Holiday Wholecloth Snuggles

This last week I found myself a little overwhelmed with all the holiday have-to's, want to's, traditions, and expectations. It's the year for cutting back and simplifying - taking joy in celebrating our blessings as we honor our family traditions in a more simple form.

Last year was our turn for the kids to be home for the holidays. It was the first time in several years. What a treat and so many great memories to sustain us through this year when it will be just the two of us again. And, on the positive side, having just the two of us makes it much easier to scale things back a bit. And to that end ... I mentioned to Mike that we might not bother with a tree this year ... "Let's just have a few things up and not go crazy with putting up Christmas all through the house."

Later in the day I noticed he had his new train set boxes out and was pulling the sousaphone out from beneath the grand piano for "just a small" set up. Then I heard him making several trips down and back up from the basement arms filled each trip with Village boxes. Okay, I thought ... we could do a small village set-up. I'll just watch and see where this goes. Meanwhile I kept quilting the wholecloth design I was working on from my new collection ... Anniston Iron.

Now this wholecloth has had a mind of it's own from the very beginning. Things can always look very simple on the computer screen. I must continually remind and ask myself ... "But can and how will you stitch this out, Miss Kay?"

Suffice it to say ... after much monitoring and adjusting, my beautiful throw size wholecloth is now a 2x2 block wall hanging, a table runner, and very long skinny throw (probably will be changing that one yet) and the left-overs from cutting the original wholecloth into smaller units has become the "snow" under the village/train set-up.

Actually, I think I've hit upon a great idea for all of you quilters out there. The houses, the train, and especially the people do much better in the wholecloth snow than they have done on batting in the past - much more stable. And the quilting design looks like swirling snow all around the figurines. So now I'm going around making mental notes to myself regarding sizes of buffet tops, desk tops, table tops, and display shelves that may need a "dusting of quilted snow" for the Santa collection to rest upon next year. And everything will all be in place for the snowmen to take their places in January.

Oh, and Mike said he would be bringing in the tree later this week since we finished up with Mistletoe Magic 2007 on Saturday. (more on MM07 to come.)