Happy Holidays!

The kids and I are in Idaho, and my parents' house, as is my sister. It's darn cold here--around 20 degrees F at the moment--with lots of snow. The kids are loving it! (The pic above is my parents' British phone booth that they brought back when they moved back from England.)

The day before yesterday Gilly made a snowman:


and Ryan had a good time investigating the tree:



Yesterday was the Great Dyeing of 2010. Last year Karen and my Mom helped me dye the roving that I spun into yarn for my Bono Kimono (which just needs to be blocked and then seamed), so this year I told them I'd help *them* dye.

We dyed six pounds of roving.

The four braids on the left are my Mom's Polworth roving, and the three on the right are some of Karen's Polworth.


The pink/orange/purple on the left are Karen's merino/mohair roving, and the ones on the right are the rest of the batch of Karen's from the pic above.

Here are the rovings before we braided them:

And another gratuitous shot on the drying rack:

We've been busy indeed! :-)

ETA: I've gotten a couple of questions about what rovings are. They're basically long lengths of fiber that's been cleaned and the fibers have been aligned so that they're (mostly) going in the same direction. The proper name is actually "top" but "roving" is a more commonly-used term (although it's not correct--"roving" has the fibers *not* aligned). Here's a good explanation.

Quilts--lots of them!

It's been very, very busy around here. I just finished the final quilt that's due out before Christmas. I feel like a huge load has been lifted from my shoulders.

This is going to be a *very* picture-heavy post, so I'll apologize in advance.

I'll go in order from the ones I haven't posted pics yet (although I'm deliberately leaving out one that I know if a gift, and she's asked me to hold off posting about it until after Christmas).

This is a team effort from Leslie Hale and Teresa Marler:


Janet Hall made this beautiful Irish Chain:



Janice Drehobl put this neat quilt together:



I LOVE how this one by Janet Hall turned out:




And another of Janet's:



Monica Maklin made a couple of really cute kids' quilts using similar patterns and cute prints:



Brooke Lindamood put this cute quilt together for her daughter. She wanted the quilting to look like bubbles, and I think it does!

This is Brooke's other quilt, made to showcase a t-shirt of her Dad's:




Here's another of Janice Drehobl's quilts. The back has notes from "the cat" and it's really cute. I wrote some sayings down the long strips ("a cat's a cat and that's that," "you own a dog but you feed a cat" and the like).



Janice's autumn quilt. We decided on leaves and pumpkins for the quilting.



Janet and her sister pieced this beautiful batik quilt:



Diane Turner's daughter put this top together using her t-shirts from high school:



Leslie Hale made some quilts for Christmas gifts:








Kathryn Blalock had some quilt tops pieced by some of her relatives, and she brought them to me to quilt. They all use vintage fabrics, and they're mostly hand-pieced.