October FMQ Challenge and a Bonus

Our Oregon gloom is back.  What would we Oregonians do if we couldn't complain about the weather?  It's been a long lovely complaintless summer, and we are dying for something to whine and moan about.  Here it is:

I'll tell you what.  Happy days are here again.  This is our weather forecast for the next five days:

Don't let that sunshine on Monday and Tuesday fool you.  I'm betting it will rain until June now.  We Oregonians hardly know what to do with ourselves in good weather, especially when the temperatures are mild.  At least when the mercury cracks 80°, we can whine about how hot it is.  But no.  It has been a perfectly lovely Indian summer, with a dearth of complaining.  Happily, we can get back to what we do best.

Sue and I walked this morning, and we got soaking wet.  We turned around halfway through our walk.  Sue was expecting the rain this afternoon, which is what the weatherman told us.  I figured it would rain, but I was only expecting mist.  We got a virtual downpour, which made walking rather unpleasant.  We'll try it again next week when we're dressed more appropriately.  Despite our rainy climate, Sue and I rarely get rained on.

It seemed like a good day to knock off the free motion quilting challenges I have on my to-do list.  This is what I did for the October challenge by Teri Lucas:

I can't say I'm very happy with this.  Once I got finished with my name, the rest of the block appeared as large as a football field, and I found myself at a loss as to what to fill it in with.  Ordinarily, I would let my fabric or pattern inform my decisions about how to quilt something.  A blank slate like this leaves me wondering what to do.  Also, I was supposed to use different colors of thread for the different sections, but all my thread is downstairs, and I didn't want to drag it all upstairs for this challenge.  All white is what I decided on.  Despite its shortcomings, I finished it and it was good practice.

I missed the September challenge because we were traveling.  In any case, the design was not to my personal taste, and so I decided to tackle the bonus challenge by Susan Brubaker Knapp.  Honestly, it was as difficult to pick out an image to work from as it was to complete the stitching, but I finally ended up with this image of a large leaf I took a while back..

My stitching didn't end up looking exactly the same.  I found myself needing more lines to fill in that seemingly football field-sized space I was working with.

This is Smitty's first experience with the rain.  He really doesn't like water, which makes a squirt gun an excellent training tool.  This afternoon I opened his kitty door.  He has mastered the going-out part of the door.  Today he stuck his head and shoulders out and then backed in again without going through it.  He decided this was the best way to spend the day.

He and Gracie are practicing getting on one another's nerves.  This is ordinarily the chair she claims as her own.  For today, however, she decided to take up residence in the little round cat bed on my desk.  That meant Smitty had to sleep on her chair.  

Gracie has been practicing her passive aggressiveness in various ways.  For example, she never sits on my lap in the morning when I'm reading my iPad.  But Smitty does.  And lately, that means Gracie is suddenly all about having morning lap time.  We are teaching him not to bother her because she is the Grandma cat of the house.  And she seems to relish this off-limits rule by sitting in the places he ordinarily claims.  Pretty funny.  It's like having two kids around.

A drywall man is here working on the downstairs again.  He says he will probably be ready to paint it on Monday, and that means the only thing left to do will be to deal with the carpeting.  It needs the pad replaced and the carpet restretched and cleaned.  Then I'll be able to move back into my sewing room.  I can hardly wait.