Productive

It has been wet here, for days now. We haven't seen outrageous rainfall, unlike other parts of Australia, and no flooding here. Two reasons it doesn't flood where I live. Firstly I live on the side of a hill, so if it floods here, we are in very very big trouble, and secondly this area has always had very heavy rainfall it's not uncommon to have 4 inches of rain in a single thunderstorm in less than an hour, the landscape is able to cope very well with heavy rain.

Enough of the geography lesson, lots of rain meant I made the most of the cool weather and tried to make a tiny inroad into my ever growing pile of WIP's which are slowly turning into UFO's.

I finished piecing this quilt top, it has a name too, Spice Boxes. Excuse the very ordinary photo of it, it's just too wet and grey to take photos of it outside and this is the best of a bad bunch. The pattern is a  Kate Conklin design that was in a Down Under Quilts magazine earlier this year.  I just love the colours in this, I started off using the warm palette from Anna Maria Horner's Innocent Crush line and added some Kona solids to break it up as they are beautiful fabrics but very busy. I also wanted to use a few more fabrics from my stash to make it a bit more individual so I added some Castle Peeps, Hope Valley, Deer Valley, and Meadowsweet.  I'm really happy with how it's come together, after a lot of time spent trying to make it look random, I just can't do random random, I have to have controlled random. Now I'm just stressing about how I'm going to quilt it.

After finishing the Spice Boxes top, I tackled the Wonky Owls quilt in an effort to reduce my pile of unfinished 2010 quilts.  After a lot of brow furrowing, swearing and an almost "art installation" moment, where it was quite possibly going to be burnt, stabbed or run over, or all three, I finished the quilting. No photo yet, but in the meantime, a photo of the binding all ready to go.

We also put  up the Christmas tree on the weekend, unlike Mrs P's at QIMP whose tree looks fabulous and very finely dressed, mine looks almost naked. Bitchypoo wanted to go with a blue/silver theme, unfortunately I don't have that many decorations in those colours, and I don't want to buy anymore so it's going to have to stay naked.

 Sorry I had to crop the photo so you couldn't see the disaster zone* in the background. The tree is tall and slim as the layout of the living area means a lovely big fat tree would take up half the floor space.

I bought a couple of decorations in a sale about two weeks ago, they were so cute I couldn't resist.

I'm having second thoughts so I think I'll buy some silver tinsel to make it look a little less forlorn, I can't have a naked Christmas tree.

* The reason the disaster zone in the background - due to the very wet weather, the verandah decking oil still hasn't dried so I can't put any of the furniture back on to it, a lot of it is still taking up space inside. I'm hoping I'll be able to show the big reveal later in the week, that's if it stops raining for a day.

ETA: I didn't buy any tinsel, when I had a look at what was on offer I decided against it.    I am very glad I didn't buy any and thank you all so much for your wonderful and supportive advice. M