Happy New Year 2020

Happy New Year to you all! 
Hope you've had a nice start on the new year, and I guess I'm not the only one excited to have a new year to look forward to enjoy. There will be upphills and downhills this year too, but I'm pretty sure it will be mostly nice moments and good days ahead.

We had a quiet celebration of the new year, since our two furballs are not happy at all about the fireworks and noise. We had a lovely dinner with our two youngest boys, DIL and a friend of them. Turkey as always, and some nice desserts. The young ones went off to a party, and me and Hubby stayed home keeping the furballs safe and calm. I enjoyed some hand sewing while we waited to pick up the youngsters late last night, and got a few stitches done on a new quilt I'm working on. I forgot to take a photo of it before writing this post, so I will share photos of it in my next post.

I've made some progress this morning on my Hexagon Flower quilt, and I'm happy it's almost a finished top, and I can't wait to hand quilt this one! I really love the wowen Japanese fabrics so much, and it's coming along so nicely

Earlier this winter I also finally got started on the Stonefields quilt designed by Susan Smith. I bought a few new reproduction fabrics for this quilt, and it's more than a year ago I got the pattern from a lovely quilting friend. I hope my version will be just as beautiful as hers, and this is the perfect long term project to work on . I have finished more than 50 hexie flowers for the border as well, but forgot to get a shot of them. This quilt is huge, and lots of blocks to make, but I know I will enjoy every minute of it :-) 

I must admit that 2019 had some really great moments when it comes to photography, and I attended two photo tours. I have to pinch myself to believe it, because it was almost surreal, since I'm not a traveller at all! One trip to Scotland, which I wrote about in my previous post, and one to Northern Ireland in September. I enjoyed the long drive from Dublin to the beautiful place we stayed at. The Ballylinny Holiday Cottages in Bushmills was cozy and nice, and this is the view from the cottage:

We visited a lot of amazing places, though I haven't edited all my shots yet.

Some of the ones I got to edit is these two from the Dark Hedges, which is famous because of the Game Of Thrones series. 

We arrived when it was pretty dark early in the morning, so we could get ready for the sunrise. It was so amazing to see this beautiful tree lane as the sun came up! Made the trees glow beautifully, and the autumn colors that popped as the light hit the leaves and branches. 

We met a few tourists when we were about to finish up at this location, and one of them was a lovely lady in a beautiful white dress. Our tour guide Bernard asked if she could walk down the lane for us for some shots. She looked so beatiful when she walked down the road, and her dress lit up when it got hit by the rays of sunlight between the trees. The most magical moment I've ever experienced for sure! She looked just like a forest spirit from ancient times...

After saying goodbye to half of the group Sunday morning, we stopped on the way back to Dublin at a place I really fell in love with. Murlough Bay is the name of this place, and it's also famous because of the GOT. We didn't stay there for long, but I for sure wish I could have stayed there for much longer! So beautiful!

I'm not sure I will focus as much on photography in 2020, since I plan to keep up the sewing and quilting most of all. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with them all, so I think I need to narrow it down to less projects. We'll see, what happens happens :-)

Have a lovely week,

Laila