Yup, still here

I know, long time no blog

I have a good excuse -- honest!

We went off to our daughter's house for Thanksgiving -- when we go to her house we usually spend several days before and after the holiday

Before to help with holiday prep and after to just enjoy their company

This picture was actually taken on Sunday morning -- as sometimes happens, I was the first one up (if you don't count the dogs). It was cold and foggy and the sunrise was magnificent. This is one of many pictures I took standing on the back deck at my daughter's house (while the dogs tried to figure out why I was out there!)

I'm hoping to be able to do some mixed media or some quilting projects with the pictures I took -- projects for next year!

As I said, we did Thanksgiving at her house

Since there are a number of folks in our little family group that don't really care for turkey, we cooked game hens -- four of these little critters (with all the necessary side dishes) fed nine of us quite nicely with enough leftovers to make enchiladas afterwards

and don't you love the square "boobs"

little pats of butter inserted under the skin of the breasts made them quite tender and they browned up quite nicely

unforturnately, I neglected to get a picture of them when they were all done (ok, DUH!)

the evening before my daughter and I made place cards for the table

we had decided that we would make each one different except for the legs and beak which would be orange

that worked okay until I got to hers -- and just couldn't resist putting red feet on it -- then of course there is the blue and white check thing -- a lot of laughter followed this little caper

(and I'm glad we had a lot of fun doing it -- some of our coloring capers seemed to escape the audience the next day)

the remake of the gold wool sweater is complete

maybe

in general I like the look of it

the addition of the textured panel down the front is actually really attractive, and the addition of the ribbing at the cuffs and around the neck is ok

the bottom ribbing is still suspect in my mind

for one thing, it makes the sweater longer -- almost like a tunic, which may not be such a good thing

for another, it ripples -- kind of like a ruffle -- which is definately not a good thing

I'm going to try blocking it, but I'm not sure it won't just get ripped out and a less offensive border added.

and of course, since I spent some time in the car, there were completed afghan squares

these three all done, and the orange one went into the box of 36 that I mailed off yesterday

so now I'm 2 squares into another box full

Over the last week I had a bunch of stuff out on Ebay, so I spent a lot of time yesterday packaging them up and shipping them off. I have 3 more to do today, and I'm still waiting for payment on a few things. More things need to be photographed and set up this week too, so between the Ebay monster and decorating for Christmas I may not get a lot of art done this week -- we'll see