Holiday visitors have come and gone, the tree is down (thank goodness--real trees don't generally last a full month indoors) and we've returned to something like normal routine. The turkey has become soup. There's still some cranberry sauce and a few cookies left and some furniture to move back to accustomed places; I suppose I'll find pine needles under rugs for months. We watched an old movie last night and went to bed just after midnight. Heard fireworks and honking in the distance, but that's about all the celebrating we experienced. Quiet, but satisfied.
I decided after our family left that I'd begin on a promised stole for a deacon friend. She wanted a reversible stole, white on one side and colors for the various liturgical seasons on the other. Deacons wear a stole diagonally (left shoulder to right hip) across the chest and back, with tails hanging straight down on the right side. I had a model for the shaping of the stole, and had been thinking about how to engineer it so that the colored side did not show through the white. Ended up piecing the white strips onto white felt and the colored ones onto synthetic interfacing, then binding the whole thing together. It worked out well.
The color side of the deacon stole. Liturgical colors: blue for Advent, green for Trinity/Ordinary Time, red for Pentecost, purple for Lent. The horizontal strap goes on the right hip and holds the stole in position.
This is the white side of the stole. The dark squares are a metallic silver; the pattern is "cathedral steps" in various white fabrics. White is worn for Christmas and Easter seasons and for several one-day celebrations such as "Christ the King Sunday."
Now to clean up all the white and silk remnants so I can go back to work on Pinehaven. I've made good progress on that, adding a phototransfer of the house and some more trees, but have a long way to go. I'm finding that when I work on another project in between, my ideas for Pinehaven develop unconsciously and move into my forebrain when I start work again on the project.
My other current assignment is to learn Power Point so I can give programs on art quilts without lugging a whole bunch of quilts around with me. I have bought a projector and portable screen (which I have not yet set up), and have composed the script with photos. I plan to bore Gee Gee with it several times before the scheduled presentation to the Daughters of American Colonists later this month.