New Year

 I do hope your year 2026 is a good one, a better one, a smart one.  Here in the U.S. 2026 can't possibly be worse than 2025....can it?  

Chooky organized two zooms, for her it was NYEve and NYDay, a real marathon.  I am happy I was able to be on for both of them for a few hours before my battery on the iPad died each day. It's so good to catch up with what I now consider my people.  On the first day there were quilters from Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, the U.S., Germany, Norway and I'm sure I'm forgetting someone.   The next day was quieter with a couple of us from the U.S. and Australia.  It was so good to see everyone and I was disappointed to miss others as people came and went throughout the two days. 

We stitched and shared stories and weather, food, plans for this year.  I learned a few things, too.  I learned that when a chicken lays an egg she squawks or clucks or clears her throat or maybe is cheering herself?  I'm a city girl, I didn't know that.  And we in the U.S. are apparently the only ones who refrigerate their eggs.  Betty said the rule of law is to treat them at home the way you got them.  If they were refrigerated then keep them refrigerated.  If not then don't fret, they're ok for even a couple of weeks if the weather isn't too hot.  Here in the U.S. the stores refrigerate eggs so we keep them that way at home.  Who knew?

There were times we all just worked on our projects and no one was talking, we were just together.

This is what I worked on while zooming.

I used my hand crank machine and put the corners on the new set of snowballs.  All will be blue and the corners are all a deep navy so they'll work next to each other with no worry.  There are 56 here!  The pile still left is bigger than this and I'm taking a break from cutting more corner squares right now so this might morph into a bigger quilt than I intended. Or two.  These will measure five inches finished.
 

I also put the binding on this with the cranker machine.  I've never attempted that before and was glad to see it wasn't as hard as I anticipated.  This was a piece from Audrey over at Quilty Folk when she was 'helping' us do one of her fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quilts. Her style is very unplanned and free cut and I love that but I lost enough track of time that it languished too long so I got it out of the basket, big stitch quilted it and layered it and called it finished after sewing down the binding last night.  She has stopped blogging and turned to IG so I don't catch up with her work as much as I used to.  But I like this, there's something to look at everywhere.

So, fingers crossed, here's hoping here's hoping here's hoping 2026 isn't grotesque. I have to dig deep.