Does Smudge have one toy or two toys in the picture? No! He has 3 within reach and guards them against interlopers!

These star blocks really are fun to put together and I think I’ll have a decent lap-sized quilt fairly quickly. Think it will need sashing though and am wondering about polka dot fabric for sashing. It’s totally scrappy and all the star points will be stripes, so I’m thinking some polka dots for fun. Hmmm …

Back in late December, I won this journal on Sue Bleiweiss’ blog

It arrived today and it’s fabulous. Look at these pages and tags!! It’s almost too pretty to use!! Almost. But I’m definitely saving it for special things I want to keep a note of. What a treat to win something like this!

The kitties got brand new kitty beds for Christmas. Smudge and Lester really seem to love them.

Smudge, who constantly amazes us with his poses, was sleeping like this last night in his kitty bed.

Last night, some Christmas gifts were opened early and now I can reveal this picture. It’s about 60″ long and contains 67 little 6-point stars made with one-inch diamonds from Inklingo Collection 1. It was fun to make those stars using ’30s prints and solids.

I have the binding half on the second-last runner to be made for Christmas and then it’s just one more to put together, quilt and bind. My favourite of those that I made this year left here yesterday and will be delivered to its recipient sometime today.

I realized last night that I will soon be finished with Christmas gifts and will then be looking for the next project to make. Hmmm — there are many that I’m thinking about and I have all sorts of little patches printed and ready to stitch but I’m just not sure which I want to work on first.

We had a number of swaps of Inklingo shapes and I think I have a rather fun idea for the 1″ squares. I’ve already made about 200 of the stars from the swaps and have been playing with different settings for some of them.

Now to brave the stores. I don’t need to buy too much, but I’d rather get the last of it finished today than brave the stores this weekend or Monday!

Thank you to all for your good wishes. I think they all helped — a lot! The test results were fabulously positive. He has actually shown improvement since his last echo-cardiogram in April.

The prognosis we were given was very encouraging as the echo showed significant improvement in one area and mild improvement in another. This was the best Christmas gift we could have been given and we are thrilled!

Now to relax and get some binding put on!

I’ve been working on these little oval appliques for a couple of months and have about 50 or 60 of them done so far. I’m using batiks and hand-dyes for this and just love how the rectangles are turning out. 225 of them are needed for the pattern — or possibly more, if I decide to make this a large bed quilt.

One table runner is quilted and the binding is almost finished but I can’t post a picture till after Christmas. Another one is going to be quilted today. My machine quilting skills aren’t fabulous — but they’re better than my machine piecing skills.

Lester seems to be doing better now that the vets have him on both Aspirin and Plavix. It’s so scary — every time he meows loudly I run to see if he’s okay and there he is playing with a toy and “talking” to it.

I don’t know what happened to this photo — the colours of this are much richer. It’s half finished in this photo — and I hope to have it totally finished by the end of the weekend, quilting included. Maybe whatever photo we take then will turn out better than this did! Two Christmas gifts left to go — I have all the pieces printed for one of them and the design figured out for the other, so this will be a hand piecing marathon!

I’m setting my 2008 quilt goals — I think. I want to make a lap quilt of the tiny star rectangles, complete a blue and white Texas Star quilt that is already in progress, a blue and white Seven Sisters lap quilt also already in progress, and make a pink and cream quilt. I love the look of pink and cream quilts — but need to find a pattern that I want to work with. Guess all the old issues of magazines and my quilt books are going to get a workout over the next couple of months.

I was absolutely fascinated by this alpaca that I found at the Creativ Festival last week. I can’t work with or wear wool, DH can’t wear wool and a friend suggested I try alpaca. We saw a booth at the Festival with all this amazing alpaca yarn and, after feeling it and not immediately getting itchy, I bought two small skeins to make a scarf for DH with — figuring if I can work with it and he can wear it, then I’ve found something perfect for us both.

This is the cute thing — each skein bears the name of the actual animal that the yarn has come from! So this little scarf will be made from Sno Jo. 🙂 Don’t know why — but that just makes me smile. Gorgeous yarns at that booth from a variety of alpaca farmers in Ontario. I’ll definitely be back for more!

There’s something about hand piecing little 9-patch blocks — definitely addictive! These are made of 1″ squares I printed using Inklingo and they go together incredibly easily.

I have had the worst flu I’ve ever had and was basically unable to do much of anything for close to ten days. I was so grateful to have these and some other bits already printed and ready to stitch. Didn’t have to cut strips or anything else, just a needle, some thread and was able to stitch when I had no energy to do anything. Even holding a book at times seemed like a huge task. That is one nasty flu that’s going around. If someone around you is coughing, run to get away from them!

I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the 9-patches and I do intend to make quite a few more of them, when I finish with Christmas gifts. Perhaps these will turn into a small lap quilt.

I’ve been working on Christmas gifts and can’t post photos of them. However, my scrappy Quilted Diamonds 2 is currently at the long-arm quilter and will be home hopefully by Christmas. I made it entirely by hand and had absolutely loved every minute of it. It was an absolute joy to work on.

Here’s a close-up of a section of it — there are lots and lots of tiny pieces in some of these diamonds. It’s Canadian Thanksgiving today and it’s absolutely glorious here in Southern Ontario. We have temps more like July than October, the sun is out and I wonder how many people are having barbecue today rather than cooking a turkey!