WIP Wednesday and Yarn-along

There are very few days to "do stuff" before Christmas; Daniel is in Chicago waiting for his delayed flight to Denver and hoping to get to PDX late tonight; the other kids are bored with their vacation already, sniping at me and each other, and lobbying for screen time and shopping trips.  I spent over $270 on groceries at Winco this morning (that includes the Christmas ham, the New Years' steak, and a $30 bag of cat food, so it's not a bad as you'd think.  But still.)  This afternoon I cooked some ground beef for Sloppy Joes tonight, baked up a batch of homemade granola, and started a batch of Filled Raisin Cookies.  I was going to make Grandma's Fudge recipe, but I don't have marshmallow creme.  Looks like I'll have to go back to the store before long.

Not a lot of sewing has been done today.  None at all, actually.  But yesterday I loaded Barney onto the Megaquilter and began quilting:

Quarta likes nonstop meander quilting.  She says when she's bored she likes to run her finger along the line to try to find the beginning.  Ideally, there will only be 2 ends to this one continuous line, and if I have ANY time today I might even finish it.

I'm slogging along binding Jack's Chain.  About halfway there now.

Still enjoying the Easy Street mystery quilt, but I have to wait until Friday for the next clue.

Socks for Steve -- almost ready to begin the gusset.  They will not be finished by Christmas.

Source: google.com via Katherine on Pinterest

This is the book I most recently finished, and I quite enjoyed it.  Jane Austen fanfiction is always entertaining but this was a cut above most that I've read.  I really feel the author successfully got inside Mr. Darcy's head and told a story that merges and diverges from Pride and Prejudice in a totally believable way.  It will make you want to reread the original just to see which scenes are changed and how.

I took some time to make this collage of the 12 shawls in 2012 project I completed.  I was going to save it for another post but I may want to take some blog vacation time over the next week, so I might as well share it now.  They're in sequential order, clockwise from top left, with the center photo a closeup of the bottom right shawl.  Of the 12, they all used stash yarn (or handspun from stash fiber) since I did not buy any yarn this year.  Shawls #2, 3, 9, 10, and 12 were from handspun.  Shawls #5, 6, 7, and 9 used more than 500 yards (they make a big deal about that in the Ravelry group).  Shawl #7 "Black Roses/ Lady MacBeth" was more like 1000 yards of cobweb-weight cashmere, reclaimed from a thrift store sweater and dyed with Wilton's, and I beaded that one.  So it was definitely my agony-and-ecstasy project for the year.

Now that I know how to make collages with Photoscape, I'll have to do a retrospective for my 2012 quilts and the ufo's from this year.