natasha's right - i AM trying to blog more often this year.

so here are the details from christmas:

i drove from edmonton to my parents' on the afternoon of christmas eve. my sisters and dad and i all went into town to visit my grandparents at the lodge. then we came home and did our traditional christmas eve gingerbread cookie decorating. we also ate perogies for supper. we aren't really all that traditional, but because of my dad's ukrainianness, we aren't allowed to eat any meat on christmas eve. so although i had been looking forward to a big, meaty meal after all that travelling, i was stuck with just perogies. boo.

we opened our presents on christmas morning (i thought i'd point that out, because other people do it other times, you know?). i mostly got money, but i also got two things of second cup vanilla bean hot chocolate mix (my favourite!) from emily, a $25 gift card to chapters from alyssa, and - here's the best one - the gift from my parents was to have the quilt i've been working on for the last year and and a half quilted (if that doesn't make sense, here's an explanation: i sewed all the pieces together to make the pattern on top and the backing, but someone with an industrial-sized machine is going to quilt the top, batting, and backing together. once i get it back, i'll have to hand-sew the binding around the edges). here is a sneak peek. when i took this picture, i still hadn't sewed on the two borders around the main part. so, this is called a log cabin quilt. mine has 64 squares, and each square is made up of 17 strips of fabric. apparently, "quilters are told that [each square] represents log cabins on the prairie with red center squares for the hearth, light values on one side for the sunny side of the house and dark values on the opposite side for the shady side of the house." neat, huh? so that's pretty much what i worked on for the week i was home during christmas. i didn't see any of my friends at all, but i talked briefly on the phone to jessica, dustan, and andrea. i also watched the entire 4th season of "the office," as well as "the dark knight" (which i didn't really like at all).

on christmas day, my grandma and gido and auntie lorraine and uncle pete came over to my parents' house, and we all had dinner at 1:00. the nicest thing from christmas was when i showed my gido bill my quilt after he had seen me cross-stitching (which i was doing partly because i don't like being in a room with a lot of people, even when it is my own family at christmas, and partly because i know my mom will never finish the stocking she started cross-stitching for alyssa), and he remarked, "boy, you are really something, caylie." it was a really simple sentence but felt really, really nice. i like to think that he likes that i am crafty and always busy, like my grandma. i sure do love my gido.

anyway... back to quilting. since i had a reasonable amount of fabric left from my quilt, and most of it was cut into 1.5" strips, i decided to try to make a star-blanket wallhanging with the scraps. it's about 20" x 20", and my mom is going to put it up in her living room. i did the quilting of the layers on this one myself. i still have to handsew the binding onto three of the sides, and that's what you can partially see in the corner of this one. i really like it overall, and think that the next quilt i do will be in this pattern.