I hope everyone had a wonderful celebration! Our weekend was pretty quiet. Earl hibernated a lot, as did the children. It was pretty nice to have so much quiet time to myself! I built a path! Our shed is at the very back of our lot, which is a pretty considerable size at a quarter acre. I was very motivated to get the Christmas stuff put away, but there was no way I was going to slog through all that mud! So off to Home Depot I went where I bought 20 pavers. Loaded each one myself onto the cart, into the van, into the wagon, and then I carefully placed them one at a time all the way to the shed! Boy, was I proud of myself! Suffice it to say, the Christmas decorations have all been packed up and put away!

My fabulous sister-in-law, Deborah, made the trip all the way down to So. Cal. and joined my step sister and step mother with the final clearing away of stuff from my dad’s apartment. This was a very, very nice thing that she did. She brought back a wonderful owl that my dad hand carved:

He was very good at this craft, but there are not very many pieces left in the family. My stepsister and I each got an owl. It’s a wonderful thing to hold and touch and shows me a side of my dad that I really wish I knew better. He also used to make his own envelopes for correspondence using old topo maps. Way cool.

Deb also brought me his collection of aloha shirts (he spent a lot of time in Hawaii, going all the way back to his childhood) that I thought would make a good quilt, his neck ties, and two bags of fabric that my grandmother sent up. Oh, and there were some calligraphy pieces that I had done for my dad years ago. (Please pardon the flash!)

This probably looks like Latin, but it isn’t. It’s English and it’s perfectly readable if you take a good long look. I painted the faux marbling on the mat too. And drew the pillar. I know this made my dad happy, and I’m happy to have it back again. It is one of my favorites even though it was really hard to do. Those are re-touched Roman capitals. Basically, they are written with the broad nib pen and then I went back in with a fine point index pen and created the serifs and feet of the letters. That was the fun part. Trying to make perfect caps was the hard part! Seems like it should be easy, but it is very hard to get them uniform and nice.

The fabric stash from my grandmother was wonderful! Lots of great mini prints- she is a miniaturist extraordaire! I am hoping she will soon start sharing pictures of her diaramas on the internet. I’ll be the first to link to her! Here are two of my favorites from the stash:

Sorry for the blurriness. I’m still trying to make friends with my new camera. Alicia gave some good tips on her blog yesterday, if you missed it. Anyway, yum! The green is a smallish scrap, but the red is a pretty good size length. The salvage is marked GEAR 1982 and has the designer’s name too. I am so in love with this!