Monday's Meanderings

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It was a stay-at-home day for me...sort of...only sort of because I had to go to the post office. Also, I made a quick trip to the grocery store because tomorrow I'm making some more Christmas candy. A few things were missing from the pantry shelves for that task. Wednesday I'm checking in with a valued mentor for my annual gifting of home-baked goods. I only see this particular person but once a year now, but I never fail to check in with some baked goods at Christmas. It's always good to see him. In any case, tomorrow is the day I get ready for that little trek into downtown Portland.

Aside from that, I had a day at home. I had a little bit of housework, and then I went to work on the Hobo Quilt blocks that I started some months back. Good grief, I just looked up when I last worked on this quilt and it was way back in April when it was my NewFO for the month. Sheesh. I knew it had been a long time, but I had no idea it had been that long. Somehow my quilts got the better of me for a while. I had a lot of tops that needed finishing and a lot of finished tops that needed quilting. Fortunately, those have all quieted to a dull roar, and I'm back to having a manageable number of projects to work on. I'm hopeful that it won't be another eight months before I work on this again.

The Hobo quilt is from this book by Deborah Henninger:

This project is a very good example of how we can learn history from quilting. You can read my original post right here where I talk about how I got interested in making this quilt. In a nutshell, during the Great Depression with so many "hobos" riding the rails, they developed a secret sign language (read "sign" literally) to help and support one another. Each quilt block represents a sign one might have seen if one had been riding the rails during that time. My goal has been to make five blocks at a time, and today I made the second set of five blocks. Here they are along with their meaning:

Bad Tempered Man

Bad Tempered Owner

Be Afraid

Be Prepared to Defend Yourself

Bread

Here are the ten blocks I've made so far. Fifty more to go, but they go pretty quickly.

My kitty friends were close by today. Gracie decided that my scrap pile was a very good place to park her fuzzy bottom. She wouldn't want to sit down on the bare cutting mat, you know.

Along with my candy-making tomorrow, I'm going to work on the sky blocks for the Quiltmaker's Garden BOM that I started quite a while ago. These blocks are paper-pieced. I've done the petunias and daisies that you see kind of in the middle of the quilt. There were eight of those. The sky blocks are identical except for the colors. There are twelve of those. If I can stand it, I'll try to get all twelve done tomorrow. I'm not a fan of paper-piecing, however, and so when I say "if I can stand it", I'm not kidding around.

And that's it from me today. I'm enjoying seeing all your NewFO's for 2014. Lots of pretty projects on the way. I hope you all had a lovely day!