Thanksgiving Week

I love Thanksgiving week. I always take this week as vacation and get to spend some quality time with my Granddaughter as her school closes for Parent/Teacher conferences. I always knew that Kylie was one smart cookie, but now she has the proof - Straight A's on her report card - it doesn't get any better than that. She reminds me so much of her father it's not even funny - I don't think that I ever got Straight A's - except maybe in art. Yes, I am one proud grandmother!

After spending the better part of the week with Kylie, I've come to the conclusion that I don't ever want to grow up - it's just too much fun being childlike. Don't they call this Peter Pan Syndrome?

I picked up Kylie on Saturday afternoon for a "Girls Day Out" and we started off at Joann Fabrics for a papercrafting demo. I always hoped to get into scrapbooking, but so far all I've ever done is some retail therapy and amass a lot of stuff that I planned to use one day and never have. Thankfully, I didn't purge it when I was in my "clean it out" mode. Joann's was demo-ing one of those fancy new Cricut machines and as they were setting the bait to reel us in, I thought twice about spending $400 for a machine that I may or may not use -- then there were the cartridges that go along with it. Whoa, this could be an expensive new hobby. Oh, did we ever get caught up in the possibilities of the things that we could make with this machine, but as we browsed the aisles of Joann's, they had a Sizzix Big Kick machine that was hand crank and 40% off both the machine and die-cuts. Now that was more like it. After we left Joann's, we went to lunch and Kylie's head was just swirling with ideas of what we were going to make.

Here's Kylie at work with cranking out all of the designs.

Let me tell you, this was the best money ever spent. I have never had so much fun playing with little pieces of paper and glue and seeing the happy smile on Kylie's face as she was creating her masterpieces. The time spent together laughing, talking and being creative was priceless.

Kylie did take time to dote on "the boys" and they loved every minute of it.

I have a few projects that I've been working on that are quilt related and I hope to get back to them once the papercrafting bug has let up.

This is an embroidered pillow top that just needs a backing.

This is the background for a Country Santa that needs to be appliqued.

and, finally a Christmas tree quilt that needs to be quilted and I'm still playing with the prairie points that will rim the edge.

I'm hoping that posting these half-finished photos of works-in-progress will shame me into finishing them. Do ya think???

Happy Thanksgiving! I am so thankful that I had so much fun spending time with my granddaughter.