Cruising right through April

And the weeks keep rolling on by at a good clip. Soon we'll be to the travelling time of the year, but in the meantime we'll do our chores and otherwise entertain ourselves as per usual. 

I have a favorite thrift store just a mile or so up the road called B.A.S.C.A., whose mission is to provide better living, working, educational, social, and recreational opportunities for adults with special needs. Their store helps support 4 group homes - 2 for women and 2 for men. It's a great store, and gets some wonderful home furnishings, dishware, and artwork donations to resell, and at Christmas they have a beautifully decorated Christmas-themed room with lovely crystal glassware, elegant dishware, and everything needed for entertaining during the season.

Some of the lights are still up. At Christmastime the table in front is
set in high style for 10,  plus a large Christmas tree resides in the corner.

A few more shots of their store to give you an idea of what a fun browse it is. I make it by every week or 10 days. I should really volunteer sometime.

If only I had room!

This small seasonal section is featuring Easter at the moment. 
Lots of nice small housewarming gifts and other doodads.

I finished my lap/nap quilt and am quite pleased for 2 reasons; it's finished, and it came out very nice. I'm happy with it, even if it is a tad small. 😉 It was hard for me to judge the size when starting it. Using 4½" squares; 15 squares down by 13 over. Sounds like simple math right? Well, the polyfil puffing shrinks them up, fine, I'm fine with that.

How it looks on a queen-size bed, impossible for 2 people,
but for 1 person @ quiet/nap time it's great, so snuggly. 

With right sides together, I used a whip stitch to attach the fleece
throw to the topper, then turned right sides out and again whip stitched it 
all the way around. Finally I tacked front to back every 4 squares.
The backing is the same royal blue as the bedspread.

The boss had his projects as well, one of them being to add a topcoat to the deck after a good scrubbing. He made it look easy and all I had to do was help move some furniture.

Almost finished! Looks like he's painting himself into a corner
but not so, he'd painted the far half a few days before.
It was pretty dingy but now, clean, nice and fresh.

I stopped by to see my friend Nancy's new place and to have a wonderful shrimp creole lunch with her. We had a great catch-up session and so far, she's loving her new apartment. She is an artist as well as the mother of 4 grown children, so her 2nd bedroom needed to be large enough to hold her studio and to double as a "doable" guest room - score!  To top it off it has a great patio area lakeside with eastern exposure, so it's shady and cool out there during the afternoon/evening hours.

She's pretty happy with it!

I've delved back into the relaxing world of puzzling again. With all the sewing and canning projects I haven't had much time for it. Here's my set-up. I use Dollar Tree flexible cutting mats for extra pieces and work the puzzle on a 22"x28" piece of poster board. That way I can gather up all the cutting mats, place them on top of the puzzle and pick the whole thing up and walk it away, quickly freeing-up my craft table.

My small rolling table (thrift find) holds 2 mats.

We have had some really pretty mornings around here lately although the last few have been rainy and we've got more onshore rain in the offing - a good thing as our lake level is down.

Great morning for a row around!

Well, I guess I'll leave it here for now. Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to leave a comment, I'd enjoy hearing from you. 😊

Another Christmas means another year has gone by.

Throughout each year there are milestones; birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries and special days of various sorts, but when we get into the Christmas festivities, I start thinking about the year as pretty much being a "wrap". Soon, I'll start having to write '23 on the items that go into the freezer, and on the notes I jot down in the cards and packages I snail-mail out.  

I remember when I was a kid that it always seemed like a momentous thing - changing years 😮- and having to get used to writing the new year on schoolwork. Even in my twenties, it was a bit of a struggle using the correct year when handwriting checks to pay bills, and when writing letters to send to friends far and wide. Now, each year seems to fly by so fast it's like "what's the big deal?" I'm thankful that my life is such that starting a new year holds no trepidation for me. I know that for many, a new year means new worries; will I get laid-off, will the bills get paid and on and on. Life comes with no guarantees; just wishes, hopes and prayers. And on that note, I wish, hope and pray that you and yours have a safe, healthy, fulfilling New Year. I hope it's 'a cut above' what's come before.

Speaking of a cut above, that's the name of a show I streamed the other day while working on my sewing project. It's a competition for chainsaw carvers and boy is it cool to watch them go at it. It was addictive. I snapped a pic of 4 of the best carver's work during one episode. These people do amazing work in 7 or 8 hours. Check it out for fun. I'm streaming it via Xfinity on the Discovery network.

Courtesy of Xfinity/Discovery - I hope they don't mind.

My sewing project, a Puff Quilt, is a fun challenge. I've never quilted before and although I've worked on really large projects like the sailboat dodger this quilt has a lot of small pieces. Here's the dodger: (If you wanted to see other sewing projects, click this LINK).

The windshield section was over 16' long.

Shown stretched-out after attaching the side
triangle pieces to the center top section. Whew.

Anyway, the quilt project idea came from a post on someone's instagram page. I thought about how much beautiful fabric I had hanging around after tiring of making my trivets. Remember my trivets? I used to sew them while onboard Dreamtime. Here's a refresher pic, and if you want to see some of the completed trivets follow this LINK.

My Trivet "how-to" instructional pic.

So I did a "proof of concept" project for my sister, a cute & colorful little lounging pillow. I loved the way it came out and decided to dive into a small lap/nap quilt for myself. 250 or so square "pockets" later, I started trying to figure out my layout to determine whether I needed more of one color or another.

The colors will feature dark purples/reds and blues/greens
with a swath of lighter yellows/pinks coming in from the side.

While not pursuing this project, (it's going to take a while, lol), I made time to gen-up a big batch of french toast for the freezer. Also some lemon cookies with candied ginger and slivered almonds.

Just butter it up straight from the freezer and
nuke it for 30-60 seconds on high, yum & easy.

The candied ginger and almonds take this cookie to 
new heights. They're made from a cake mix! YAY!

Oh, I also made the pumpkin loafs we liked so much, one plain, and 2 smaller ones with raisins and pecans. My wonderful neighbors shared it with us.

Made from a Libby's Mix - so fantastically spiced.

We cheated with Christmas dinner and reheated leftovers from our big blowout Thanksgiving dinner. 'Sacre bleu'. I had vacuum sealed sliced turkey, baked dressing balls, and turkey gravy cubes (made in my handy-dandy 2" silicone ice cube trays). All I had to do was make rice, steam the asparagus and get the cranberry sauce ready. 

It all tasted fantastic and we enjoyed every bite, we even have enough for another round in a day or two. Note: most often, if I'm planning on vacuum sealing and freezing something tender like dressing, I'll put it on a piece of parchment paper and a plate and run it into the freezer to freeze. Then I take it out and vacuum seal it. Nothing gets squished or deformed that way.

We warmed up the Florida Room enough to eat out there.
Our temps on Christmas started out at 26° and didn't
get much warmer, but the skies were very blue and it was sunny.

Well, that's about it for this post, thanks for stopping by to read it. Hope your holidays were wonderful. See you next time.