Category: Holidays

From the time they were toddlers, my girls have loved to play dress up in fancy dresses. We loved to find old prom dresses at the thrift store or at garage sales for them to play in. One year my friend, who has two daughters about the same ages as mine, and I made big…

For several years while I was working full-time outside the home, I was off on Mondays so every week the girls and I would have a tea party when they got home from school. We each had a favorite tea cup and favorite tea, and I would get special fancy cookies, and we would just…

The girls had pets this year. DD#1 had a white dove and DD#2 had tree frogs, so I made these ornaments out of Friendly Plastic. It’s hard to see from the photo that they are iridescent and metallic.

This year we celebrated two “firsts.” It was DD#1’s first year of playing the violin, and it was DD#2’s first year of playing volleyball. I remember looking all over for a small violin to use as the basis of DD#1’s ornament. I was so relieved when I finally found this one only about a week…

This year I was becoming more interested in quilting, and less interested in other crafts. I made thirty or forty patchwork ornaments similar to these as gifts that year. Each one was a small log cabin quilt block and I put a fragrant orange-cinnamon tea bag inside.

In 1994 I was still doing quite a bit of cross stitching. I entered a contest that was being sponsored by one of the cross stitch magazines, and these original designs were my two entries. They didn’t win, but I still liked how they turned out so they became the girls’ Christmas ornaments for that…

This is the year the girls began collecting things. DD#2 had been interested in rocks for years (in fact, the Christmas when she was three, all she wanted for Christmas was rocks), but this year we went to a rock show in Cincinnati. She was thrilled by the vast array of colorful rocks. This agate…

I spent a lot of time this year reading every quilt book I could get from the library. I was especially impressed with crazy quilts. I loved the creativity and variety in them. In my imagination, I thought it would be fun to make one. I’ve even collected bits of lace and trim and specialty…

We moved from California to Ohio in 1991. It was so much fun to watch the girls discover all kinds of new things. Fireflies, for instance. There were no fireflies in San Diego, so it was lots of fun to run around and catch them here in Ohio. Rain was another thing that was new…

This was the year that my girls loved the My Little Pony toys. I remember collecting them at garage sales. They each had their favorites. They spent hours lining them up and act out stories with each other. Not long before Christmas, the company came out with miniature versions of the larger toys, so I…