Day Six- Christmas Day

Here is my wonderful family














and my adorable precious talented and gifted three kids!- Dave is 23, Rachel 21(on the right) and Ruth 18 (in the ble striped shirt).


We had a nice breakfast meal at lunch time and then handed out the money-checks from the grandparents, cash from us and foil covered chocolate coins. This has been our tradition - being together rather than lots of opening of presents. We are planning three outings together over the next 10 days as a way to celebrate folks being home from school and to do things together rather than everyone run off and do their own things. Sat night is the first one. We will go to Fonthill the mansion in Doylestown to see the Christmas decorations by candlelight tour. Monday we will go to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philly and then one warm day we will go to the zoo- Ruth's pick. We are hoping for that warm day to be outside. Fortunately the first two planned events coinside with Tim being off work so he can go too.


In additon to yesterdays mostly being a family day I took all the strings out of the piece I had spent hours sewing and the leaves barely showed up. It was a disappointment but I know what I did wrong. This picture is not exactly the right colors but using the flash changes the color and I haven't gotten good enough with photoshop elements to take the time to fix it so it is correct to the actual cloth. Anyhoo you can see a few of the leaf prints showing up but trust me this is not what i was looking for. What I did wrong: I used cotton thread to sew the leaves so when I dumped the whole thing in the soda ash the cotton threads as well as the cloth became ready to absorb dye. I will try again and use poly or nylon thread so it will actually act as a resist to they dye and there will be nice leaf prints all over.



This piece below is the one that had the glue dots all over it. They too were to act as a resist to the dye. It worked pretty well I think and I have lots of places to add more color




The last thing I did while watching a movie and some TV last night was to pull out a piece I hadn't worked on for YEARS and finally finish sewing on the seed beads. I'll post again later today with todays work and give you a picture. I have a decision to make about this piece....