Caught up...

...well, a little.  A few quilting projects completed, as you can see, and I had fun with NaNoWriMo, and well, the end of the year is always and ever busy at work.

As I've been editing photos and composing posts, Handel's Messiah has been on the CD player - from beginning to end.  My favourite Christmas music, bar none.  It's some years since I sang it (although for about ten years I did, as part of a community choir performance at the Sydney Town Hall) but it never fails to be beautiful, wonderful, inspiring music.

Now I have some entrancing scraps and partly made scrap blocks excavated from the sewing room, and I'm going to play....

Oh, and the photo in the blog banner is not photoshopped.  Just a fortuitous location for their retail endeavours!  I could have used a prettier photo of ornaments and lights, but there's a raw authenticity about that one, a casualness that's maybe more part of summer and Christmas here in Australia.  I doubt that water pistols are part of Christmas Day if you have snow, but if it's summer, and you arm the kids and uncles...there is fun to be had indeed.  I've had winter Christmases, and summer ones, and they each have their own individual flavour.  Mince pies, for instance: lovely in winter, heavy and less welcome in summer.  But here, now, the shops have cherries and mangoes, grapes and other fruit, and at night the cicadas sing under the fairy lights.

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