Like Father, Like Son!

Today, I received an e-mail from my son.  The e-mail contained only one word…”Success!”.  There was a picture attached to the e-mail…

mattThis is my son wrapped up in the quilt that I made and gave him for Christmas this year.

Looking at this picture made me laugh.  I looked over at my husband as I was reading the e-mail and this is what I saw…

Harold

I guess we had success at our house too!  🙂

Like father, like son!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from our house to yours!

This is a picture of my husband with the fish quilt that I made him. Although this quilt was finished in time for Christmas this year, this was not a Christmas gift (not this year anyway–LOL). Several years ago, I gave my husband a completed block for this quilt as part of his Christmas present that year with a promise to finish the quilt after Christmas. I guess I should have specified which Christmas because here we are several years later and the quilt is now finished. No more cold knees for my husband, Pam !

This is the Christmas quilt that I finished for my mother for this Christmas. The flimsy was finished in September 2006 (http://silverthimblequilting.blogspot.com/2006/09/stackn-whack-christmas-completed-to.html) and this top sat in the “to be quilted pile” since then. As Linda pointed out, “It isn’t doing anyone much good sitting in a bin somewhere”, so out it came and I finished it in time for this Christmas. My mom has promised to provide a better picture of the quilt once it is in place on her bed.

The following three pictures are of some of the Christmas vignettes from around our house.


Notice the totally green poinsettia? This is a plant that my husband brought home from work. He tried to tell me this was a new variety of poinsettia. Turns out that this plant didn’t receive the appropriate amount of light and dark to trigger some of the leaves to turn red. At first I thought it looks a little odd, but the longer it lives in my dining room, the more it grows on me. I think it fits with the red and green theme going on in the dining room at this time of year.

This is my nativity set–all white porcelain. I was thinking I didn’t have room to properly display it. After rearranging some things in the kitchen, I found a great place to display it on the corner of the kitchen counter.

This is this year’s tree. As you can see, we weren’t shorted in the present department. There were plenty of things under that tree for all of us!

This is my son and his girlfriend.

This is Joey checking out the presents before all the unwrapping activity started. I think he smelled the catnip mouse that was under the tree for him.

These are the stockings–overflowing with stuffers before they were opened.


This is my son, his girlfriend and my daughter sitting on the couch at the beginning of the present opening phase of the morning.

This is my daughter and husband playing Santa as they distribute the presents to everyone.

This is my Dad.

This picture was taken a little further into the unwrapping frenzy. Paper, paper everywhere.

We saved the presentation of the quilt for my mom for last so we could all watch her open it.

We have experienced a higher than normal amount of snowfall in the past week. It started snowing again on Tuesday night and it never stopped until we got up Thursday morning. The next three pictures were taken Wednesday (Christmas Eve Day). These pictures are of my son shoveling the driveway.

The last seven pictures were taken around our yard and show the recent snow accumulations. This is the first white Christmas coast to coast in Canada since 1971!

Fish Quilt and Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians! I have a bit of time while I wait for the turkey to cook and before I have to turn the vegetables on so I can update you on the progress of my current project.

This morning I was busy working on my husband’s fish quilt. I am determined to move this one off my UFO list.

I finished the inside portion of the quilt and I am now ready to add the borders.

The fabrics on the left are the border fabrics. The black fish fabric is the outer border and the narrow beige strip will be the narrow inner border. (You can only see a bit of it peeking through in this picture.)

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving stat holiday here so I will not be going in to work. I hope to be quilting tomorrow–putting the borders on this quilt!

DH’s Fish Quilt

Today was the day to drag out a very, very old UFO and move it forward. I am embarrassed to say how old it is. On my UFO chart, I don’t even have the year marked down so that tells me that it was in existence when I started that list years ago. I actually have already given my husband one of the blocks for Christmas many years ago thinking that I would finish it right after Christmas. Needless to say, that did not happen.

The pattern is in Susan Teegarden Dissmore’s book, Clever Quilts. This is the diagram from the book showing the quilt pattern, which is called, “Q is for Quilting”.
After today’s work, this is how far along I am.
It took a while to get back into the piecing of this one. I had modified the size of the block and I had not made note of that change. I also had not kept a swatch of each fabric and labelled where it was on the pattern. If both of these things had been noted, I would have spent less time trying to figure out where I left off on this one years ago.

Hopefully, I can see this one through this time.