We had a massive burst of holiday cheer around the Dennis household this weekend. Saturday morning the cookie bug bit me! After ten dozen peanut butter blossoms were made I moved onto these delicious-even-in-pictures-caramels. I would highly recommend these not only for taste (they are super yummy) but they look great, you can't mess them up and the are very time and budget sensitive. They are an even better project if you have kids that can help you unwrap all the caramels and put the sprinkles on after you drizzle the melted chocolate.

The other holiday surprise was a call from the furniture company Saturday morning. The baby furniture was delivered Saturday afternoon and I think I've gone in every day since just to make sure it is still real! I am so happy with our decision and love the quality that Twin Locust provides. Jeff and I are super jealous of the baby now! We rounded out our weekend by finishing up our Christmas shopping...now I just have a few handmade projects to finish up!

On another exciting note, if you're a fan of Heather Bailey make sure to check out her new fabric line, Nicey Jane. So feminine, light and vintage. Beautiful designs and colors. If you get the QuiltHome.com newsletter you'll see they have a discount on this brand new line as well as 25% off Amy Buter's Midwest Modern and Midwest Modern 2 lines! Yay for the holidays!

Don't forget tobecome a fan of Nina on Facebook. 2010 will be full of fun stuff and we will be running Facebook only ideas, posts, specials and information.

I never thought about that until this week. Where would you turn if you had 17 projects to complete, proof, and send off in 5 days? I didn’t even look around me for help. I flew out to my mom and sisters. Although I felt like I was pushing child labor laws ( Ali is 11) to the limit almost every day I was there one of my sisters said something to me about how much fun they were having. Fun?! Yes, we’re a topsy, turvy group. We had so much fun sitting around sewing for hours on end it didn’t seem like work anymore. The deadlines disappeared and it just turned into being together.

While most of what we worked on I can’t show you yet, the younger girls, Ali, Clara and JoHannah finished up a king sized quilt that we have been working on…

Ali completed two baby sized quilt tops…

And Braeton took naps for all of us. He matches perfectly with Heather Bailey's Pop Garden!

I miss them all already and even the fantastic Japanese Steakhouse dinner wasn't enough to thank them!

With so many fresh, new, wonderfuland miraculous things happening it is hard to confess the bit of cloud that is covering my skies lately. Before you get all sad and down, let me assure you, this is not a storm cloud. I prefer to think of it as a summer cloud. You know the kind. The ones that show up and clutter the sky in the middle of a perfect afternoon of sunshine and Twilight reading. The wanna-be storm clouds (as a side note, yes, I am part of the ever growing crowd obsessed with the Twilight series…began the Breaking Dawn this past weekend).

In any case, there is a situation that has clouded some of our plans and although it is super easy to get discouraged I am trying to will the sunshine back into our family. Little sayings like, “When a door closes...” or “Everything happens at the right time” seem too focused on the unfortunate, the cloudy that has happened. I’m sticking with “Look on the bright side.” Keep focused on the sunshine and it will come back. How do you get past the cloudy times in your life?