Weekend organizing and fun!

Easily the weekend's highlight was attending a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert!  It was a special treat, attending with daughters Emily and Hannah.   The entire program was fabulous, and the guest artist Lisa Batiashvili and guest conductor, James Gaffigan, were excellent!  My favorites were the Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah by Saint-Saens, and Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. 

Scott helped me out by installing my new pegboard (from IKEA) in my sewing studio. Work in progress in the background, more on that later.

It looks great!  

Before the CSO concert, we went out for dinner at Gia Mia.  Everything was delicious!  We had zucchini fries, meatballs with polenta, gnocchi, and pizza.  

Girls night!  We decided we definitely need to do this more often, next time with Genevieve too. 

Saturday I got to do a little fabric shopping/therapy and get a few boxes checked on my Shop Hop passport.  Most of the fabrics are Moda, except for the blue and green prints which are Northcott.  The two gray prints are for the backs of baby quilts, the dog prints are for dog bandanas, and the others are just for my stash.

Our lab, Dora, just LOVES being outside in the summertime.  That is her happy place, for sure!

We love being outside too, and have been eating most meals outside this summer.  I just noticed that you can see both dogs in this photo - Buddy is under the table.  This delicious dinner was mostly from IKEA, Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes.  Yum!

 

Happy New Year 2021!

Happy new year, 2021! I wish all of you a year filled with love, good health, and happiness!

We took a drive yesterday so I could visit a couple quilt shops! I had depleted much of my Christmas fabrics, especially reds, while sewing several new Christmas stockings for new family members.  I had fun doing some stash building! 
I also had this panel that I purchased a couple of years ago, that I plan to incorporate into a Christmas quilt.  Plan for that quilt is tbd.

New year's eve dinner was surf and turf!  Scott made the entrees, I made the sides, and we both enjoyed!  My birthday is January 1st, so this was also my birthday dinner.  

I got this puzzle for Christmas from my Secret Santa, my nephew, Austin.  It was lots of fun!  So much fun, that we just broke it up, and started it again!

 

Christmas in November!

So - I still send letters and packages via snail mail, guess I'm old fashioned.  But I LOVE getting packages in the mail! And look what just arrived from Barb (from Fun with Barb) - wonderful, yummy scraps!

And when I say "scraps", let me just say, that Barb was very generous!  In addition to actual (little) scraps, Barb included several fat eighths and fat quarters, too!  See all those fun fabric designs? And the AMOUNT of fabric? Yay!

I had fun going through everything (my friend calls it "petting" the fabric).  Check out those great lime green prints (my favorite color!), fun novelty fabrics, gorgeous modern prints, and a nice selection of reproduction fabrics, Civil War, I think. 

I sorted them, made piles, thinking...what SHALL I do with these? !!! I don't know yet, but I know it will be fun!  

I saw this Churn Dash on a Barb's blog - I love the old-fashioned simplicity of the block, and the fan quilting is so lovely.  Maybe these fabrics will become a churn dash quilt one of these days?
Regardless - thank you Barb, for bringing some of your "fun" into my house!
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!