Icy

This morning I was up around 4:30 a.m. Sometimes I wake up sneezing like crazy and with my sinuses draining, and I know I'm finished sleeping for the night. (It comes from spooning with the cat.) That usually means an afternoon nap, and that's exactly what happened.

When I stopped sneezing, I could hear freezing rain hitting the window. It was 29°F. with a windchill of 25°F. This was predicted, and so no surprise there. When the sun finally came up, the windows were glazed over.

It was supposed to get warmer by afternoon, but the temperature has actually dropped by two degrees. By around 1:30 p.m., we had about a half inch of ice on our deck just off the dining room. No way I was stepping outside onto that. If you've ever slipped on ice, then you know you're down on the ground before you ever know you're falling. I. Do. Not. Want. Any. Broken. Bones.

Gracie decided the flannel quilt was going to be her hang-out spot for the day...until Mike turned on the fireplace, then she went downstairs and flopped down next to the fire. Her mama didn't raise any dummies.

And when it became clear that Mike wasn't going to be going to work today, he made Spanish coffees. What the heck? It's tradition for our first winter bad weather day.

So I did some more quilting on the Gardener's Journal today. Recall that yesterday, I'd decided to quilt some straw cross-hatching onto her basket and her hat, so I did that first.

Eliza is completely addicting in the way a good book is addicting. Once I start, I have a hard time stopping. I think, "Oh, I'll just do this little bit here," only, when I'm finished with that, I'm inspired to do some other little thing. And on it goes until I've been there for a couple of hours. Today I decided to do some pebbling around the border of the seed packet embroidery motif. Only instead of making the circles round, I made them kidney shaped like bean seeds.

I kept thinking that if I enter this in the fair next year, a judge will probably remark that my pebbling needs to be more round. Anyway...there didn't seem to be much else to do here, and so I just stitched around the edges of the seed packets.

Then I worked with these applique hearts. I just went around and around inside of the two appliques.

And then I did a "heart stipple" on the background fabric. I'm trying to bump up the contrast in the image below so you can see what I've done here. It's really just a swooping vine with leaves that are heart-shaped.

In this little 2 x 3 patch, I did my interpretation of a dandelion seed head. If it's my garden, there are plenty of dandelions.

Then I turned my attention to this little lady. Mainly, I just stitched around the edges of the embroidery.

Also, I stitched some straw cross-hatching in her basket, and some grass at her feet.

And some bugs flying around her head. And given those proportions, I figure those have got to be Junebugs or something because those are some big honking bugs. 

Then I just did some square maze thingies in these little strips, and some criss-cross-applesauce quilting in some of those little squares.

Oh...and a caterpillar above that row of embroidered flowers. See him?

And then I needed an intervention before I could stop quilting. I was having fun, but I wanted to do some other things. Besides, I don't want to make my hands and wrists sore, which is a distinct possibility when I'm doing something like this for hours on end.

After that I took a shower, and then went downstairs to work on the next block of the Folk Art Cats quilt. I'm really hoping to finish the last five blocks for this quilt before the month is over. So, I'm off to a good start. This one still needs top-stitching, but the fusible is done.

I'm trying to use different fabrics in each block, and so I needed to lay the rest of the blocks on my design floor so I could see them. Of course that meant little helper cat came to the rescue to make sure those cats were pawsitively under control.

And that's pretty much all I've done for the day.

I have leftover chicken and dumplings from the other night heating in my crockpot, and it's been a pretty slow day. It does seem like a week of Sundays since Mike has been home every day this week except for yesterday. It's good having him home, but I feel as if I do less when he's around.

So stay warm and dry everybody, and if you're iced up like we are, I definitely recommend staying inside. I think I mentioned once on this blog long ago that I used to work in an emergency room, and it caused me to admonish my kids at every opportunity to wear their seat belts and to wear their helmets while riding their bikes. "Helmet alive, no helmet, dead," I'd say. "Seatbelt alive, no seatbelt, dead." It became a family mantra until Matthew...so "Matthew" of him...turned it into a joke. On one of our road trips, we crossed over the "highest bridge in Idaho" and we parked on one side and ran out to the center of the bridge to look down. Matthew, at about age 14, brought his helmet, because you know, "Helmet alive, no helmet, dead." So with that lead-in, I'm sharing with you a text conversation I had with my grown-up Matthew this morning. What a smarty pants, but you gotta love the kid, dontcha?