Saturday Sharing

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Things are moving along here at the Three Cats Ranch, but not very speedily.  Today I'm going to do some sewing.  Tomorrow I'm considering going mushroom hunting with Mike and our friend, Chuck.  For the past couple of years, Mike and Chuck have gone out and hunted down a queen's ransom of chanterelle mushrooms for me.  In turn, I have made my most delicious Chanterelle Mushroom Risotto for them.  It's one of those recipes that is so delicious that it is an annual requirement in my kitchen...for my plate as much as for theirs.  I've never gone with them before, but I'm thinking tomorrow I just might.

For today, I'm going to work on my doll quilt for the doll quilt swap.  I can't say anything more about it than that because it's a surprise for my partner.  Over the past couple of days, I've worked on a few other things. I finished the top-stitching on the October Folk Art Cats block.

I used metallic thread for the moon.  It didn't have quite enough contrast to suit me, and so I decided to use this gold thread.  It still needs a little more oomph, I think, so I'm considering whether to use some oil crayon on it to give it a little more color.  I'll need to experiment with those before trying anything drastic.  

I like these hot fix nailheads for the eyes.  I needed nailheads for some other project, and I got a mix of colors and sizes of nailheads for a pretty good price.  I'm using them more and more for this sort of thing, and they work out pretty well.  I like crystals too, but the sparkle isn't appropriate for all quilts.

Also yesterday, I finished up the October block for the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines quilt.  The November block is in the mail, but I haven't received it yet.  It's always fun to see what the next little sewing machine will look like.  Some of these are so unconventional, and I had no idea such a thing ever was manufactured on a large scale.  I posted about this little sewing machine earlier, so you can read about it here.

And with that finish, I'm caught up on these.  Yay!  But I'm a month behind on the Promises and Borders quilt.  I drew that one out yesterday, and started sewing on it today.  This is the 10th and last block.

Except for some embroidery, I didn't do any sewing yesterday.  Mike had an unexpected day off.  His company is cutting everyone's hours, and so he won't be working all five days during the week for now.  There was a time when such a cut might have been disastrous, but we're not sweating it this time around.  Layoffs and unplanned furloughs are a common occurrence in the electronics industry, unfortunately.  In any case, with him having the day off, we decided to go out for lunch and then for a walk.  We ended up getting rained on, but it wasn't too bad.  Here's the route we took.  I'm calling this the Up and Down Loop:

It took us about an hour, so I'm guessing we walked somewhere between four and five miles.  It would have been a pleasant walk had it not rained on us.  Of course, the rain started when we were as far as we could possibly be from our car.  The forecast was for no rain, but you know how that goes.  And you would think two Oregonians would know better than to believe a "no rain" forecast.  But that's why we Oregonians have webbed feet.  We just swam back to our car.

And speaking of walking, I've been doing pretty well with my exercise commitment.  I'm actually liking it!  And on Thursday, I sat and thought of all kinds of excellent excuses for not going swimming.  And then, after working so hard on those excuses, I realized that I actually wanted to go.  And here's the best part: my morning backaches are improving, and I'm sleeping better because of it.  On the other hand, you may have noticed that my weight loss ticker isn't budging.  I think it might be stuck.  I might have to call in a weight loss ticker repair person, but maybe I'll just wait until after Christmas for that.  It might start working better then.  For now, I've decided just to focus on exercise.  If I can get that commitment off and running, the weight loss ticker might start working again.  It's been known to happen.

The weather wasn't very good for taking pictures, but I managed to click off a couple.  These reds and greens had me thinking I might be up for another Christmas after all...as if I could stop it from coming by willing it away.

And I'll finish off by showing you the Picture of Contentment...or "Cattentment" if you prefer..

On Monday, I'll be linking this post to: