December

The last two months have gone by in a flash with no notable occurences, except for Thanksgiving. One of my sons and his family stayed for a few days, and we had a lovely holiday. We found time to play some cribbage, which I haven't played in years; and now hubby and I try to play every day at tea time. 

I started this Courthouse Steps a month or more ago; but I haven't been doing a whole lot of quilting lately, so it is still on the design wall. This is mostly fabric that is part of my quilt chapter's stash, that no one else wants to work with, so I'm (still) trying to use it up. This is a masculine quilt and is perfect for using up most of the man-themed fabrics. 

 

I bought a secondhand Handiquilter Avante long arm just about a year ago that came with a ProStitcher tablet for computerized quilting. I have spent the last year mostly in the dark about the operation of the tablet, frustrated by endless thread breaks, and lack of progress, until I was ready to just heave it out the back door. 

A totally unsatisfactory situation. Two days ago, I sewed some ugly fabric together into a top and decided to make another attempt. After spending quite some time playing with the top tension, I finally managed to stitch out two different patterns across the quilt top, with no thread breaks. An exciting breakthrough to be sure! I have much more to learn, but hopefully now I am on my way to actually quilting a quilt on this machine. 

I am keeping my Lizzie for now. That one is a much lighter weight machine than the Avante, and I love quilting on it, so I'm not giving it up. 

Truthfully, for the last month I have been way more absorbed in making quilted ornaments. I starting learning how to make these a couple of years ago from theornamentgirl.com. While the website has many patterns available for purchase by the general public, they also offer a couple of different subscription services, one with a complete kit each month, and one with a new original pattern each month, no kit. I am subscribed to both, so I have access to many gorgeous patterns and the supplies to make them. 

Ornament Girl also has a YouTube channel where you can learn to make some of the free patterns. 

The Nutcracker and the Santa Suit above are two of my favorites. The Santa Suit was December's ornament of the month. The gingerbread man one was just finished yesterday.

I made my daughter-in-law a Grumpy Cat ornament for Christmas. She has a 13-year old cat named Mo that she rescued from a shelter earlier this year, and he's very grumpy. He's bitten everyone in the house. He looks just like this too, lol.

This is another very pretty one called Daydream. 

Having a ball making these!