Holidays with the grandkids

We had a wonderful time in Florida with the kids and grand kids, the weather was beautiful (but it did not look like Christmas), we did a lot of hiking and spent time at the beach. Now were home and back to the real world! This is a picture of Grandpa with the boys and their Christmas quilts I made. The oldest received his a few years ago. It has wonderful Santa's on it with leopard spot stripes on their socks and the top boarder has Santa snowboarding. I made this quilt double bed size. Someday I'll make the "triplets" bigger pieced keepsake Christmas quilt.

This is a picture of the kids when they opened their quilts. They were so cute studying them. They love snowmen and their favorite movie is Frosty the Snowman.

This is the youngest, I told him this is Grandmas house and that's where they sleep (upstairs window) when they come home. He's pointing at the window asking me where his playpen is he sleeps in.

I looked up and one of the twins was making a "snow angel" on his quilt, they really need to get to Michigan and see real snow.

Last year I made this tree topper for their tree. I took a large styrofoam ball and coated it with craft glue the wrapped yarn around it. The yarn is pure white with little sparkle highlights. For the nose I sharpened a wooden dowel painted orange and buttons for the mouth and eyes. The hat I bought at a party store, it's a kids headband. Then I cut out a polar fleece scarf.

This is it all lit up. My daughter puts so many lites on the tree, it was not fun taking it down.

We did have a lot of fun at the ocean.

The water was cool but it didn't bother the twins.

This was one of our hikes we took just after we watched the movie Kung Fu Panda! Obviously, the boys loved that movie.

While on the hike we found a lot of lichen on sticks. The kids helped me collect it to try using it for natural dying. There is a lot of different types of lichen so I'm not sure if I have the correct type. I looked it up on the web and there's not too much information on the procedure. My husband scrapped it off the sticks for me and I have it soaking in ammonia. It's one of the ways I read, I also read to simmer it in water, I wish I would have divided it up and tried both ways. Right now the water is a dark rust color, which is hard to believe because the lichen is a pale greenish white. I can't wait to put my fabric in. I'll show you the results soon.