Christmas is over!

  Hello Friends!

I love Christmas, but I sure am glad its over!  We have a lot of fun at Christmastime but I also get really stressed out!  The task of getting the house clean and getting everything ready for people to come over is just a lot, and it was even more this year since there was so little time between the end of school and Christmas (I'm a preschool teacher so if school is in session that means that I'm working).  To add to my stress at Christmas is the fact that in order to host Christmas I have to take down my craft room, my tables get called into service as a place to seat 12 people for the holiday meal.  This is a real problem because crafting is a major stress release for me.  As soon as everyone left our house, the hubs helped me put my craft room back in order and he ordered me to go sew!  Things are alot calmer around our house now, momma has her craft room back! 

One benefit to having to take down my craft room is that in the process I have moved my craft room to a different room in the house.  I got to move from the formal dining room to the large room on the back of our house.  It has no windows but its almost twice as large as the formal dining room and its tucked away from the main traffic flows of the rest of the house and it has a door, which means when I've made a big mess no one has to see it!  I can just close the door and act like it doesn't exist.  Of course I now need to make a curtain for the window in the door to truly hide the mess but that won't take too long.  In moving my craft room I also ended up with a room with more wall space.  The formal dining room had two doorways, a large window and two built in corner cabinets, leaving little wall space and what there was, was in small chunks.  More wall space means that I've been able to fulfill one of my quilting dreams:

A design wall!  And I love it!  This design wall is made from a large piece of felt (the local craft stores had felt by the yard on sale right before Christmas!), hung over some metal rods that are secured to the wall using eye screws. The felt is secured to the rods by binder clips.  Easy and low cost and makes my quilting life so much easier.  I can layout my blocks on my design wall and I know exactly what order they go in.  When doing something that has a random quality to it, I can make sure that the randomness is still pleasing to the eye before I sew it all together.   Well, I'm off to spend the gift cards that I received as Christmas gifts, I do believe a new iron and new quilting rulers are in my future!

Until next time, I hope your day is "SEW" happy!

Shelly