Market Dash

It was overcast when we awakened this morning. The weather seemed harmless enough, however. Erik, Mae, and I had a plan to go to the Portland farmer's market this morning. We found a parking place right next to the market, which was nice, and then we headed up the hill for our customary huevos rancheros served up with lots of veggies. Yum. Definitely one of the most important parts of farmer's market days. Everything smells so good while it's being cooked up.

We were able to sit and eat our breakfastin peace. Just about the time we finished, the skies opened up and it started to rain. In Portland, we often get a soft drizzle that doesn't much bother us seasoned rain veterans. Today's rain was something to contend with, and it rained harder and harder while we made our way around...going faster and faster, eventually looking only for the items we came for specifically. I did pause long enough to admire these pears. Aren't they pretty?

I was in the mood for some clams to try out a new recipe I found online last night, this Spaghetti alle Vongole

(image source)

from Bon Appetit. I already had almost everything on hand to make it, but I needed the clams and some fresh Italian parsley, which was available at the farmer's market. I'm using linguine since that's what I have open. And as long as I was standing there purchasing clams, I picked up a dozen oysters so that we could make our favorite Oysters Rockaway.

So we finished up our market shopping pretty quickly this morning...not taking any time to browse. It was too wet. Oh well. Such is life in Oregon.

After that I came home and took a nap. I'm not saying I'm sorry I did four days of exercise last week, but it did wear me out. I was really tired both Thursday and Friday afternoon and pretty much slugged around both days. It was nice to just lie down and surrender to it this afternoon. Besides, it gave me some energy for sewing.

My next task was to put together the sampler top for the long arm class I'm taking later on this month...a week from Monday, in fact. It's a simple design: six 6-inch strips of fabric, with two 10-inch strips at the bottom. 

Not a very good picture, but there you go. I'm using a pink tone-on-tone for the back, and I also needed to cut two 72-inch long and 3-inch wide strips of "extra fabric". I'm not sure what those will be used for, but I have them ready to go.

After that, I started pulling fabrics for my next project which will be my "Let's Book It" project for the month, this "Mom Cats" quilt:

I don't have a lot of calico prints in my stash, but I did manage to find four that I thought would work for the cats. I'm using a solid white background, and I'll pull some scraps for the spools.

I've also pulled out some vintage hankies and doilies from those my grandmother made. Now that I've pulled them, I'm having a hard time deciding to cut them up. I think I'll probably stick with the hankies since they are well-worn and some of them have tears in the fabric. I'm still making up my mind, but I'll take pictures and show them when I've decided. A few are stitched with some interesting techniques...some would appear to be done by machine, but I happen to know they were done by hand. It makes them all the more amazing to me. More on that later.

So it was kind of a nasty day, but when I looked outside just before sitting down to write this post, there was a rainbow.

I had to bump up the saturation on that a little bit to make it visible. Here's a zoomed in bit of it. So pretty.

The best thing about spring rains in Oregon, I'd say.

So that's it from me today. I'll get started on my Mom Cats tomorrow. How was your Saturday?