Another jigsaw

Christmas jigsaws obviously run in the family, completed by Jack and Lesley on Christmas eve.

Mola style box

At last ! I've got my Mola style box on to the blog, I played safe and kept it extremely simple,especially compared to the gorgeous one that you sent me Kathy.

Annual Christmas Puzzle

We finished the puzzle! Grandad and Luke did most of the work with the rest of the family supervising.

Christmas Visitors

I went out to brush away the skim of snow this morning and found we'd had visitors in the night.  These tracks are from Missy, the cat across the road.

 

No, this isn’t the cat leaving tracks.  This is Shadow, the Christmas kitty, waiting for his boys to come home.  (Delays – I guess they have more interesting places to be.  We should have some arrivals tomorrow.)

 

 

 

 

More tracks.  Looks like one of Santa's reindeer took a detour into our yard. 

Quilt, Dress, Cast

Here is Anna's new quilt in her loft room

Here is Miriam dressed up for a
formal dinner with the youth group

Ruth with her classy new purple cast
doing large-scale cross stitch with one hand.

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Recent Projects

When there are lots of preparations to be made for 

Christmas I can always be talked into starting a new project instead!

The tree skirt was made for the public library. A week ago the staff were trying to decide how to use funds that had been donated in memory of a patron who had passed away. The asked for a tree skirt for the library Christmas tree. My friend Donna and I shopped for fabric last Saturday, worked on it through the week, and delivered it to the library today!  The pattern is from the book French Braid Obsession by Jane Hardy Miller. (We like our colours much better than the ones in the book!)

Directions for the walll-hanging were in Happy Villages by Karen Eckmeier. I couldn't find the book in Canada so ordered a copy on ebay. I invited a couple of friends over one morning to try this out. The collaging of the shapes was fun -- a person could go on adding details for ever! Once the bits were all in place, and tacked down with spots of glue, they were covered up with a layer of tulle and free-motion machine stitching around all the pieces holds everything in place. My good machine was being repaired so I did this stitching on my older one. I've left the mistakes (tension problems, etc.) all in place and I didn't cover up the stitching on the back as this will be useful as a teaching sample.

I'm trying to decide if I should run a line of that beautiful spun sari silk around it just inside the binding -- the colours are exactly right, but I don't know if I want to "waste" the silk.

Weft Studio Christmas competition results

My box came in third!  Here is the link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=303935&id=272974776728

Anna, Mary and Miriam in Calgary

The three-way swop

And does this girl look a bit like her aunt?

Happy Birthday, Kathy!

Hope you have a wonderful day!

(Took a long time to find a picture that didn't feature the "interesting" glasses we seem to have worn "way back then".)

Related?

Do think there is any chance the two young men pictured here might be related?

It isn't as obvious in the pictures, but when Luke was here the other day I thought he looked an awful lot like his grandfather! The forehead, perhaps?

We had a good visit with Lukefor a few days. He went back to the coast yesterday. His email said the roads were passable. I was relieved to hear that, as things looked pretty wintery from this end of the highway.

New car and finished box

Hyundi i10 that Jim is now driving!

I finished the gift box and I'll hand it in this week for the competition.

I'm here now, guys

Whew! i finally made it, with Louisa's help. I am now a blogger. Wow. I've been admiring the lovely photos and projects. She says it's easy, so I hope to add my bit!

The last of this year's apples

The boys picked the apples at Thanksgiving.  These are the last few.

Sliced and ready for the dehydrator.

Dried slices ready for snacking.

Anna's best Take 2

Anna's best Take 2 lately: 163 points. All but 3 tiles count twice!

Crocodile Tears, Guy Fawkes and a woven paper box

Miriam just started reading Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz, "Four hundred pages of awesomeness!" I don't think we will see much of her this weekend.

Anna is off to a Guy Fawkes bonfire party at a friend's house tonight.

The woven basket became a box with a lid. The green wool became the filler for the frosty wrapped beaded "berries" which will be part of a corsage-like decoration on the lid. I'll use some of the yarn in the lid decoration and the rest to tie the box like a present. Hey presto - a gift box!

Those Strips -- Part Two

This is what my set of eight strips has become. What can I say? -- It seemed like a good idea at the time -- made use of all the strips, and used up a piece of "well-aged" blue fabric with a pattern along one selvage. But it really is quite dreadful!

It needs more of the blue for a bit of a border, but there isn't enough. So I'll need to use something else. Just what, I have no idea. I wonder if I could find enough of the blue to make a very narrow binding -- might that be enough to finish it off?

Christmas craft competition next phase

After the sheet of laminated tissue paper dried, I cut   twenty four1.5 cm strips and began weaving a basket. I haven't quite figured out how I will use the rest of the materials in the pack but they will be decoration for the basket somehow. I like the idea of using the grid of the basket to do some large scale cross stitch...

From the Apple Tree

This is tucked inside the middle of the apple tree in the back yard.

It has been a bit broken up by the wind now. It is bigger than a person's head.

I saw only one wasp on or near it, so I'm guessing it is abandoned, but no one wanted to get close enough to find out for sure so the apples on that part of the tree were not picked perfectly clean.

Strip Challenge

This challenge looks a bit simpler than the one Ruth has embarked upon!

At guild last evening we played a game involving a quarter metre of fabric, "Monster Mash", a circle of chairs, and much laughter. At the end we each had a selection of 8 strips. We can add one fabric to them, and by the next meeting are to have something made.

Black is the obvious fabric to add, though I might have something else that would work. It would be very straightforward to make a checkerboard of these fabrics and black, but maybe ......

Christmas craft competition

Lately I bought the competition pack from the Weft Studio. Contents of competition pack: small squares of coloured tissue paper, sparkly white yarn, white beads and sequins, and some green carded wool. Entries due: 20 November. The rules: must use at least half of the materials provided in the pack, and at least a little bit of everything: can add your own materials as well; any media is allowed; size must be no larger than 60 cm x 60 cm.

Today I made the first step of my project, a sheet of laminated white tissue paper with snippets of the coloured tissue paper and strands of red and green thread imbedded in it. It is drying on a big plastic sheet on my dining room table right now. Can you guess what I might be going to do next?

16th birthday & fancy dress

Anna got a haircut for her 16th birthday. A group of friends came over to have pizza and cake and visit for the evening. Becca and Leah stayed for the night. They got about 5 hours sleep.

Miriam went to a friend's 18th birthday fancy dress party. She and her friend Miriam made ghostbusters costumes. They had more fun preparing for the party than they did at the party!

Boys on the move again

Continuing the family tradition of "line up and shoot 'em as they leave" pictures, here we are as the boys were getting ready to leave last Monday. Sandy had driven up in a blue Matrix (from Zipcar), and Luke was in his Corolla. So the driveway looked like a Toyota car lot.

Hello, world!

 Or at least the small part of the world that might be interested in the day-to-day goings on of our family!
 

We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner last week.  It was wonderful to have the boys home, briefly.  Dinner included the last of the beets from Dad's garden, an acorn squash that Ian grew, and a salmon caught at Spence's Bridge.