Time to relax and decorate

As planned I closed all Christmas orders on the first and it was a blessing – what a wonderful feeling to get up in the morning and know there isn’t any pressure to get something finished and in the mail. Now I still love doing my sewing and always will in fact yesterday I was thinking about cutting out something to sew in the evening. I think I need to stop thinking like that don’t you???  My mind never rests!

But back to the ‘nothing to do’ – that’s not so true because just like all of you I spent the weekend and part of this week doing my Christmas decorating and at a much slower pace and it was so enjoyable. In fact I just put the last touches on a couple baskets and now it’s completely finished.  Minimal, Simple but FINISHED.

I may have to do this in a two part post because of all the pictures I took – and hopefully they will go on my Picturetrail sometime as well.

I want to say a huge Thank You to all my followers here – my how the number grows. You are all such a wonderful group of blogging friends and some I have even got to know personally.

I did a Christmas swap with a  FB friend I went to Ohio with last month – Oh I got some beautiful gifts – and hand made! These are from a dear friend, Sandy Schutt. She sent the most primitive Santa and long tall snowman.
Thank you Sandy!  (You’ll see them in their rightful place in the Christmas photos)

And from another friend, Trena from http://www.timewornprimitives.blogspot.com/,
I received these sweet gifts
A cute Christmas Pillow, faceless Primitive doll and a Primitive sign. She also threw in a special treat. Thank you Trena.

And in today’s mail I received a beautiful Silver antique ornament and a Pewter Chamberstick and candle from Linda Tittle down in sunny but cold Florida – her and Ben were also part of the Ohio trip in October – Linda you nailed it on the head with these gifts…Thank you sweetie.

Here’s Ben (Linda’s husband). Now this just doesn’t relate…Christmas decorations and no shirt! Ben I’m jealous…well, not the no shirt for me but the Sun for sure.

I’ll get to the decorating in a minute but first I want to show you my Christmas present from my husband. I am a huge reader and the library is starting to overflow so he thought I needed an electronic reader and yesterday he came home with a KINDLE for me...hmmmmm, thought I never wanted one of those things. I like to feel the book and read the back of the cover and all that goes with a ‘paper book’ BUT…now I have changed my mind in just a short day!

It’s fantastic – I purchased 2 books already and have read most of the first one – I can’t say enough great things about them. So I guess I can eat my words about NEVER GOING TO HAVE ONE OF THOSE THINGS!!!!
Today we went and bought a jacket for it so it doesn’t get banged up.
 

Oh…still another thing to talk about – I am in a swap with Grace from Lancaster, PA – she wanted a Cabin table runner. Well that was a challenge put to me to say the least – I do more Folk Art designs so I went to work in my head figuring out just how I wanted it to look and the fabrics. I got the picture in my head – now I needed to get it on the runner.
Here’s what I came up with – It’s RIGHT ON with what I had pictured in my head and I realllllly love it.
The one thing thought that I couldn’t get right was the angle on the left side – that bothers me but it is still what I saw in my head.
I had to prepare each element of the cabin separately and used 3 different types of fabric for it and then bake the pieces in the oven to get the look I wanted
 

Oh man, this post is getting too long and I’ve probably lost many of you by now – I think I will post Christmas pictures maybe on Monday how does that sound?
Didn’t mean to tease you but I think you will agree.

I’ll leave you all with my snowy picture from Saturday – windy, snowing and 2 degrees! Blizzard conditions
 

I also received some photos from a follower of my blog and my website – Diane Ward – she tried my Pantry Cake recipe I have on my ‘Tips N Techniques page and sent me photos of them along with some of her lovely home. I told her that her home is Country Sampler material!!!

You can find it here:  
http://www.kmprimitives.com/pages/TipsTechniques.php

Didn’t her cakes turn out gorgeous????
 

Photos of Diane’s Home…it’s gorgeous!
 

 

Karen

P.S. there may be some typos and no periods, commas but this darned thing was acting up – every time I tried to correct something it would delete the next character and I’d have to keep typing to finish the thought. I decided you would all know what I was getting at so I left the boo-boo’s.