and a happy New Year

I hope everybody had a great Christmas!  We did here because my oldest son and his girlfriend came to stay for a few days.  It feels good to have them home.

I did a little fabric cutting while they slept this morning.  I am probably not going to start sewing this one until I collect enough darks and lights, but I think I will have enough reds and aquas (I am doing aqua/blue/turqoise range instead of yellows in this pattern).  I seem to collect mostly mid-tones, so darks and lights are sparse in my stash.

Deer hunting success

WARNING:  This post contains pictures of a dead deer.  If you do not wish to see them, please don't scroll!

On Saturday, hubby and I went Christmas tree hunting - and we brought our bows with us ''just in case''.  We got way up high and got a nice Christmas tree.  Here it is pictured in the background propped up against our Suburban:

Our dog, Lucy (the St.Bernard/Mastiff in the forground) had such a good day playing with my nieces dog, Shadow (Chesepeake).  They played together like they have always been best friends!  I knew they would hit it off and was so glad they did :)

We hung around for a little while (in the rain!) and had a fire and let the dogs play.

We headed down about an hour or so before sunset and joked that we hoped a deer would jump out in front of us on the way home.   We did spot a pair of does on the way down, and I was able to get one!  My first deer harvest after 4 years hunting, whew!

pic below














Me (wearing my dads down jacket and his wool hunting pants!) and my harvest:

My shirt says ''I don't wear bows, I just shoot them'' - and it is now officially my lucky shirt :)

hoping for less rain

We came home from our deer hunting early the day before Thanksgiving because of the weather.  On the east side, it was snow - but when we got home to the west side (the WET side), it was rain.  The day after Thanksgiving, the river flooded.  Luckily, not deep enough to get to our house, but it was way too close for comfort.

Here is a pic of the water directly across the street that borders our property:

Tonight, it's expected to flood again.  And, it's raining pretty good right now, so I have no doubts.  They predict about the same elevation in the river for a crest, so I am hoping they predicted correct (or even over predicted) and we will be OK.  This is about as stressful as stressful gets.  I really dislike fall!  I am hoping for winter soon so that the precipitation is snow in the mountains instead of rain in the rivers!

vintage dresden plate blocks

I just realized that I don't think I shared the completed top from the vintage dresden plate blocks I acquired earlier this year.  I used some of the orange fabric that thankfully came with the blocks, and an orange/white DS Quilts print from JoAnn's.  I would really love to get this one quilted soon.  I am actually going to hang onto it for a wedding present for someone in the family.  Nobody is engaged, so I might be hanging onto it for a while, LOL.

I will bind it in orange, or mainly orange print, to finish it off (it will have to be something as close as I can get as there is none of the original orange left).

Moda Bake Shop: 9-Patch Posie quilt

I am excited to show you my latest Moda Bake Shop project.  This is my 9th project for MBS, and it is a 9-patch quilt made from ONE jelly roll (and solid yardage).

For the quilting, I used a 10'' circle template and centered it over the white blocks between the 9-patch flowers.  This intersected the centers of the 9-patches around the perimeter of the circle.  When all the circles were drawn out (with washable quilting marker), it created an orange-peel type design. 

 I was able to use my normal walking foot for this quilting and lengthened my stitching to 3.5.  I quilted on the diagonal in a wave, like pictured:

It took longer than I thought it would to do this quilting, but I love it!  The quilt is very soft and drapes very well with this loose quilting.

I also did a different type binding.  I added a faux piping and did a wider-than-normal binding.  I knew I wanted a solid to divide the outer border from the binding print, but I only had about 11 inches left of the navy blue.  So, I improvised.  I sewed a 2'' strip of the print on each side of a 1 1/4'' strip of the blue. (2'' print, 1 1/4'' solid, 2'' print)  Then, when I folded it in half, I had about a 3/8'' bit of blue showing on the folded edge.  I stitched it on the back first, then folded it around and stitched on the blue with blue thread close to the stitching line between the blue and the blue/aqua print.  I really like how it turned out and I think I'll do more of this type binding in the future!  The wider binding was MUCH easier to stitch down!  No wrangling to get it into place at all!