Stitching Cuteness

One of the things I enjoy doing in my free time is stitching. I go to an Enrichment group twice a month, though it's mostly just two of us, sometimes three, who show up. Which is fine because we've become very good friends and sometimes we even just visit instead of stitch--oops, don't tell! Anyhow, I designed and made this pillow for my niece Holly, she just turned 11 on Dec 7th. I made it to match her room colors and bedspread. So I gave it to her for an early birthday present when I saw her at Thanksgiving and she loved it and hooray!--it matches really well and looks so cute in her room!! Thanks to my friends who #1 gave me encouragement and #2 helped me figure out how to sew it together. Sewing (like on a machine) isn't something I've ever done much of or well at when I tried and the machine I have was my grandmother's, so it is well built (meaning heavy) and I can't get it to do a zig-zag or anything but a straight stitch anymore.. (hint hint Santa). So the actual machine sewing of this pillow is what took the most amount of time in the whole process (that piping was hard to do! But now that it's done I'm proud of my accomplishment and now have to get working on another one!!

Time flies!!

It's almost Christmas, only 14 more days. How does the time go by so fast?? And as I get older the weeks and months just go by faster. I don't understand how it works, it just really does seem to be that way.
So this past weekend it was time to start getting the house all Christmasy. But in order to put up the tree the living room really needed to be cleaned up and rearranged to make room. So that spurred me on. The sewing machine has been in there for awhile and finally my pillows were done (I'll post pictures soon, they turned out so cute!) so Alli helped me get it all put away and one thing led to another... I have really disliked our sofa for quite some time, so I went and got a sofa cover at JC Penney. (They were 50% off and then I had a $15 off coupon, so although buying it cost $90 it was still a great deal!) Then every nook, shelf, and cranny got dusted and vacuumed and the sofa and entertainment center both got moved, which then means the rest of the furniture in there got moved too. Basically our living room furniture has been in the same configuration since we moved in July 2000, so rearranging is really a pretty big deal for me. I think I'm liking it though. The whole room needs a makeover in a bad way, but this will have to do for now. So that was most of my Saturday. Sunday evening Alli helped me get the Christmas boxes out and we put the tree up. Monday night we got the decorations on the tree and some of the other decor out in the room. Tuesday night we went to Rick's work Christmas party/dinner, and then last night we went to a BYU basketball game. So now it's Thursday night and my choices are to get the boxes all put back under the house or to blog.... Big choice, huh? Well, you can see what I chose. I'm not sure what my focus is here in blogland yet, but Rick's response when I told him I had set up and started a blog was "I hate when people do a blog but then don't write anything on it for weeks at a time." So I'm trying not to be one of "those" people. Not that he reads blogs about people and what they do; he reads blogs about subjects, like astronomy or aliens or the economy and smart stuff. We are quite different in many ways, blogging is just another one of them I guess.

My very first blog entry!

Well, I'm going to make the transition from anonymous blog stalker to real blogger here. My husband and daughter both were surprised that I'm doing this. But then I will be able to leave some comments, post pictures and maybe even figure out how to make links and enter contests and all sorts of other stuff I've seen everyone I've been stalking do... So wish me luck and leave me some comments and tips on how to do this (be kind!).