Does This Look Like Happy Holidays?

This is my youngest daughter. She will be 10 in February. With the busy-ness of our lives (holidays, home schooling 8 children, having a home business, and life in general), I have neglected making time to teach her to machine sew. Well, wait no more!

We make an "I Spy" quilt for all the new babies in our church and close friends. We need to have 5 ready for the next 6 months or so. I let my daughter lay out the squares on our little design wall (I cut them out). With just a little instruction, she already is sewing her rows together. We are using Bonnie's webbing the top method, so there are no misplaced blocks.

The top is 4-1/2" novelty blocks with 4-1/2" yellow tone on tone alternate blocks, forming a checkerboard. The quilts finish about 40" square. We just started doing this about 6 months ago.

This is definitely happy holidays for me! This is the 4th installment for the Carolina Crossroads quilt. I had to make my triangles a tad larger than the original instructions. Fortunately I checked after cutting just 5 squares. I keep reading it over, but I must have missed something.

This is an aerial shot of unit 4 on my ironing board down to the floor. I will be ironing them in a few minutes.

I'm probably one of the few people that woke this AM and checked Bonnie's blog first thing. The family and I were watching "It's a Wonderful Life" last night, but I kept falling asleep in the living room. So I conceded and just went to bed. As a result, I was the first one up this AM. By a long shot.

I checked the blogs I read daily, then did more hand quilting on my Christmas 2007 quilt (which is rapidly approaching completion) until others started stirring. I was so excited to see that unit 4 directions had been posted.

My DH is teaching 3 of my girls how to play bridge. The 4 boys are all engaged in a strategy computer game. So that left DD4 and I to occupy ourselves. We played 3 games of 10,000 (she won 2 out of 3, so she was very happy). Then I decided we had time for her to start some machine sewing. She is doing so well.

I'll post a picture of her progress later today.

DD1 made home made cinnamon rolls for us and 3 neighbor families. GOOD morning! The smell must have calories, they are so aromatic!!

Why am I sewing today instead of merry making? We've had a family staying with us for the last 10 days or so. They flew home yesterday AM. We had so much busy-ness while they were here with visitors, outings, etc., that we are taking a couple days to rest and relax. Relax is spelled s-e-w-i-n-g to me. We are not exchaning presents among our immediate family (and just a few other than that), so that isn't even a factor. Back to relaxing (sewing) for me and DD4.

~Joan