I hope you are all having a lovely holiday season.  I am currently home alone, my family left me.  They loaded up their snowboards and skis and I don’t know what-all and headed for Dubuque to go to Sundown Mountain.

(Shut up, we do too have mountains in Iowa.  Sort of.)

I had thought about going and taking a sewing machine and hanging out in the hotel room, but I really need to get some stuff done in the shop tomorrow, so… I elected to stay home.  Bummer.  I’m so sad.  No one here demanding to be fed (oh wait, the dogs are still here…), no one making rude bodily noises (um, yeah, I guess the dogs still do that, too…), no one playing endless video games (ha, the dogs don’t have opposable thumbs, so that one is true…)

What’s a girl to do?  Well…go shopping of course!

I needed beads.

(Shut up, I really did need beads. Sure I already HAD beads, but, I needed to make sure I had a full palette of selections.)

OK, I didn’t strictly NEED the glitter ladybug buttons, but I couldn’t resist.

It’s really too dark to get adequate pictures of the beading I’ve done so far, but I’m plugging away at it.

It’s something of an experiment, and I’ve changed my mind about a gazillion times already on what I’m doing.  I need to find the two books about beading that I own, but…my sewing room is such a disaster, I’m not even sure where to start looking for them.

Mark actually told the boys that the reason I wasn’t going skiing was because I had to stay home and clean my room.

You may recall that the whole quilt looks like this:

Well, it did before I quilted it.  It’s now been quilted and with two layers of batting, does not qualify as a snuggly quilt.  But…this one isn’t intended to be snuggly (especially not after I get the beading done…)

I just love that black and white polka dot fabric.  I bought a whole bolt of it.  I’ve used it before, and I’m sure I’ll use it again.  I even used it to make myself a guitar strap:

I’m making progress on my guitar-playing skills, and have the start of a blister on my index finger to prove it!

I’ve also been working on my binding skills.  In the last 4 days I have either partially or completely bound 6 quilts.  Three were these crazy things:

You my recall that this fall I was involved with the musical at the high school.  I never managed a picture of the finished product on stage, but I was in charge of decorating a bunk bed to look like a stack of mattresses.  These three pieces — one long on the front, two short on the sides were the “mattresses” — after the show was over I stuck the wad of fake mattress in a pile intending to take it apart and finish the edges of the 3 pieces as quilts for the dogs.   I don’t know what came over me over the weekend, but I started binding and I couldn’t seem to stop.

(if you are crazy enough to count, there are only 19 strips of fabric — there was an actual mattress on top of the bunk bed that counted as the 20th mattress…)

Oh!  My beading is calling me.

(I can hear it, cause…there’s no hooligans making a racket…)

TTFN-

Suzanne