The Long Weekend was ...

Fun, productive and exhausting .. but before I get into all that .. I need/want to show off something. A couple of weeks ago I saw on a few blogs the new Moda fabrics, one in particular really caught my eye .. guess which one! lol .. Bistro! Talk about wonderful and perfect for me ... I saw a table runner for my kitchen table, but of course you know that I've very very sewing challenged so making it myself was out of the question. I emailed Kim who I think makes some of the prettiest quilts around ... and aksed if she would be interested in making a table runner for me. She emailed back that she'd love to and sounded really excited .. we talked about size and when I needed it by (anytime next year was what I was thinking!) .. but looked what arrived at my house ....

Isn't it great!! I absolutely love it ... here's a close up ...

and here's the backing fabric .. it's really cute too!

I just love the dark brown fabric she used for the binding and to break up the design. Kim, I know I've already emailed you, but wanted to tell you again how much I love this table runner! I can't wait to use it :) p.s., DH wouldn't let me take pictures until I found a table cloth that complimented it.

Our Thanksgiving was really nice, well it was nice after the stupid football game .. way too much food, but darn it was all sooo good! .. Chris (DS #1) has become the official gravy maker .. it was really tasty! After dinner we played Catch Phrase and Such&Such. If you like fun word games, these are a blast to play. Usually there's 10 or 12 of us playing, from my niece who's 13 all the way up to my Dad's who's 77, and every had a great time :)

Friday Lisa and I went Christmas shopping. We've been doing this for about 15 years now. We don't get up at the crack of dawn .. met for breakfast about 9 .. headed to the mall about 10:30. Other than the traffic getting to the mall, and the parking once we got there, it wasn't bad at all. There wasn't one place we went that we had to stand in line longer than about 5 minutes. I found a couple of Christmas gifts, a couple of must haves for the family, like a can of hot chocolate from Williams-Sonoma :) After shopping all day, we went to see the movie Australia. Wow, it was sooo much better than I expected! Of course 2+hours of watch Hugh Jackman can't be all bad, now can it?! lol

The rest of the weekend was spent getting the house all Christmasy .. hence the exhausting part .. but fun :) I have a little bit more to do, but all in all, it's done .. well except for the tree. We get a real one every year and don't usually put one up until 2 weeks before Christmas. Hate when they dry out too quickly. I put a new picture at the top of my blog, it's my mantle decorated .. didn't realize I took the picture a bit crooked! lol .. guess I'll be redoing that tonight!

Not much stitching has been going on, except I'm stitching on my Round 10 Fair and Square (behind as usual!) .. I do have a finishing picture to share .. last week I was doing finishing on two ornaments for exchanges and while I was waiting for glue to dry (yes, I used a bit) I was looking at a design I had stitched for myself but hadn't finished yet .. I started playing around with wool and pins and well, here's the finished ornament .. I really really like it! I hand stitched the little pillow, put some infacing on the back of the fabric and then just used pins to attached the fabric to the pillow ...

I used the same pins to attach the ribbon to the back .. I thought that was a cute touch :)

I hope the first week of December is being good to all of you :) Thanks for your comments, I always enjoy reading them :)

I'm grateful for long weekends ...