Christmas in July

Merry Christmas! I say that because I just hosted a Christmas in July party at the Tuesday night Quilting Bee. I have wanted to do it for a while, but I didn’t realized I had been talking it up so much, until these ladies started making comments like, “Well, you’ve been talking about doing this for a couple of years.”

My logic is as follows, the time to start or finish your Christmas projects is in July, not in December (when I tend to do it).

I didn't expect this idea to snowballed (pun intended) as it did, but the Christmas Spirit has a way of taking over if you give it an opportunity. It was fun to see everyone get excited and start "keeping secrets" about what was going to happen at the party. What's a party without food, so took honey dew melon chunks and watermelon (green and red). I wanted to cut watermelon slices to look like Christmas trees….but I couldn’t find my metal Christmas tree cookie cutter….so they had to settle for triangles.

The spur to have this party came when I was visiting Elizabeth Hicks and her mom, Susan. Susan use to be in the stationary business and was a rep for several lines. She isn’t in the biz anymore but consequently she has boxes and boxes of "samples" she wanted to get rid of. These samples included Christmas gift bags. I brought home two huge boxes at her insistence. I bet I had over 300 Christmas bags. Anyway, I decided to bunch them up into party favors and share them with my friends. The day of the party I made a Christmas CD and sat on the floor putting together the gift bag party favors. My cats, Buttons and Bo were on had to help.

At the party, Cheryl Wilson gave me a homemade Christmas apron….cute! Joanne gave every one a small Christmas theme fabric panel. Others brought presents so we put them on a table and then had a drawing.

It was funny to see Mary Ann randomly selected a gift of the table only to find inside a disposable camers. Mary Ann is the Piecemakers by the Bay Quilt Guild Historian and provides me with most the pictures (regarding quilting) for my blogs.

There were many "show and tells" and then we ate, but I won’t mention how much.