Stitching Fast and Slow

Good morning, my friends. It was all sewing all the time yesterday...except for the three loads of laundry I did. Aside from that sewing, and more sewing. I had just one more kit that I brought from home...this "Carrot Top" kit.

It's a free pattern from The Sewing Loft. Okay, well just now I went to link to the free pattern, but it hasn't been free since 2019. You can purchase it right here. I forget when I came by it, but apparently it was sometime before 2019. I probably saw it on Pinterest. It's intended to be a single block for a larger quilt, but I liked it just the way it is.

It was a pretty simple block to sew together. I started by sewing together six strips.

Those were cut into two pieces. Those will make up the edible part of the carrot.

From there, I added some corners to make the carrot shape.

Then, I made four half square triangles. These were trimmed to two inches.

And then, I made two flying geese.

I added a piece to each end of the flying geese. This will be the tippy top of the carrot.

And then I sewed the 2-inch HST's to the rest of the carrot greenery.

Then those two pieces were sewn together to make the top of the carrot.

And then I sewed the tops to the bottoms.

And then, just one more seam to finish it off. There are two sizes for this block. Mine finishes at 12-1/2 inches square. I'm calling this little quilt "Bunny Bait."

When we get home, I'll give it a border and quilt it and make a little table topper or a wall-hanging from it. 

The only machine sewing I have left are some huge zip-lock bags of bonus triangles and cut-off bits, bobs, and orphan blocks.

Possibly, I'll start on these before we leave Pahrump, but probably not. I'm thinking of starting to sew them together as leaders and enders. I've never actually done leaders and enders, but it might be a good way to lay waste to all these pieces. I'm also thinking of instituting the one-hour rule when we get home, and spend an hour each day sewing them together. For now, I sewed together the four that were generated from this Bunny Bait project. Gotta start somewhere, right?

There were some other smaller triangles generated by this project, but if they're less than about two inches, I toss them.

When I had everything packed up again. I went to work on my slow-stitching. I needed to finish the bird house below.

From there, I moved my hoop down and finished the last of it. This is Block 6: Snowman with Mittens.

Here are the six blocks I have for this quilt so far.

So, I started this project on February 3rd. Now half the blocks are stitched. It looks like I'll still be working on them by the time we reach home. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that there will be no stitching emergency.

Okay, so I traced out the next two. Tomorrow is our last day in Pahrump. We'll move on to Death Valley on Friday, and we will not have electricity there. Since I won't be able to use my light wafer there, I decided to trace the next two blocks, and these should keep me busy for the duration of our stay in Death Valley.

Block 7 is "Reindeer behind Tree."

Block 8 is "Smiling Snowmen."

So I'll start with Block 7 this morning, and I'll probably get out for another walk today. Aside from that, I have no plans for the day. It's getting warmer with each passing day. It seems like a good day to take my DSLR out into the desert with a macro lens attached and see what kind of close-ups I can get. It'll give me a good reason to charge my battery too because I expect we're going to see some wildflowers in Death Valley. Certainly, I want a fully-charged battery for that.

There was a pretty sunset last night. Sunsets (and sunrises) are pretty here in Nevada...big, somehow.  The image below was taken from the steps of our RV.

Moving a little to my left, it looked like this:

That's it from me today. Slow-stitching awaits.

More Yard Art

Good morning, my friends. It was another lazy day here at the Traveling Three Cats Ranch. I spent some more time on my embroidery, filling in most of my hoop.

There's just a little left to do at the bottom, but I'll start here with the bird house this morning.

We got out for a walk. On this morning, we walked in one of the neighborhoods to the south of us. I was instantly taken with this tall palm. I love the pattern of their trunks.

This prickly pear cactus almost looks fake, but it is real.

Apparently, it's yellow's time to shine on the wildflower calendar. We're seeing the desert sunflowers in bloom virtually everywhere.

Yesterday I noticed one of the creosote bushes in bloom. The flower is yellow, just as I thought.

Here's a really beautiful Joshua Tree. Look up there at the tippy top and in the middle, and you can see it's getting ready to bloom.

In the fake plants category, this aloe plant. I'm not sure why you'd want a fake one when the real ones grow beautifully here. It's true it doesn't need water, however. It kind of fits with the astroturf lawns we're seeing around.

In this same yard, there were some potted fake flowers.

I love these frogs. Makes me think of our Portland frogs back home, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way

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Here was another frog. I had to mess with the saturation on this one to make the frog visible.

Also...turtles. Turtles are popular in yard art it seems. This one is made of wood.

What I couldn't see from that angle is that the chicken has a duck friend.

But here are some more turtles.

I thought this was another frog, but it's actually a warty toad.

Here's a saguaro cactus made from horseshoes.

To its right was this life-sized mule.

Walking back, we noticed this skeleton of a saguaro. My grandmother used to pick up the "bones" of cacti in the desert. We had a lamp she'd made from one.

Our shadow selves were hungry for lunch by then, and so we went back to the RV.

The seed-eating birds have discovered our seed feeder. The only one I've seen is a house finch. Having never seen one quite this close-up, I noticed the red stripe on his back between his wings.

I was trying to get a picture of his red breast, but my camera focused on the tree behind.

Here's a better image I found in the public domain. Pretty, huh?

(Image credit: "Roselin familier / House finch" by Eric Bégin is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.)

They'd like to drive Sadie crazy.

After lunch, Smitty's shadow self wanted to go out for a walk, and so my shadow self went out with him.

And wonder of wonders, we found some grass growing in a drainage ditch right here in the Paw-hrump desert.

So we had an early and light dinner of charcuterie and a bottle of wine at the Charleston Peak Winery, here at the RV park. The cheese choices could have been a little more imaginative, but it all tasted good, and we enjoyed it. 

The days get warmer and warmer. I expect it’ll be warm enough today to be out without a jacket. I’ll probably get out for another walk, but I’d also like to get in at least one more day of sewing. It’s early as I’m writing. It’s anybody’s guess what the day will hold.

Quiet Day

Good morning, my friends. Except for grocery shopping, it was a stay-at-home-and-be-lazy kind of day. Before anything could happen, though, I needed to spend some time with my slow-stitching. I took the first stitches for Block #6.

From there, we headed out. Our list was relatively short, and so we were home before lunch time. After lunch and naps, I baked a Skillet Cherry Cobbler for Two. This is made from cherries from our trees, canned in simple syrup a couple of years ago.

Later in the day, we decided to make our way over to the winery associated with the RV park, Charleston Peak Winery. 

We'd heard it was possible to get a glass of wine and "snacks," but we weren't sure how that worked. And so we headed over to get the lay of the land, so to speak. They have light meals and charcuterie boards. Along the way, I took pictures of every blooming thing in their flower pots. These flowers I'm about to show you were all tiny...about the size of a nickel.

My phone tells me this is a Flaming Katy.

This is a Madagascar Periwinkle.

This one is a Texas Barometer Bush. 

And this one is an African Daisy, or Dimorphotheca ecklonis, if you want to get all technical about it.

Okay, and if you traveled with us to Alaska, you might remember the candy store we visited in Anchorage, Aurora Chocolates. They had all kinds of fancy chocolates...real works of art, inspired by the Northern Lights.

Well, the winery has some little gift boxes that reminded us of those. We might have to get some of these, but we resisted for this visit.

We wandered around a little bit, taking note of all the wine barrels in the employees-only section.

So, we've decided to head over there this evening for some wine and something else. (I'm leaning toward charcuterie, which I love.)

Back at the RV, we took advantage of our new wide-open spaces. We're at the end of a row, and the four spaces between us and the next RV are open. Feeling brave, Smitty consented to a walk lasting approximately three minutes. We saw a dog, and that put us off.

Open the door, wouldja, Sadie? I'll share my treats of valor with you.

And that was pretty much our whole afternoon. We enjoyed our cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and called it a day.

There isn't much on today's agenda. I'm thinking about doing some more sewing. Or maybe doing some more walking. I haven't made any decisions yet. We have four more days here in Pahrump before we move on to Death Valley National Park. Yesterday, I took a look at the roads between here and home. An awful lot of snow has fallen in the Eastern Sierras. We were hoping to go home that way since we're told it's a good place to see wildflowers. That's still about ten days off, however, and so maybe conditions will improve. If not, we can always head that way through Nevada. Time and weather will tell.

And speaking of weather, I hope y'all have survived the blizzard back east. Stay safe, warm, and dry, my friends.