Merry Christmas!

k, ignore everything you’ve ever read or seen about how spending Christmas alone is a terrible thing.  It’s not – in fact, it’s been a very pleasant experience.  Of course, it probably helps that I’ve never really thought of Christmas as that big a deal anyway.  Yes, I have a lot of fun decorating the tree and wearing Christmas earrings to work every day of December, but that’s just because I love the total lack of taste of the season – all that tinsel and coloured lights.  It’s such fun to embrace the tackiness.  But the sentimental side of Christmas has never really been a thing for me (might be something to do with growing up spending most of my time hanging round in Dad’s shop – there’s nothing like retail to remove any sentimental feelings you might have about Christmas 🙂 ), so in many ways it’s just another day.  But one with presents and good food.
And I achieved both today.  The good food started with breakfast:

Crepes with cream and fresh berries (which are the absolute best thing about a southern hemisphere Christmas – you northerners can keep your snowmen and roaring fires, give me a bowl of raspberries any day!), and a ginger and mint concoction to drink. And the best bit about eating alone is that you get to read a book while you eat 🙂
I had a lovely dinner tonight, too (though I forgot to take a photo of that) – inspired by the taco I had at the Pallet Pavilion the other day I bought some decent corn tortillas and made myself tacos for dinner, filled with lots of salady bits and spicy beef.  And of course there were the De Spa chocolates to nibble on during the course of the day.
I even had presents to open.  I’d already had my present from Mum (the fabric cutter thing and ruler), and Dad sent money with instructions to buy myself something (which I might do tomorrow if any of the Boxing Day sales look promising), but I’d bought myself a few books off Amazon, and left the box unopened so I could have something to look forward to 🙂  And even better, a couple of days ago a parcel arrived from Lytteltonwitch, so I even had a present to open that I didn’t already know the contents of!

Very nice contents they were too: a book, a couple of bars of exotic-sounding chocolate, some little notebooks and a book-shaped eraser (do you see a theme here? 😉 )
Otherwise, I spent most of the day either sitting out in the garden reading (the promised rain didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon, so it was a lovely morning), or working on the quilt for my boss’s baby (yeah, I know you’re supposed to be totally lazy on Christmas Day, but I’m not very good at that). It’s been a really lovely relaxing day, and I can honestly say I haven’t felt at all lonely or that I’m somehow missing out.
The quilt’s going well so far, considering it’s my first attempt at a proper quilt and I’m trying to learn most of the techniques off the internet 🙂  The pattern is sort of based on this one by Deb Robertson (discovered when I was searching her blog for earthquake-related posts for work – did I ever mention how much I love my job, that gives me a legitimate excuse to spend a work day reading a crafty blog? 🙂 ).  She’d mentioned in a previous post what an easy pattern it was to sew (and very forgiving of mistakes, which sounded perfect for me!), so I searched out a few tutorials and discovered the very clever trick behind it.
Progress so far:

96 strips of random fabric (actually 98, because apparently I lost count somewhere when I was cutting them).

Quasi-randomly sorted into groups of six.

First set of six sewn together (yes, I know all the strips aren’t the same length – it’s easier to just cut the width of the fabric and then trim them later).

And another 15 sets of six sewn together.
Now here’s the clever bit. You take the outside strips of each set and sew them together, making a tube:

And then you cut each tube crosswise into strips:

So now instead of strips, you’ve got squares. But that’s not the really clever bit. The really clever bit is… actually, that will have to wait until tomorrow, because I haven’t done it yet, and it just won’t be the same without photos 😉
Hope you’re all having a fantastic Christmas. I certainly am!