Dragonflies and an Elmo

I've had a busy but fun day.

Today was fruitcake making day. I make them about 6 or 7 weeks before Christmas so that the cake has a chance to age and the flavors all meld together. I wrote about it here last year, so I won't repeat myself by giving you the recipes again. They're in the oven cooking right now, and the house smells so good.

.

I still have my embroidery machine out and I'm gathering up all the supplies to send to my sister next Saturday. I keep coming across pages of "Embroideries on my to-do list". So for fun this morning, I stitched out some beautiful dragonflies. Here is one of them. This Oesd design pack has about 20 different elegant designs. These stitch-outs will all become patches on blankies sometime soon.

.

I need to make baby Aurora a plain quilt that I can add some patches onto, each time she visits. The other grandkids used to love that. Some still do, and I won't say who. Aurora's first patch will be this Elmo. She recognizes him anywhere and says his name really good. It's cute. You know it won't be long before we have her starting to bake cookies with Grammie. She already loves to help Grampie put the silverware away from the dishwasher.

Machine Embroidery - 12 Days of Christmas

I don't use my embroidery sewing machine much for embroidery any more. So I'm going to send it to my sister for a while to see if she can get some use out of it. It's quite old, but still stitches out embroideries quite nicely.

So her hubby will be coming by in 2 weeks and I plan pack it up with my old notebook with the designs on it, my thread collection and stabilizers. She'll be all setup to stitch.

Meanwhile, I thought, I should at least do one project this year before I send it away. I've been wanting to do a table runner out of the "12 days of Christmas Redwork" embroidery pack that I have, so this is the incentive to do so. I have 7 of the 12 five inch blocks stitched out. They are stitching quite quickly since it's only one color. Actually, I think they're really nice, now that I've started them.

I hope to have the table runner done in the next couple of weeks. The blocks will be set on point and sashed in red. I hope to have it ready to show at our next quilt guild meeting, which will be our final one before Christmas. I'll show you when its done.

Sewing small projects for the school Christmas shopping table

Next month, the triplets will be able to go shopping at the schools Christmas craft and shopping table. But before that, all the kids and families are to contribute to the shopping table. So I'm making some things for the table. I love sewing little projects so this fun for me. I also have lots of fabrics in my stash to use.

First, I'm making some Wonder Wallets. What a fun little design from Lazy Girl designs. These came together just fine for my first ones. You can get 2 Wonder wallets out of one fat quarter. If you have 2 different fat quarters, you can mix and match colors of the pockets and get 4 wonder wallets. This pattern is great for using scraps of fabric that are at least 5" wide.

Next, I made some shoe bags. I have three made so far. I probably won't make any more because my serger is not stitching right, and I can't bear to fight with it.

I have a stack of Christmas and girly luggage tags cut out and that will be tomorrow's little project. I should be able to finish at least a dozen tomorrow. There are many free patterns on the Internet, but I'm using my own tried and tested little luggage tag pattern. The free pattern is linked at the top of my blog sidebar, in the Sewing Tutorial box.

My sister, who works at a very active elementary school in Nova Scotia says that these gift tables really are really fun for the kids to do some shopping. She said they always need more things for Dads that the kids can buy, so I'm on the hunt for small crafty things to make for Dads. I'm thinking masculine luggage tags. Do you have any other suggestions?

A month of Crazy Quilting Mondays - Won't you join in?

Are you a Crazy Quilter? Want to join in on a Month of Crazy Quilting Mondays?

Last winter, I started crazy quilting on to Christmas socks for 2 special girls. I won't say who they are because this will be a bit of a surprise when I give it to them next month. But as an incentive and motivation for me to finish these projects and give them to the girls to use at Christmas time, during the month of November, I am going to post progress of my 2 projects on the 5 Mondays in November.

I mostly crazy quilt in the evening while watching TV. I was so pleased to get my supplies all out last night and organized around me for my stitching effort. I expect to really make good progress and meet my end of the month target for finishing these socks by the end of the month. I'll show you the completed socks at the end of November.

The following represents about 2 hours of work. It might not look like much, but the thing I'm most pleased about is how much I'm looking forward to stitching this evening.


Two lines of beads were added to this line of stitching.

I love this wired ribbon and it goes across the ankle part of the sock. I had it being held down with pins and now dainty little flower buds are securing it down. I will probably add a little sparkle later.

And I added this line of stitching to this naked seam. I'm thinking of what to do as the next embellishment. It looks so plain right now.

Stay tuned for Crazy update next Monday.

Goblins

Spooky goblins on our doorstep last evening. Well, the lamb and the kitty weren't spooky, they were just too cute. Aurora wasn't sure what was going on, but got into the swing of things as the kids ran across the court to get some candy from the neighbours.



Mitchell was a Ranger and that scared Aurora half to death. Caitlin was the Red Devil with the freaky red eyelashes, Aurora was a cute little lamb, and Grace was a sweet little kitty cat.

Halloween cupcakes

What kid doesn't like making Halloween crafts? Today the triplets and I made chocolate covered pretzels using fun Wilton candy molds.

And we made these fun gouly cupcakes with the googly eyes. We got the idea from my Martha Stewart cupcake book that I got for my birthday.

Egyptian Quilt

While on our tour in Egypt, our individual travel was limited and I wasn't able to go off on my own looking for a quilt show, if one even existed.

I kept my eye open for Egyptian cotton or fabric stores or quilty things along our travels. I saw none.

At the tourist markets, the vendors would be sure to tell you they had 100% Egyptian cotton things and really sell you on that. What they don't seem to understand is that we tourists know the difference between good cotton and cheap cotton. The T-shirts while made of 100% Egyptian cotton, were only $2.00 You can just imagine the quality. Just the same I bought 2 Egyptian cotton T-shirts. I also bought some white cotton shirts with fancy embroidery on them. I know they were not good cotton either because of the price.

I also didn't even see any sign of cotton being grown as we sailed down the Nile. I'm sad to say that I left Egypt without knowing the Egyptian cotton story. I will find out sometime though.

But, our stay in beautiful Aswan treated us to a beautiful stone sculpture display. Much like our ice sculptures, Egypt hosts an annual stone carving contest and exhibition. And guess what I found? Yes, a quilt. A stone sculpture quilt. There wasn't any English explanations of the sculpture, but it gave me my little quilt fix.

Here are a few photos of some of the other sculptures.

Home Sweet Home

While in Egypt, we went on 20+ tours. We saw it all. We even spent a couple of days at a resort on the Red Sea, just relaxing. By this time, I'm getting really good at speaking Aribic. I know a dozen words/phrases, thanks to our Egyptologist Hesham. I was approached by a young lady vendor trying to sell me a scarf. I politely said La, Shockrun which stands for no thank-you. She stopped right up and looked at me intently, and then she said in a very heavy Arabic accent, "Good Arabic". I was pleased that she had taken the moment to comment on my effort.

So, on Friday we started our trek home on Egypt Airlines. We landed in London where we spent the night at a nearby hotel at Heathrow. Early Saturday morning, we caught Air Canada to Toronto, then caught a connecting flight to Fredericton. Yesterday afternoon, we arrived home to be greeted with heavy rain. Now any other time, rain would put a downer on our arrival home, but the rain was refreshing. Our 2+ weeks in hot and dry Egypt left us with dry skin, dry eyes, dry hair, dry feet, dry everything. It's good to be home. Traveling is good, but the long flights going and coming are the toughest parts of the trip for us. It was great to touch down at the airport yesterday and to be greeted by wildly waving hands of grandchildren, rain or no rain.

Today, our bodies are smack in the middle of jet lag. I know this, because I was wide awake at 3am, ready to get up and refresh myself with my sewing projects. I resisted the urge to get up and stayed in bed until 5:30am. I thought about what meals I would make this week, what crafts I would do with the kids on Wednesday afternoon (only half day of school) and I wondered how much weight I had lost in the 2 weeks we were away. Then my big mistake was thinking about the great cup of coffee I was going to have when I got up. Egypt is not known for their great coffee. That got me out of bed. What a great cup of coffee. It's good to be home.

Our next trip south, is in 2 weeks. We're heading south by car, to Nova Scotia, that is. My sister and I have a day or 2 of sewing planned.

PS: Despite plentiful buffets for every meal, I lost 2 lbs while in Egypt.

Moses was Here!

Yesterday, we got to visit a Monistary at the foot of Mount Sanai. This is a picture of Mount Sanai which is on the Sanai Peninsula. This of course is the mountain that Moses climbed to get the 10 Commandments. People come here and take a camel ride to the top to see the sun rise over the mountain in the morning. It's sort of a pilgrimage.

This is us standing under the Burning Bush that Moses saw. It is in the St. Catherine Monistary which sits at the bottom of Mount Sanai. This is a very holy place, and many many devout people were here praying for one thing or another. 22 Monks live here and visitors are only allowed until noon, then the monks go into their daily prayers.

Our trip is coming to an end and the last few days of our trip will be spent here at a posh resort in a community called Sharm el Sheik and it's on the Red Sea.

I can't wait to see everyone when we get home later this weekend. We have many stories to tell, as you can imagine.

Heiroglyphics

You just can't imagine the heiroglphics we've seen in the last 7 days. There are thousands of inscriptions that have all been studied and interpreted by Egyptologists at least 3 times each. These inscriptions are the basis of many University papers. This is our tour guide, Hesham. He is an Egyptologist and is said to be the best in the country. He is studying for his Masters. He reads this stuff like it was English.

Pyramids

Day one in Egypt.Pyramids are awesome. The internet access is limited. We're having fun and already it's a bit of history overload.

Egypt Weather

As we're putting the last minute things in our suitcases ready to board our flights, we have one last look at the weather. We are wondering if we should bring our umbrella's or not.

I don't think I've ever seen a 10 day forecast like this before, have you. I expect after 18 days of this, we'll be glad to get home to some variable weather, for a change.

Click here for 10 day Egypt Weather Forecast