It's hot and windy here today in Southern California, so we decided not to take the boat out for fishing, even though we haven't been in a long time, it's just miserable fishing in the wind, but I sure miss our fishing every weekend! It's about 90 here at my backdoor. One would never guess it's the middle of November! There are more wildfires burning all around us, people are losing their homes by the dozens, it's so darned sad, we can see the smoke from one of them looking south from our house. Just awful.

Since we didn't go fishing, I decided to re-accquaint myself with my quilting room! I haven't done a lick of quilting in weeks. I really need to get working more on my quilting. Anyway, I joined the Simply Sophisticated BOM at Fat Quarter Shop. If we all finish our monthly block by a certain date, I think it's the 25th of each month, Vicky at LA Quilter puts us all in a drawing to win a $25 gift certificate from Fat Quarter Shop. I didn't win last month, but I'll keep trying. I finished my blocks today, there were a lot of them, 8 in all, and 6 of them were 9-patches. I HATE doing 9-patch blocks. But they are done now! It feels good to be caught up.

I'll show you one thing I did manage to get my butt in gear and do. I have a TON of DMC embroidery floss. I decided since I'm getting back into cross stitch again, I should have it all organized so I can pull numbers easily. So, I ordered a couple of multi-drawer cabinets from Amazon, and now all the floss I own is nicely organized and numbered. I got two thinking I had more floss than I did, but all the floss fit into one, so I'm using the second one to hold all my embellishments, beads, buttons, etc. Here's a picture of my floss cabinet. This took quite a lot of work to accomplish. Get aload of my ORT PORT. I saw on a few blogs where people keep all their scraps of thread, for what, who knows, but I thought it was sort of pretty, all the different colors, so I started one of my own. Finally, here's a picture of how far I've gotten on A Quaker Christmas.

I am pretty perturbed though. I was zipping right along on it and GASP, I came to a spot where there is a small hole in the fabric, where a couple of threads broke! I wish I had seen that before I started the pattern! I was just sickened when I saw that. What to do. Well, I added a few stitches not in the pattern to help hold the threads from unraveling anymore, and went to my newly organized embellishment drawers and found a a little tiny Mill Hill crystal treasure, a tiny little red heart, I'll sew that puppy on there when I'm all done, it will cover up that ugly spot. Here's a picture of it up close.

Check out this picture of my Yin Yang kitties. They are both tuxedo kitties, Stinky is on the left, Talula is on the right. Could they be any bigger slobs? What a life. I can't believe I didn't make my bed today! Well, that's about all I have for now. I need to get back to my sewing room and do some more quilting, now that I seem to be in the mood.

Tootles!