Monday, November 26, 2018

the end of November


I haven't checked my e-mail in over a week.
And now I'm scared to.
I get about a hundred e-mails a day;
most of them are junk,
but there are some that I'll need to tend to,
and weeding through it all takes forever.

~

Remember my china cabinet??
The one that I had to drive the trailer
to go get!?!

We finally painted it
and moved it 
to the spot that it's been waiting for its whole life
💛


It's a tiny tad more 'French's' mustard than I'd have preferred,
but I love it anyway.
As soon as I find the china 
that we bought in East Berlin
while it was still a communist country
I'll fill it up!

~

As you can see,
we also put up the Christmas tree
(and plugged in the frasier fir fragrance...)
though we have yet to put any ornaments on it.

~

no - that's not true.
There is the Operation Christmas Child ornament 
that Lexi picked up when we worked our shoebox shift.


~



For several weekends,
Tyler has been working on our stair rail
and we finally got that finished and up this weekend, too.


I love it so much!!


~
I may have gone a bit overboard,
but I've finalized the fabric pull 
for my new commissioned project.


I'm hoping to get my first block made today,
and after that,
I'll aim for a pair of blocks every work day
(double that when the blocks are small and simple)
I estimate it'll take 4-6 months to complete.

~
Along with other leftovers,
Mom and Bill gave us 
both the ham bone
and the turkey carcass
 after Thanksgiving,
so we had a delicious ham and bean soup yesterday
and our (almost) annual day-after-Thanksgiving
 turkey noodle soup.


They were both scrumptious,
but now I am ready to get back to not eating carbs!

~

I only have four more granny circles
to turn into squares and join!

(obviously, this was taken a few days ago...)
I use an empty candle jar to keep a row of circles contained and in order :-)

I discovered there is a thing called continuous join as you go
which is ever so much better than join as you go
which is better
by far
than joining afterward,
so that has sped the process up considerably.

I couldn't find an exact tutorial,
so I sorta cobbled together bits and pieces
from various blogs and videos
and muddled through
until I figured out a good method.
I should probably write it up 
so I can use it if I ever make another one...



Thursday, November 15, 2018

breaking news


Back a few weeks ago,
I told you about TaeKwonDo testing,
and how the girls didn't break all of their boards.

Well.
What I didn't tell you then,
was,
Mr. Townsend had told Tyler and me 
that he knew they could do it;
they'd broken all of their boards in class.
So he was going to let them test again at make-up testing,
but he wouldn't let them know 
that they were testing for their black belts -
they would just think they were practicing.
He was fairly certain that removing the pressure
would allow them to pass with flying colors.

And it did!

I am so pleased to announce that both Lily and Lexi
are now,
finally,
 Christ First TaeKwonDo Black Belts

I'm so proud of you, Girls!!

You can see videos of their board breaks
I am soooo grateful that one of our friends
recorded them,
since neither Tyler or I were there
(so as to maintain the illusion of 'practicing')