What do you mean it's December?

And how could it possibly be the 6th of Dec. already?!  The holidays aren't just sneaking up on me,  they are running me down and moving on out of sight. 

My parents left on Saturday and the guest room has been converted back to the sewing room.  Time to get down to work.  The Christmas tree has been purchased, put up and lighted with new LED lights (they just don't have the same warm glow as the old ones, even though they are "warm white").  Decorations are still under the stairs.  They will get dragged out this week so the house will be nicely (we hope) decorated for my book club meeting on Saturday.  Boxes with presents were mailed today.

Today I finally started the process on my commission piece.  First I enlarged my sketch on the computer.  Here I started taping all the pieces together.

Then I labeled each section and made lots of registration lines (you can't really see that). The edges of all the papers will be a nice reference for lining up the straight grain of the fabric.

After that, I was ready to cut apart the sections for templates. I will add the seam allowance when I cut out the fabric.  Since this will be the front, I need to make sure I flip the piece over to face the wrong side of the fabric when cutting.  I cut notches at the registration marks so I can see them from the back. 

This is not the way I usually work, so I'm thinking of doing a section with printed fabrics just to make sure it's going to work before I cut into my dyed fabrics.

A good start today, but the timer is still ticking.