I'm ba-aaack!

Will you look at that? Looks like I gained a few more followers while I was on vacation. So happy to have each and every one of you!

If you're in the U.S., you know that last week was Thanksgiving. I went home to visit my family for the first holiday in 10 years. You read that right. 10 years. It was over much too soon. My little brother (he'll love that) was there for about 24 hours at the same time as me and my best friend from high school (gulp, 20 years ago!) was there with his husband. Wish I could have spent the whole week with all of them, but they had lives and travel arrangements of their own. BFF had the idea to do family portraits one day. Here are a few:

Unfortunately, my brother wasn't there that day, but was visiting our dad, instead. He had grown a mustache for Movember along with a number of his friends back on base in Pensacola. Try as we might, he WOULD NOT let us document said lip caterpillar, but I captured a wee peek of it.

I'm very proud of him and miss him a lot. 24 hours was not nearly enough time to spend with him. He's promised to come visit us in Minnesota next summer.

So I'm back home, now, and plugging away at my projects while my sweetie is in Hawai'i <sob!> without me. It's hard posting anything, though, because I'm working on so many different projects for Christmas and my friends and family are very supportive in reading my blog. <Hi! I love you guys!> Luckily, I think I've come up with a couple pics that won't give anything away.

Doesn't that stack look like a bunch of pancakes??? Nothing else I can tell you about it, yet. Come January I'll say more.

Another Pay It Forward is half done! I call it Starry Night.

And I'm having fun with fabric on the design wall. Nothing sewn, yet, but I can tell this is going to be cool.

My holiday crafty list hasn't shown much progress:

1. Snakes and Vines - still not done and I didn't get to see my friend and her boys (one of whom this is for) when I was home. This may need to be a finish for  2012. I'm quilting it in a really neat but work-intensive way.
2. PIF 3
3. PIF 4 - 1/2 done
4. PIF 5 - work has begun!
5. Mondrian commission - Sarah, would you understand if this wasn't started until January? I'm sorry it's taking so long to wrap my head around!
6. Kona challenge quilt - partially quilted
7. Non-traditional Jack
8. My sweetie's quilt

9. Charity item

10. House Project Quilt for a friend in the flickr-verse

11. Maverick Star for my MPLS MQG meeting this Thursday

12. Sewn Together VQB blocks for Rick - fabric has arrived

How is your list coming?