Medicinal Purposes

I admit, Black Friday and Christmas shopping is usually wasted on me. I try never to step foot outside the house during the madness after Thanksgiving, and I thrift or make most of my gifts for Christmas. This year I needed to boost my spirits after the bad news, so I decided to do a little shopping from indy sellers during December for someone who rarely gets gifts: me.

These silver beads from LadyBirdBeadsCo are both new and vintage, and go nicely with the silver and garnet frog brooch I thrifted. I'll be using these as stitch embellishments next month for the first of my calendar project tote bags.

These three mystery fat quarter bundles came from FlatWaterMuse. I (obviously) don't need the fabric, but I needed the mystery.

Love all three sets. Now I'll just have fun with them.

14carrot, my favorite Etsy seller, really came to my rescue with a handmade pearl bracelet, three adorable quilt tags and two bags of charms and jewelry findings that I can use for the 2026 calendar project. If you want to find a gift to make your recipients smile, Karen's creations are perfect.

While out finishing up our gift shopping for the family, which I now have to ship all over the planet instead of put under the tree, I bought myself a bag of my #1 favorite snack. Yes, they're bad for me, and yes, they're not on my diet. From my POV they're medicinal, as nothing soothes Christmas pain like Keogh's Truffle and Irish Butter potato chips (available at World Market.)

When we got home I added a few more rows to the granny stitch rectangle throw. It's starting to look really cool, too.

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Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

Progress

My guy is back home safe, sound and exhausted. I think he just realized he's over seventy now. :) I didn't finish a sewing project while he was gone, but I did make some progress on the beach bag. I've tacked down all the fabric elements on top of the old backing fabric I quilted. Time to break out the embroidery thread box and have some fun.

Valerean

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