100 POSTS

My last post was my 100th!! WooHoo!! It snuck up on me too. I want to do a give-a-way to celebrate. Check back soon to see what I come up with......

Pineapple fan shawl

Since this is made from a dark blue yarn Robbie didn't mind modeling it for me :) When he wrapped up in it he looked like a bat.




I made this one for my stepdaughter Jess up in Connecticut. Her birthday is January 5th and she will be 22 this year. I thought she might like a little something extra to snuggle up in while she is doing her school work on the computer. It gets mighty cold up there in January! Brrrr! Blue is her favorite color. If I make something in any other color she always complains that I should have made it in blue. I try to add different colors to her house, but she don't like it. Oh well, at least there are different shades of blue out there :)

This pattern is from Celtwich's site but unfortunately she has taken down the site due to problems with people selling it on Ebay. It was an old crochet pattern for a chair doily that I made using acrylic yarn instead.

Snow in Florida?

Of course way down here in SW Florida we don't normally get snow...

My deep freezer was getting too much ice in it so I had the kids scrape it out. I let Robbie make snowballs out of the fluffy stuff. There was also a bunch of ice chunks that he just tossed around the yard. The fenced yard in the background has three kids (baby,2,5) living there. They happen to be outside playing with Grandma when Robbie was making snowballs. He passed a few over to them to play with too. Their house is set much higher than our house (due to new code regulations) and the adults can stand near their backdoor and easily see over the fence. Actually, we can see them from the waist up from our side. Anywho....When I went out to check on Robbie, the Grandma was standing on the hill and laughing like crazy at silly Robbie playing in the snow.



This one is when Robbie was done playing with his "snow" and just started tossing it all around the back yard. Even down here in Florida we still wear gloves for a day or two a year so Robbie was well prepared to play in his "snow".




It was getting too slushy to make snowballs so Robbie went ahead and just dumped it all out.



I have seen some gorgeous pictures of snow on other people's blogs....but this is all I can offer for now.

Quick quilts and dish cloths

I decided this year that my extended family's gifts will all be handmade. I also wanted to use things I already had in the house.

I wanted to make quilts for my niece and nephew for Christmas. I knew I had limited time, so I went with some quick quilts.







This is the back of Bryant's (6) quilt. I dyed a white sheet with some blue dye I had in the house. I like how it looks like the sky on bright clear day.



This is of course the front. I found 2 of these panels at a thrift store. The other one will be for our couch. I just did a few stitches here and there for the quilting. I wanted to make sure he wouldn't outgrow the quilt to fast. This is twin size. He and his father are hunting and fishing outdoor type guys. I figured a jungle theme was something he could grow up with. At his age he changes his favorites so fast, it's hard to keep up.
(close-up of one circle)

Christine (13) has her room painted in this color blue with green circles all over. Her room has been this color for awhile now so I thought it would be safe to make a quilt in these colors. I made her a pillow case in September in the same colors.

I tried a little free motion quilting around the circles. It is definitely something I need more practice on, but it was actually very fun!



When I saw her pillowcase on her bed recently, I knew that the colors I chose for the pillowcase matched her room perfectly. Which was good because for the pillowcase, I used sheets from Walmart. That made it very easy to match the quilt to everything since I still had some sheets in my stash. I used a flat blue-ish twin sheet for the main background and cut out a bunch of different sized circles from a lime green sheet.



I used another white sheet and dyed it with Bryant's. This made Christine's lighter in color, but it still looks nice to me. Hers has more "clouds" and I like that effect.






For my sister and BIL I went with dish cloths. When she opened them she thought they were potholders. She was already gifted with potholders this year and didn't look too pleased. I'm not sure she really "got" the idea of dish cloths, but once she uses them I think she might get hooked like the rest of us who use them. My family thought I was crazy at first when I started to make them for our house. Now they have all come around because they work so great! They gently scrub the yucky pots and also clean the glasses without scratching them. I clean my floor with them too. They have many uses :)