…I am in love! I have been such a good girl this year that I gave myself an early Christmas present. (Update: Typepad went missing for a while, but is back, so I am trying to get yesterday’s post on line.)

Meet my new studio pal – a Janome 6600. She is quite a work horse and I find free motion quilting on this machine to be a dream!! I have ordered an insert for my Horn table so that she can rest comfortably while we work. Both of my other machines have automatic threaders – but – this one actually works. I love the bobbin winder, too. It has a built in walking foot which is pretty cool, too. Bernie is in the hospital so she does not know about Jan who has replaced her. Hope they can get along when Bernie comes home.

Today my bestest friends and I went to Larkspur in Marin county and made many shopkeepers very happy. Then we had lunch at the Lark Creek Inn. My daughter Lisa joined us for our outing. We enjoyed watching her find great bargains at a thrift store. We had a delish lunch and shopped til we dropped. Nothing better than a good day with quilty friends!

Tomorrow is my last day to work at the Surface Design office. I will continue to be the web administrator because I can do that from Portland. So I am starting the transitioning to less stuff to do away from home and more time in the studio.

Well, it was just a good Monday for me! I think that the sinus trouble I have had for 3 months is over!!!! I went back to aerobics today and had no problems. I was even able to balance on one foot – oh, yes, it is a sight to see.

When I got home there was a package for me. My new acquisition – Out of Africa -made by Rhonda Blasingame for the Quilt Art List Quilt Swap. About sixty of us made quilts for the swap. They were posted for us to see and we selected our top 5 quilts. I got Rhonda’s. I really love it. She has used some wonderful fabrics and trims. There are wonderful wooden beads and beads that look like ivory. The binding is burlap that is fringed.  Here is a pic and a closeup:

This afternoon I worked on the fiber Christmas Cards. Here you can see a pile waiting for the binding:

I also put all of my works in progress on the design wall so that I can start thinking about how to quilt them:

I also rounded up a rainbow of fabrics for doing a miniature prototype  of the commission piece.

Tonight we went to the symphony. A nineteen year old young man from Sonoma County was the guest violin soloist. He did a Prokofiev piece which was sensational. Then the orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Symphony NO. 6 in B Minor – Pathetique. It was unbelievable to hear a small city orchestra play this well. We are truly blessed.

It is so good to have my health back and the energy to do every thing I want to do. Yeah!!

It is so good to have energy again.

A small group of Artful Quilters are working through the Color and Composition book by Katie Pasquini Masopaust and Brett Barker. We will be posting our work on our blogs for all to see. Here is our first assignment: Contour drawing.

Compose a still life.

Exercise one: Blind Contour Drawing

Set a timer for 25 minutes. Draw the contours of the still life without looking at your paper (hold a paper over your hand and pencil). It was hard for me to spend 25 minutes on this. Maybe my still life didn’t have enough contour complexity!!

Exercise two: Semi-blind contour drawing. Repeat the process. This time you can look at the paper at the beginning of a contour, then take your eyes off the paper and look at the object (75% looking at still life, 25% looking at the drawing).

Exercise three: Contour drawing. Draw the same still life. You can look at the paper as often as you like. but keep in mind that the more you look at the paper and not the still life – you are using that pesky left brain!!

I really enjoyed doing this. I think I need to sign up for a drawing class because this was fun. I am a very right-brained person so I think it was relatively easy for me to let go and let my hand and the pencil do the work.

I love Christmas trees – the smell, the lights, the decorating and the anticipation of what may show up underneath. I grew up on a farm in upstate NY and we would trudge off into the woods, usually in snow, to find the perfect tree.

After Steve and I married, I think we always went out to the country to a tree farm to find and cut down our tree. When we lived on the coast of North Carolina, there were no tree farms, but we had a Fraser Fir, brought from the mountains, and they are probably my favorite tree – you don’t find them here in California.

Here is a better photo of this year’s tree:

I like an old fashioned tree with eclectic ornaments – not those decorator themed trees with all the same colors and coordinated ornaments. I once thought I had lost a new friend for being so dogmatic about this. They were at our house for dinner and I had decorated the tree with home-made gingerbread ornaments and popcorn and cranberry strung on twine. I made my big pronouncement about trees all in one color. The next week we were at their house and there was this totally blue tree  – blue ornaments and blue lights! Midge became one of my dearest friends ever and the next year, she had an eclectic, much more interesting tree.

I have a weird assortment of ornaments. It is like a walk down memory lane every year. This is a Chrismon made by my son Mark when he was a gangly, incorrigible thirteen year old.

Once when we moved away from a neighborhood, all my friends gave me an ornament. I think of each of them when I put their ornament on the tree. Here is one made by the best of friends in that neighborhood:

This was made by my beautiful mother-in-law who gave us beautiful ornaments every year:

This is an antique ornament from her collection:

I made this needlepoint Teddy Bear:

I found this Santa on a scale when I was operating a weight-loss center and I bought out the store to give as gifts.

I have lots of wooden ornaments like these that I love. The really tiny ones go on the top of the tree.

One year I found these folk figures that you could cut, sew and stuff and I have several of them.

Another friend made this burro from clothespins. He makes me chuckle every year when I hang him on the tree.

Now for your enjoyment, here is some wacky seasonal music. Listen all the way through so that you don’t miss anything. It is pretty funny!

Download OhHolyNight.mp3

For the other one you need to go here.