Happy New Year 2019!
Happy New Year! It seems impossible that we’re here at a new year again– 2018 whizzed by — at breakneck speed! I guess that’s a good thing — at least we weren’t bored and wondering why time was passing so slowly. I could do with a happy medium though.
The normal custom here in ThimbleannaLand is to have a Kitty animal greeting and then look back on the year of travels and projects. The cats are just recovering from a major trauma — Winston AND his favorite two-year-old-tornado were here for the weekend. It’s funny — the cats tolerate Winston pretty well now — they’ll even lie down beside him. But the 2-year old? No Way! They hear her voice at the door and dive under the bed. She’s never hurt them or anything, I guess it’s just her volume that scares them LOL. Anyway, I decided not to bother them for a New Year’s picture this year so that they can recover a bit.
Here are my 2018 pictures in review:
It was a good year here in ThimbleannaLand! Our biggest excitement was the arrival of FinallyAnotherGirl. She’s three months old now and is the best baby. She’s MUCH easier that FinallyAGirl — she hardly ever makes a peep. Both babies are just happy as can be and SO fun to be around. FinallyAnotherGirl was preceded by my fun trip to Shetland and London — definitely a highlight of the year. There was some knitting (all baby!), sewing, and quilting (technically those folded memory quilts were made in 2017, but they weren’t posted until 2018 and they didn’t make it into the 2017 round-up, so I’m counting them this year LOL). It wasn’t all fun and games here this year though. Part of the reason blogging has been fairly light is because we’ve spent the year cleaning out MeMum and BigDaddy’s house. It’s been a huge job and tons of work. We started in February and spent a lot of weekends going through papers and closets and dishes and fabric and papers and more papers and … you get the idea. It’s been the worst thing I’ve ever had to do and I can’t even describe the sadness. So, that’s about all I’ll say about it ’cause I’ll start crying. This blog has been a record of our little family for quite a few years and the clean out has been a major part of our 2018, so I didn’t want it to go unmentioned. {Sigh.}
Anyway, you might have noticed some quilts up there that haven’t been posted yet — that’s because they were Christmas gifts and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. I broke into my hoard of Cat in the Hat fabrics (and didn’t make much of a dent LOL) and made FinallyAGirl a quick quilt. It was a last minute decision and having that big center panel made it go much more quickly. Hopefully she’ll have fun with it when she’s reading her Cat in the Hat books — it’s a great snuggle size — about 56″ x 70″. (It’s so hard to get quilt pictures this time of year — pretty gloomy and dark and too windy outside. So, I had to randomly stick them up around the house, but you get the idea.)
And then, the Christmas quilts. I loved the retro Santa by Urban Chiks from the moment I saw it and knew I had to make some. I actually made three of them (two kits plus an extra Santa panel will make three quilts, fyi) but couldn’t get them all together for a photo. I made them for MeMum, MyDadLovesMeBestSister, and SweetiePie.
These quilts were super fun to make. And, for the first time, I rented time on a long-arm to do the quilting. It took a day and a half (with the lesson), but so worth it — I’m thinking it would have taken me 2 or so days each to quilt them on my regular machine. I did an overall stipple on the log cabin blocks, and then did a few different things on the Santa. Everyone seemed to like the circles on the cheeks the best.
Now to plan for the new year. Are you a resolution maker? I’m not really, but I do like to plan my next quilting and knitting projects. Hopefully, between a little cleaning and organizing around here, I can do just that.
Happy Planning and Dreaming — I hope all your New Year Wishes come true!
XOXO,
Anna
