Another Update and Halloween Wrap Up

I've kind of lost my blog writing uumph but thought I'd post a few pictures from Halloween here at my house and give you a bit of an update.    I'll save the update until the end in case you want to skip that.  

Our two grandsons came over and helped decorate for Halloween.  The oldest is 14, so he did most of the outside decorating.  I think the trick or treaters enjoyed the lights.

                                       


Here are the three tomato cage ghosts that we put out every year.  My tomato cage ghost tutorial can be found in my blog post here.  

Since I wrote the tutorial, I've put a styrofoam ball on top to make the heads more rounded.  

Our youngest grandson is 10.  He's pretty creative when he's turned loose with a couple of containers of Halloween decorations.  He likes this quilt, so it hangs in the kitchen.  

He stuffed every single stem that he could find into this one vase.  He kept asking me where I wanted him to put things, and I told him to just put things where he thought they looked best.

He put lots of pumpkins on the coffee table.  He spent a lot of time decorating.   He worked really hard to make sure that every cross stitch pillow was visible.  

Then he moved out to the porch and decorated the coffee table there.

This display is on the floor.  He kind of has a circle thing going.  

Even the fan had a pumpkin.  

And the person that sits in this chair will get a pumpkin surprise.  After all the decorating was finished, we took the boys out for pizza and breadsticks at our favorite place.  

Last weekend I went up to Shipshewana, Indiana, to the Midwest Fabric Study Group meeting.  This was my first time, and I really enjoyed getting to see Mary Kerr and her quilts.  I've been a fan of hers since I saw her quilts in Paducah about 10 years ago, and I have 4 of her books.  

This hexagon quilt is in one of her books, but photos don't do this one justice.  She left it hanging during the entire weekend, and I couldn't stop looking at it.  

If I were making this block, I'd be stressing over the direction of the stripes in that outer round.   The maker of this quilt didn't worry about fabric direction or consistency as you can see in the bottom corner of the photo.  And the entire quilt is quilted with red thread.  

Update:    I just finished my 8 weeks of physical therapy for my knee at the end of October.  I've had the kneecap pain for several months now, and the physical therapy didn't change anything.  I saw the surgeon again, and he's recommending kneecap resurfacing.  I won't give you the gory details, but there will be another surgery using the same incision and they will put a "button" on the back side of my kneecap.  That means more recovery time, and you guessed it-more physical therapy.  Meanwhile, during a routine visit to my primary care doc last week, she heard something in my heart that wasn't supposed to be there so I'm seeing a heart doctor on Monday.  I'm also having a test in December on my surgery leg because it's numb down to my 2 outer toes. That test is right before Christmas, so I'll most likely have the surgery in January sometime.  At least that's the plan for now.  

Thanks for stopping by for a visit.  

I hope you're finding some time to stitch today.