Christmas Sorrows, Joys, and Unfinished Gifts

For the first time ever, I am taking down the Christmas decorations before New Year's Day.  I always like to have them up as long as possible because Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year, but this year I just don't want to see them any more.  My mother-in-law died early in the morning on Christmas Eve  this year.  It was very unexpected and very sudden.  From the time we heard she was in the hospital with pneumonia to the time she was gone was about 12 hours.  No time to talk to her, no time to get down to Arizona to see her one last time, no time to process anything at all.  There's no other way to describe it but that it 1 million star sucked. 

But God is gracious and gave us a really nice Christmas Day.  I could literally feel his comfort and grace surrounding our family all day.  In the afternoon, all the kids and I went out on a little photography trip with all of our photography swag and we had a really fun time taking some photos of beautiful stuff.  I'll post some of them when I get the film developed but here's one I took of us reflected in the mirrored glass of a building with our various cameras.

Four of the Meader photography geeks all in a row

On to unfinished gifts.  Well, like I thought, Al ended up getting a box with lots of quilt blocks in it for one of his presents.  I just ran out of time.  Yesterday I laid it out on the floor of our bedroom (my only option for a design wall right now) and arranged everything the way I wanted to sew it together.  I only got about a third of it sewn though so we had to carefully walk on it and around it until I got it all put together today. 

    

Here it is in all it's quilty goodness

Here's a closer shot

I'm looking forward to getting it sandwiched and machine quilting it so it can be finished and Al can use it before it starts to get warm.  I was pretty surprised that I matched the seams as well as I did since it's been so long since I've done any patchwork.  Thankfully it's a pretty simple block.  I still don't really like the process of sewing patchwork though.  I'd rather do a freeform art quilt any day.  :)

The cat seems to like the quilt too.  She's been sleeping on it all night.  :)