We had a nice Christmas weekend, starting with friends on Friday evening. We did our annual ornament exchange/Chinese auction style. Above is the glow-in-the-dark snowflake that I made for the event.
Ethan, Hope's boyfriend (below right) ended up with it.
After eating & exchanging ornaments, we played Pictionary-man. Much fun & silliness ensued.
The crowd left about midnight. We blew out the candles & crawled into bed until... (I'll finish this story at the end of the post.)
I wanted to share other things I've done for Christmas first. I got a blank PFD white silk scarf for one of my gifts from Jan at my Calendar Girls group. I used it to make a gift for my friend Kathy, who always exchanges with me.
I finished up a customer quilt for Tracy Trasky. This bear who I think should be called "The Guardian", because that's what he felt like to me, when hanging on my studio wall, waiting to be bound.
I also quilted the top that I gave to my DH for Christmas last year. I was a day late fining it, because of the rest of the story....
At 4 a.m. on Christmas eve morning, we were awakened by the electronic voice of the fire alarm screaming "FIRE! FIRE!" along with it's obnoxious alarm that even the hard of hearing can't ignore. I grabbed my robe & ran up the stairs, & found we indeed did have a fire blazing on top of the bookcase where earlier there had stood a candle. It was burning the cotton batting that was snow for the nativity. My first stuporous impulse was to smother it with my robe. Well, I found out that fleece burns quite well. Now I had a fire right by the Christmas tree, that was burning a package & a robe along with the cotton snow-batting... I ran to the kitchen & grabbed my tea kettle & a pan of water, & ran back pouring it over the fire, putting about 2/3 of it out. I think this is when I carried the flaming robe, & burning foot stool, which were melded together, out on to the snow covered porch, & got more water to put the rest of the fire out. Warren was working on damage control at that point, & I think that's about the time that I realized my hands felt like they were on fire. The right hand fingers got the worst of it. We went to the ER where they gave me drugs & attempted to bandage my wounds, but I couldn't stand having my hand out of a cold bucket of water for any longer than a few seconds before I had to plunge it back in again. It was about 24 hours before the fingers no longer felt like they were still in the flames. We felt very fortunate that so little was damaged, & we are safe, & healing. My hand no longer hurts.
The final photo that I am posting is another piece of silk that I dyed when I did the scarf. I think it looks like fire.
