Can you believe it's October?

I know, where did the summer go?  And now that it has turned into fall its time to start thinking about Christmas.  I know, you are all telling me to bite my tongue.  I can't though.  As a quilter I tend to make a lot of holiday gifts and I'm sure you do the same.  If your list is as long as mine that means you really need to start the day after Christmas or at least the day after New Year's.  Do you find yourself in the same boat?

I also say that as a long-armer that this is where it starts to get into busy season with folks wanting to get things done in time for the holiday to decorate their homes or give to friends and family.  We always like to try to start the planning early, but it always seems like the nice weather comes and I want to go outside and play saving those projects for rainy or bad weather days.  Isn't it always amazing the things that seem to pop up when we aren't looking?

Well, if you are like me you are starting to seriously re-evaluate the list you wanted to accomplish and have started to pare it down to a more reasonable size that won't cause you undue amounts of stress this holiday season.  If you are like me a few years ago you are still thinking that mountain of a list is still manageable as long as you can reach some daily goals (which may or may not be reasonable goals).  I like to think that I've learned somewhat of a lesson over the years.  However, I'm sure my husband will disagree with me when we reach that dreaded 11th hour and I'm surrounded by not quite finished yet projects.

Feel free to share stories!  I know my best one is the year I made the most adorable chenille snow dog wall hangings.  I was hurrying through either the quilting or the buttonhole stitching and managed to sew through my finger.  Yep, needle straight through the nail and the tip of my finger.  Thankfully I didn't jerk or continue to press on the foot feed of my machine.  I did yell for my husband who was upstairs and *ahem* indisposed as I was yelling for him to come down to hand me my scissors.  I did manage to extricate the needle from my finger by tapping the foot feed once and since I now had thread through the hole it was doing me the favor of wicking away the blood so I didn't bleed on my white chenille snow dogs.  However, I couldn't move to get my scissors which were across the table from me so I had to patiently wait for my crabby husband to come downstairs to see why I was making "all the fuss".  He did feel bad when he saw my predicament and helped me remove the thread and bandage up so I could carry on.  After all, Christmas waits for no one!

Happy Fall everyone!  Enjoy the crisp sweatshirt and warm apple cider weather!