Zigzag, Not Zumba

Okay, so it was a busy day today...I'll give it that. I did all the laundry, and I cleaned up the downstairs. And I did some work I needed to do at the computer. Then, I was all set to go to Zumba Gold. I even put on my slightly too tight cropped-off workout pants. I even made myself a sandwich for lunch. Then, I still had about 45 minutes before I needed to go, but I made the colossal mistake of spending that time sewing. And I blame my thread.

I was working my way zigzagging through all the pieces of the Chili Rounder.

And my danged thread kept breaking, and it was frustrating the heck out of me. I kept trying different things...I changed the needle, I unspooled a bunch of thread thinking I might be at a weak spot, rethreaded needle and bobbin, finally I put the spool on a different spindle on the sewing machine, and that seemed to fix it. But during all of this, it was time to leave, and I simply could not walk away from it. It would have been like surrendering to the thread, and I Could. Not. Do. It. I know you understand. I'll go on Wednesday when I don't have so many other things going on.

In any case, I finished all the top-stitching on the Chili Rounder. I'm really happy with how this turned out. It was so much fun, I might turn around right away and make another one.

I'm going to put this aside now, but only because I want to wait for some polyester batting. Usually, I use cotton exclusively, but I want something that won't shrink when its washed. It's a table topper, and so it needs to be washable.

Until that comes, I'll work on some of the other things on my to-do list, and with a week left in the month, there isn't much time to spare. I'm going to start by catching up on the Rainbow Scrap challenge. Recall that I'm making the Dream Machines pattern, by Barbara Talbert.

I am making one block per month, and so I'll have twelve blocks when I'm finished. I made the blue block in January, 

but then I fell behind. That's okay. I've was doing this challenge two months at a time last year, and it worked out pretty well. So, now I need to make the pink block and the teal block. I don't know if my teals are right, but that's as good as it's going to get. These are the fabrics I pulled today. The top ones are for the body of the machine. The middle ones are for the hand wheel, and the bottom is for the thread.

And I put the birdcam out early this morning and ended up with over 3,000 pictures. There were a couple of hundred good ones, at least. Here are the best ones. This first one is a black-capped chickadee.

And look who's back! The Goldfinches made an appearance today. They are just developing their summer coloring because they will be bright yellow eventually.

And the other stars of the show were the Purple finches today. I got lots of good pictures of them, both male and female.

I think this might actually be a House finch here. 

He's looking wary at the cat bird behind him.

And that's it from me. Tomorrow is a swimming day, and I need to go to the grocery store. Hopefully, I'll get some time to sew. We're due for more rain tomorrow, so things should be a little more mellow. When the sun shines, we are busy. Sometimes a little rain is a good thing.