Focusing on the postive

 I did get the table-runner quilt blocks finished and pieced together, but this morning when I was going to machine quilt it, in less than 15 minutes the thread broke 3 times and the I broke a needle. I decided to walk away and try again another day. So instead of focusing on this frustration I will share a recent success.

I saw this idea on Pinterest. The idea is to take old Christmas cards and cut them up to re-purpose them as gift tags. I do not know why, but I have a huge stack of old Christmas cards we received from the past few years. 
  

I went to JoAnn Fabrics yesterday and since I had this idea in my head I stopped at the paper crafting section and found this good-sized circle hole punch from EKTools. So I pulled out the cards and got started. Not all cards work well. And if there is writing on the back side you really can't use it to write the 'To' and 'From' info. The great thing about this punch is that you can see exactly that you are punching out - no guess work. As you can see from the photos you can pick and choose what elements you want to keep.

 I also bough a regular hole punch so the tags can be attached by a ribbon. I now have a little zip-lock bag of tags ready to go for the holiday season. And probably enough for the next couple of years.

Lots going on

With the start of the semester and the end of summer a lot of the items on my to do list became more urgent. Classes started last week and I was ready for that - yeah! At home I just finished the touch-up painting on the house this weekend. The furnace tune-up was scheduled for this next week, but they had to re-scheduled so that is still on the list for yet another week. Still on the to do list, paint the porch floor and start cleaning out the garage so when we start getting frosts I can put the car in the garage.

I am slowly but steadily working on blocks for a table-runner (in photo). It is understandably taking a while as there are 53 pieces in each block - several of them bias cut pieces.

In other news Damon's plans for buying a few more fish for the aquarium are put on hold when we discovered that one of the fish had babies. He jumped on the internet and discovered that it is actually easy to tell by fin shape that three of the first fish he bought were all females. We figure at least one was pregnant when he brought them home. So now we have 4 tiny baby fish. They usually hang out towards the bottom of the tank but as they have gotten bigger in the last couple of weeks they have gotten more adventurous so we see them more often out and about.