I remember seeing it for the first time last year and oooooooh the spread of food. The cake turned out really nice. I am just waiting now for the cream cheese to come to room temperature and then I will make the cream cheese frosting. When it is done and frosted, I will take a photo and post here with the recipe. This is one of Mum's recipes and its a delicious one too!

Well I should post this now (sorry no photos tonight) I want to make sure this post goes through just in case the power does go. I will post here again soon!

Also for those of you who were interested in what pattern I used for the Turtle pincushion, I will post that soon too. I will go look for that pattern again as I put it away with the rest of my patterns. I do know it is either a Simplicity or a Butterrick pattern.

Happy Quilting!

Quiltingly Yours
Andrea