It's Almost Christmas Already--Happy Holidays!

Here I am, catching up once again!  It has been a very busy month and I've meant a hundred times to get a post together.  Better late than never, I hope. 

Our quilt holiday meeting on December 8 was a lot of fun.  We had a potluck dinner, a drawing for gift cards, a Dirty Santa gift exchange game, the results of the crayon challenge, a fat quarter game, details of next month's ugly fabric challenge, show and share, and preview of a round robin that anyone could join.  My crayon challenge project turned out well, I thought.  My crayon colors were gold and yellow-green:

The colors are a bit off in this photo as the gold is much more gold in person.  The little trees were a bit frustrating to make at first, as I kept cutting them too wide at the base.  But I got the hang of it after about 6 of them :)  This runner is less than 24 inches wide so these are very small trees.  It's displayed on my coffee table for the season.

I won these great Gingher scissors in the gift bag exchange. We drew numbers and in turn picked a bag or wrapped gift at random from a table.  There was Dirty Santa stealing and my sister Kathy ended up with the most popular gift of the night, an Ott light, as only two steals were allowed.  These fat quarters came home with me in the game where we stood in a circle and passed the fat quarters to the next person every time the word "THE" was said in the "A visits from St. Nick" story being read.  Fun!  Next month's challenge is an ugly fabric one.  And boy, it is ugly.

Hideous shoes in hideous colors.  We are to make one 12.5" block--keeping the modern aesthetic in mind.  It's going to be tough!

Here's a nighttime shot of our tree this year.  I bought a new tree topper that is a reasonable facsimile of an expensive Capiz shell star.  Erica and I had quite a time with putting on the lights.  It took two store visits and two days to get all the lights we needed and then ON the tree.  We bought new LED ones this year and they look fine.  I can't seem to be able to stop buying new ornaments!  One day we may need that 9 foot tree Erica never stops asking for :)

Here's Lucy in her nest of tissue paper as we unwrapped the ornaments.  She loved it.

My early Christmas present to myself was swapped with my husband's early Christmas gift to himself, so we are both down one present to buy .  I bought him new pickups for his guitar :)  This tower of 40 fat quarters was jammed into a priority envelope, amazingly enough. Lots of yummy prints in this Minnick & Simpson collection.  With the great sale from Green Fairy Quilts, each fat quarter cost about $2.10.  Score!

Cove gets a handmade ornament from Mimi tomorrow.  I tried to make it more modern by doing a "negative space" version of the cross-stitch alphabet letters.  This stocking is about 6-7 inches long and I'm pretty pleased with it.   Here's the little devil standing alone for a number of seconds at 9.5 months (his mama helped him stand up).  He'll be 10 months at Christmas.
 

Still on the to-do list are the Holiday Newsletter with photo (which we haven't had taken yet), more shopping, wrapping, and all the celebrating!  I'll be working Monday and Tuesday but then won't have to work until the 29th.  Hope you are all enjoying the festive times and family gatherings.  Happy Holidays!