Dog days of December and the Christmas Reveal

Christmas here may be cold, but we hardly ever actually have a white Christmas

so on Christmas day, even though it was pretty chilly, it was sunny enough that the dogs were happy to go out on the deck in the sun

the big black dog is my lab and the little cairn terrier is one of my daughter's dogs

I made my daughter and her husband a calendar for Christmas that had a different picture of one of our collective pets for each month of the year -- this shot may well be one that gets included in a calendar for 2012

these are the shots I got of the red dog

it's a lot harder to get a picture of her, so these were taken through the glass patio door

I'm still trying to get a really good head on picture of her with her eyes open so you can see that she has one brown eye and one blue eye

we'll keep trying


now that Christmas gifts have been given to the folks they were made for, I can show you the rest of the finished projects

this is a fleece vest that I made for the DH -- because our house is a balmy 64 degrees in the winter, he wears these around the house, and after several winters, the first one I made him is getting a little shabby

my daughter bought the fabric and I did the sewing and he should be set for another winter or two





and this is a table runner I made for my daughter

I also made her a set of four place mats (that won a ribbon at the State Fair back in August)

this black and white and daisy theme is what she has in her kitchen and I've tried every year to come up with something that works with it for her kitchen

these projects were also a good exercise for me to learn more about my sewing machine's decorator stitches.
as were these -- six very custom dish towels made for my sister

during the summer I had been to an estate sale where I picked up some vintage fabric perfect for the making of tea towels

I used a different decorative stitch on each end of each towel -- a dozen different ones (and barely made a dent in the 46 available in just one of the many menus on the machine)

yesterday she called and told me I had succeeded in making her smile while doing dishes -- a great success as far as I'm concerned


in keeping with a long standing tradition there was the building of pj pants for my daughter and her husband

the ones for my daughter came with a promise to rework them when she has recovered from the birth of her baby, but it was important to me that she be able to wear them on Christmas eve (when this one package is traditionally opened)



there were three pair of those pj pants this year

here's a picture of my grandson modeling his first ever pair of grandma made pjs

I'm hoping to make a lot more of these as time goes on

and isn't he the cutest?

so today it's on with working on both sewing and writing for the upcoming trunk show