Merry-the-day-after-Christmas- Some years I have braved the stores on this day, looking for the perfect deals on the cute items that I couldn’t justifying buying for myself or for the house on the days leading up to Christmas. But this year, I had child care for the younger two and the oldest in the first day of football camp [Oh Lord help me!!….] and just couldn’t bring myself to spend my day shopping when there was so much cleaning, organizing and project planning to do in the studio and office. And so today found me busy as a bee, trying to squeeze 5 days worth of work into 6 hours… its amazing what a mom can do when she knows that all of her “vacationing” children are well taken care of! As a result of my organizing, I…

I just want to wish all of you the Merriest of Christmases!! For me tomorrow, the 24th is the day our family celebrates the most. It is considered Christmas in Poland and therefore Christmas at our house as well. There are many special traditions and foods that only come this one day a year for us but I won’t regale you with all of those right now…. lets just say that there is a lot of cabbage and potatoes! Mostly I just wanted to sit down for a moment and thank you for being a part of the creative process for me these months, for being such a gracious and willing audience to my musings and thoughts. I have really enjoyed blogging and am looking forward to another year full of blog fun and festivities. For now, I am sincerely hoping that all of you spend your…

Well, surprise, surprise, here’s another post from my trip to Paris… This time I am taking you on a little voyage through the craft & patchwork show that I attended while in Paris, in fact this show, named Cree Attitude, was the reason for the timing of my Parisienne adventure! Quiltmania, my favorite French patchwork magazine asked me to show one of my Christmas quilts, Mistletoe Hollow, in their booth at the show which meant that I got a backstage pass, so to speak, to see the show itself. This was a general craft show, or a hobby show as they referred to it, and the exhibitors ranged from patchwork shops [quilting is generally referred to as patchwork in Europe], to embroidery & all types of needlework, to knitting, to decoupage & scrapbooking to ceramics & food crafts, to weaving & woodworking… It was wonderful to…

Have you all had enough of Paris? You know I’ve just barely scratched the surface of the 353 photos I took while there…. I thought I’d interject a little quilt shot of one of our best selling Christmas quilts, Yuletide Snowflake. It is a traditional Bethlehem or Lone Star made in warm Christmas colors and with the added applique you can turn it into a grandiose snowflake! Now let me just tell you something about this quilt… ready for it…. ready for it…. this quilt has no templates, no special rulers, no insets seams and basically anyone can make this type of star! How this is possible is that if you use a jelly roll and cut your strips on the angles indicated in the pattern, you can make super easy diamond strips. When you position the same colors in the same…

Another early evening walk that I wished I had time to do more than once, I began on the Rue de Rivoli and wandered down quite a few streets in the very center of Paris. To orient you just a bit, the Rue de Rivoli is the street that runs behind the infamous Louvre museum and the Tuilleries Gardens and it is towards the beginning of one of the great shopping areas in Paris. It might not be quite as well known as the Champs de Elysees or quite as fancy as the Galleries Lafayette & the Boulevard Hausmann but Rue de Rivoli & the streets surrounding it like the Rue Saint Honore, Rue des Capucines and Rue Paix, have countless high fashion neighbors with some of the most charming & beautiful holiday window displays I have ever seen. The closer you walk toward the Opera and the Galleries Lafayette…

There is something really wonderful about arriving in a new place with the feeling and sensation that you have been there before, that you feel at home. That is the feeling I got when I walked out of the metro stop on St. Michel and walked the few blocks to what would be my home for the following 3 days. Granted, I have been in Paris before, but it feels like more than that. One of the most enticing charcteristics of this city is that it is so “out there” for you to experience. It is truly a walking city and every part of life happens right before you on the “rues” and the “boulevards” of the city. One of my favorite aspects of Parisienne city life is the marketplace. Markets come in many different forms in Paris and believe me when I tell…

Greetings friends…. or should I say Bonjour or BonSoir- Well Bon Soir it is as the photos I am going to share first where all taken at night in what I have decide to call my favorite little street in Paris. Now, there are a thousand different choices and maybe next time I have a chance to wander the nooks and crannies of Paris, I will find and fall in love with a new favorite. But for this visit, this is the one. For a little geography lesson Paris is divided more or less down the middle by the river Seine, crisscrossed by a number of beautiful little and not so little bridges. More or less in the middle of the city are 2 little islands. The bigger of the two, Ile de la Cite, is home to the Notre Dame, my favorite church and tourist attraction in Paris…

I am back from my travels & living like some kind of a nocturnal creature for the last two days. Somehow transitioning to a new time zone was no problem when I had to get up and work & teach all day every day but has been MUCH harder when back in the luxury of my own home, napping when I want [& the munchkins let me] and waking up in the middle of the night, ready for a tasty dinner snack :-)! To finish off my travels, my bags decided to do another little tour of Paris while I landed in San Francisco and when they finally did arrive 48 hrs later, it looked like they had walked around in the rain for a few days… rain on the inside of the bags! I don’t know how & what but its been quite an adventure, more for…