Catch-up Post and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Are you all ready for Christmas yet?  If so, congrats! If not, why are you sitting there reading this when you still have things to do?  LOL

We are ready here at the Kizerian Love Shack. I may still make a pie or some cookies so I have sweets when the families swing by. But since we are feeding some of them brunch and some of them dinner, and Bruce and don’t generally keep a lot of junk food around the house (because I would eat it), that is a maybe.....

Anyway, I wanted to show you a few things I have finished up in the last two weeks or so. So let’s begin.

First is the Cozy Cottage pillow I made. It is a Lori Holt pattern from her Farm Girl Vintage Calendar for 2016 (which you can buy at the Fat Quarter Shop. It has lots of cute ideas and patterns in it besides the calendar part).  I want to make another one next year in Christmas colors.

Next we have the Milk Cow Block. I have embroidered the eyes, but need to redo them because they are hardly visible. I had a lot of trouble with this pattern and even discovered a couple errors in the directions, so had to recut some pieces. Not my most fun block.

Barn Cat went together smoothly, but I don’t like my fabric choices. Oh well. In the big, busy quilt, these tame fabrics might be a nice place to rest the eyes. Obviously, I still need to embroider eyes, nose and whiskers. Because, what is a cat without whiskers?

All I need now is to finish up the blocks I will use for pillow shams;  the tractor for Bruce and who-knows-what for me.  This will probably begin coming together before the year is out.

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In the past I used to supply vintage Victorian postcard images having to do with each respective holiday. This year I decided to show a few decorating vignettes around our house instead.

The first is on our antique sideboard. I love the traditional Christmas colors of red and green and gold. Sometimes other colors appear (orange, blue), but for the most part, this old gal sticks with what she loves.  By the way, in the background you see part of one (of a pair) of carved griffins on this sideboard. The furniture is part of a set that my ex husband and I bought for our larger home with a formal dining room. This is the small sideboard; he took the big one. I got the vitrine (china hutch) and we sold the dining room set with chairs. It was all a matching set that had been imported from Europe. It is circa 1860’s, Dutch. Maybe I will show more pictures sometime.

Below is an antique Father Christmas that my former sister-in-law gifted me one year, back in the 1990’s. It is composite and circa 1900-1915. Father Christmas stays out all year because I love him!

We have 3 bathrooms in our little home. When we remodeled all the bathrooms a few years ago, this main bathroom is the only one where we were able to maintain the original tile (counters, walls and floor). It is usually decorated in a peacock theme (I have shown pictures of that before), but this year I have a few of my older-style ornaments set up here.

In our master bedroom, on the dresser, sits my collection of Willow Tree Angels. At Christmas time, they are graced with two beautiful Christmas-themed postcards, which I bought from one of my favorite crazy quilters, Margreet deReus.

I collect vintage cookie jars, and while this one isn’t vintage (the left one is from the sixties, though), the Fitz & Floyd Snowy Woods Father Christmas jar is one of my favorites. It was produced from 1992-2000 and like all F&F, is highly collectible. What is sweeter than Father Christmas being surrounded by woodland bunnies??

Wow. That makes me want to start collecting again!

Back to sewing, I finished up a spur-of-the-moment idea for the grands; an I-Spy quilt. I had lots of 5” I Spy blocks hanging around since I attended the 2012 Sewing Summit. So, I arranged them, stitched them together, basted, quilted, bound and washed it. Done in two afternoons. It measures 45x45”.  The binding is scrappy leftovers for quilts past.

And finally, I cut and pieced my Helen’s Garden quilt last weekend. Yesterday I basted it, and I plan to get quilting on it this evening perhaps.

As this fabric line has a lot of large-print fabrics, I decided to do this easy pattern from Missouri Star Quilts. I did omit the outer border though, because the vintage sheet I am using for the backing was not large enough, even with the addition of an extra column of leftover fabric. I will show pictures of front and back when complete, since I need to do a post for the 2015 Finish-Along. This is one of my 4th quarter goals I didn’t know if I could really get done.

The dragonfly fabric, below left, is my favorite print in the line. I have another yard of it left over, so I will need to mull on how to use it. This fabric is by one of my favorite designers, Tamara Kate.

And I think that catches us up. So all that’s left is for me to wish you a beautiful and Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year.  I will be back after Christmas with a final year-end wrap-up post.

Until then,