Sunny day, keepin' the clouds away

 Yesterday I worked on Santa.  Simple borders to just make him a little more a part of the party come Christmas.  I'm not finished.  I want to add a small off-white pencil thin border before the binding goes on. Right now he's a perfect kid sized little quilt and I think I'm quite happy with him.  Love, love, love the Santa border.  I know I mentioned before that he's the Santa I grew up with and I think this was the right use for that fabric.  Making the front and the back identical  taxed my math skills. I'm notorious for measuring, thinking, measuring and still cutting wrong only to make frantic phone calls to Friend Marilyn crying about how to fix the mess I made.  Well, I had just so much of this fabric and no chance to get anymore and the front and back had to be identical so I spent the better part of hours   making sure I measured and then multiplied by two, talking my way through it out loud.  I don't have but a strip of the fabric left but I did it!  Front and back are identical except for Santa has his backside to us on the other piece!  Don't laugh.  I am math challenged.

 

On Tuesdays I go to Elizabeth and Adelaide's school and read to their class.  You can take the librarian out of the library but you can't take the library out of the librarian, I guess. More on that later.  Today was a beautiful blue sky sunny day and along the way I stopped to take some pictures of a nice winter day. We are not getting the storm the East Coast is getting.  We were given crystal clear blue skies.

The school is in a small town near here and I pass a small lake on the way.  I always slow down and notice the ice fishermen.  I loved the look of this one chair sitting out in the middle of the lake alone (I took this picture on a snowier day.)

Today these guys were out there swaddled in layers and layers of clothes,  sitting on the ice on their five gallon buckets, holding the fish line trying to catch their supper.

 There are lots and lots of barns along the way and I always stop and take pictures of this one. Some days the shadows hit it just right. Today set against that blue sky it was really beautiful.

I turned around and went back for this one.
 

 There are apple orchards on every road.

Along the way, just down the road from the ice fishermen, is an absolutely beautiful country church. But I can never seem to capture it right.  I do love walking through an old cemetery when I have the time and this one, associated with that church, dates to the mid-1800s.