Phew!!

Christmas is over for another year.  I'm kind of sad it's over, we had such a lovely day.

Some Christmas gifts for friends.  You can find the recipe here.

Christmas presents opened in the morning.

Yummy Christmas breakfast at my parents house.

Quiet midday time, relaxing.

Drive to Brisbane in the afternoon.

Great Christmas dinner in Brisbane with all the relatives.  We had a blast.  My voice was hoarse and my face ached from laughing so much.

Sorry this is the only photo I had of the buffet, it was too dark and I was shy and didn't want to be the only one taking photos of the food.

I remembered to take this photo. This was a plate of fabulous seafood, prawns, crab and salad.

Moi and my dad

BP and me

I hope Christmas was a wonderful time for you and now you have some time to relax and  enjoy the next few days.

Next party -  New Years Eve!

Aussie Jingle Bells - Colin Buchanan

This one is for all the Northern Hemisphere people.
As we don't have snow, sleighs or anything else that's in the original Jingle Bells song, Colin wrote some alternative lyrics for Aussies. It's sung a lot in schools at end of year concerts.




If you need translations:

Rusty Holden ute - Holden is General Motors here in Aust.
                           - ute is short for utility
Esky - ice box cooler/ice chest
Beaut - short for beautiful
Thongs - unlike the rest of the world, Australians refer to flip flops as thongs.
Swaggie - Swagman best known in Waltzing Matilda. Wikipedia - Particularly during the Depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployed men travelled the rural areas of Australia on foot, their few meagre possessions rolled up and carried in their swag. Typically, they would seek work in farms and towns they travelled through, and in many cases the farmers, if no permanent work was available, would provide food and shelter in return for some menial task.
I have never seen a swaggie in my life and I think 99% of Australians have never seen one either.

Favourite Things Friday

It's late Friday evening here, and I've just finished making something with the help of BP, so this is my final favourite for 2011.
I decided at about 5.30 this evening that I'd attempt to make something for my father for Christmas.
After finding this tutorial at Ayumi's blog and seeing this idea on Oh Fransson! I thought I would make dad a First Aid bag.

The front

I combined the two ideas and came up with this.

AND woo hoo I actually used some of my scraps. Some of them are from charm squares I acquired about 10 years ago. I knew I'd use them for something..........eventually!! Some of the red squares are from scraps Melissa at Clothwork kindly sent me earlier in the year.

The back

The lining, hmm, just noticed a thread on the red casing.

I love it, I hope he'll love it too. He loves bushwalking, birdwatching and the great outdoors. All it needs now is some cord to finish the drawstring closure. That will have to wait until tomorrow.

BP helped me choose the fabrics, piece the back and sewed the lining for me. I love that she wanted to help and enjoyed it. She's even started sewing up some blocks left over from her Paradise quilt to make a small quilt.

So this week, my favourite is sewing with BP and starting and finishing something that I'm really pleased with, in a couple of hours.

Linking with Shay for the final FTF for 2011. I love FTF's and have really enjoyed reading everyone's posts each week. Thanks so much Shay, looking forward to next year's.

Christmas weekend

We had a fabulous weekend.

• Friday night we all went out to dinner to a local restaurant and had the best meal in the company of wonderfully kind and caring friends. It was a great start to the "official" Christmas festivities.
• Afterwards sitting enjoying the balmy weather, a drink or too and the fairy lights out on the verandah.

• Saturday morning, up not too early to open our presents. I struck gold this year, especially as Bitchypoo has been working part time since finishing school and now is "flush" with cash. My sister felt sorry for me as usually Bitchypoo doesn't get me anything so she had bought lots of little presents for me.  So, with lots of presents from my sister and all the presents from Bitchypoo, plus presents from the rest of my family and friends, I well and truly did very well.

• I will have to take photos of my bounty, we have been way too busy to have time to do that, so I might save them for another post.

• E (Bitchypoo) loved her hand made Christmas stocking and even left a lovely comment on my Christmas stocking post on Christmas afternoon, it was so cute and almost made me cry!

• I made J a pin cushion as part of her Christmas present.
• Christmas day weather-wise was pretty darn good too. With the threat of severe weather including very heavy rain we were a little concerned, however the weather couldn't have been much better. It stayed relatively dry with only a shower or two later in the afternoon. The sun even tried to peak out from the clouds late morning, which made it a little humid. It wasn't too hot, so we had a lovely lunch with family and friends.  Lunch included turkey, ham, prawns, stuffing, a sugar snap pea salad and beetroot, feta, and walnut salad, followed by J's fabulous ice cream dessert, shortbread, black and white cookies and rocky road.
• Saturday night was very relaxing spent watching videos and enjoying a quiet evening.

• Sunday the weather worsened so we took the opportunity to partake in a bit of craftiness. My friend J helped me baste a quilt. She was excellent help and we had it finished in no time and now I'm all set to start on the quilting.
• In the evening we sat out on the verandah again, under the fairy lights and had cheese and biscuits and wine, whilst enjoying the balmy and less rainy weather.
• This morning we had a coffee along the river, and then did a spot of shopping.
• This afternoon I pieced the backing of the Spice Boxes quilt, with more help from J as my mathematical ability disappeared and I completely miscalculated by forgetting to add seam allowances. After much cursing and hair pulling we eventually came up with a design that was pleasing and was big enough.
• Tonight, dinner was lamb on the BBQ with roast potatoes and Greek salad and we went to see Little Fockers, very funny and a great end to the day.

It was just the nicest Christmas I have had in quite a few years, no hassles, no arguments, just relaxing, enjoyable and stress free. I hope everyone else was as lucky as we were and had a stress free time too.

No views like this, the weather has been pretty ordinary, a fair bit of rain and no blue sky or sun for almost a week now, but I am not going to complain as there are a lot of people who are in the midst of very serious floods, and doing it tough. We have been very lucky here as it could have been far worse.

This male King Parrot visited us today dressed in his best Christmas finery.

Still wishing everyone a nice stress free and peaceful time for the end of 2010.

Merry Christmas

A big thank you for your kind words, support and encouragement throughout the year and it's been inspiring to be able to see such beautiful work, and fabulous reading all the wonderful posts.

To all the wonderful friends I have made this year, thank you so much for joining me in my journey and random ramblings. I hope you all have a very happy and safe Christmas break, and I really hope the weather is kind to everyone in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Especially those in northern Queensland with the first tropical cyclone of the season hitting the coast (this morning) on Christmas Day.

THE DIGITAL STORY OF THE NATIVITY

I have visitors here at the moment and I'm hosting Christmas lunch too, so no time for normal posts.

This is another absolutely gorgeous story of the nativity, again even if you are not religious, it is so well done and is worth a look. A great modern version and very clever.







Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone.

Back to normal posting next week.

Take care over the Christmas break,

Marg

xx

The Christmas Story (HD version)

You just have to watch this, it is SO CUTE. Even if you are not overly religious, it is well and truly worth 3.53 mins of your life to watch this right to the end.
Wise man #3 and the star are just adorable, and I love........... and then there was a party.....

Christmas stocking

I needed a crafting fix yesterday, after a completely craftless week, so I whipped this up. I'm not sure whether I love it, I tried to do random and I really just can't do random, unless it's well planned random, lol, and then it's not random is it!

P.S. You may note that it has an E on it, not a B for Bitchypoo, it is for Bitchypoo but I don't think she would appreciate that.

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

An alternative Christmas Carol

You won't have heard this one 20 times already.

Straight No Chaser - The Christmas Can-Can

(It takes a while to buffer so it might be easier to watch on You Tube)

Favourite Things Friday

Yay it's Friday again, this week has taken forever, thanks to on going verandah renovations.  It's now December and the only decorations I have on display are my Christmas crochet stars I made last week ? or the week before, (I don't remember), and my Advent Calendar.  I normally put up my tree in the last week of November so that we can enjoy it for as long as possible, however the Christmas tree and boxes of decorations are stored up in the studio, and the most direct route to the studio uses the verandah, (the one that has been out of action for the last three weeks forever.) I am crossing my fingers that I will be able to bring them down to the house on Sunday.
So this week my favourite thing is my very own cross stitch Advent Calendar. It is stored in the house, not in the studio, so I unwrapped it earlier this week and now it's sitting in pride of place.

I made this when bitchypoo was very young. I just love the detail and it's such a cute picture, although maybe not quite politically correct as Santa is smoking a pipe!

The charms are cross stitch on plastic mesh. 

Take a look over at Mrs P's  to see all the other lovely favourites this week.

Christmas day table

Here is the table that my wonderful friend J, whipped up on Christmas day. She raided the neighbours garden for the beautiful red flowering gum. A unique Aussie take on Christmas decorating, and it matched the Christmas crackers too.

A belated Christmas post

A few photos from Christmas. As it is hot here in December, I prefer to use cool colors on the tree, and use cool color lights. It doesn't quite give the same cosy atmosphere, but when its 30 degrees (86F) you don't need to be cosy.

Some of the presents waiting under the tree.