Fall is coming!

Fall is, without a doubt, my favorite season of the year. I think of Fall as "the season for staying home" - I admit it, I'm sort of a homebody, but there's something so pleasant about a rainy fall Saturday afternoon, when you can sit at home and watch a good old movie on television, or a chilly fall night curling up with a book or some knitting.

And now that my house is clean, I turned my attention to decorating the mantel for fall:



I wasn't going to put the leaf garland out there again - I feel like it's not safe to have candles burning on the mantel with it up there - but then I remembered that I had wound the little strand of orange LED fairy lights around it, so I put it up anyway.

Maybe having the fall decorations up will encourage the cooler weather to come back.

Another thing I did yesterday was to frame and put up some of the pictures my mother sent. The arrangement of photographs on the wall is perhaps not optimal from an interior-decorator's sense, but it's kind of something that has grown organically as I added photographs to the ones already up there.

It makes me happy to have all of these.



The other thing I did this weekend was to (a) do a bit of cleaning in my sewing room (to get it back to functionality as a sewing room - doing things like clearing stuff off the ironing board so I can actually press quilt blocks) and (b) finishing the framed-four-patch quilt I made using a Moda Jelly Roll:



I had had all the blocks sewn into rows, but had not put the rows together, so I did that and then put on the borders. (I made them just a tiny bit narrower than the pattern recommended). I like that it's a darker, more intensely colored fabric that frames the quilt. (It's a Michael Miller print of Texas wildflowers. I don't know if it's specifically called that, but there are bluebonnets and something that looks like Indian blanket and something that looks like Indian paintbrush in it - all wildflowers you see in Texas).

Here's a close-up: