Saturated Saturday

Good grief it rained yesterday! It came down in buckets. Our indoor weather station literally told us that it was "raining cats and dogs". So there you go. And you thought that was just an expression, didn't you?

Despite the rain, Mike and I spent a nice day together. We had to drive over to the Oregon Garden in Silverton to drop off my quilts for the Stitches in Bloom quilt show next weekend. When we'd accomplished that, we had lunch at a restaurant on Silverton's main drag called Mac's Place. We'd been there once before. I think I read about it originally in Sunset magazine, and we had lunch here about ten years ago.

Silverton, Oregon, is a great little town with a long history. If we were ever to think about leaving the Three Cats Ranch, I would consider living here in  Silverton. Originally a farming town, farming continues to be the dominant usage of the land in the area. It also boasts the first openly transgendered mayor in the entire United States, elected three times, and so the folks of Silverton obviously like their mayor.

Here's a picture of the main drag through town. Mac's place is just outside the frame on the right.

It was kind of hard to get a good image of the street because of all the cars parked along the road. Inside the restaurant, there is a full bar. They also have a lot of local brews on tap. Mike had one of those, and I had some hard blackberry cider. Yum.

When you walk out the back door, you can see that the restaurant (and, indeed, this whole side of the street) backs directly onto Silver Creek, for which the town is named.

My thanks go to Edmund Garman who took a better picture (below) of Silverton on Silver Creek.

I like restaurants that have old pictures of their towns on the walls. There were a number of images that we enjoyed, but these were especially interesting. There's no date on this next image, but look at the dirt road through town and the horses and buggies. If you scroll up and compare it with my image above, you can still see the same building with the cut-off corner on the right. (It's to the left of the frame in my image.)

Contrast that with the image below where they are laying the first hard pavement on the main street. The date on that image is October, 1912.

Mike had a French dip sandwich for lunch. I had this German sausage sandwich which was served up on their home-made bun. It's a little hard to see against the color of the sausage, but this came with marionberry mustard (yum). The ketchup in the cup there for my sweet potato fries was habanero ketchup (also yum).

After stuffing our faces, we headed for home. On the way out, we happened to notice this sign, so we drove on over to have a look.

As it turns out, the city of Silverton commissioned copies of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms to be replicated on the walls of a warehouse-style building on the 50th anniversary of their creation. I'm a Norman Rockwell fan, and so I enjoyed seeing this. The accompanying mural explains the "Four Freedoms" and what caused Rockwell to create them.

Here they are: Freedom of Worship

Freedom of Speech. 

I was curious about the pamphlet in the pocket of the gentleman seated in the foreground, which says "UAL Report". I have done a little research trying to figure out what "UAL" stands for (I'm assuming it's not United Airlines). I couldn't find any information. I have an idea it might have been the initials of a labor union, but that's just a guess. And just as I wrote those words, I looked again at the picture and noticed the partial word "rmont". I know this was based on something Rockwell saw at a town meeting in Vermont, and so I tried one more time to see if I could figure it out. This is what I found:

That's the best I can do, so if one of you knows something, please chime in. Continuing on...

Freedom from Want

Freedom from Fear

And after that, we came home and I continued on with my quilting. When I left you yesterday, I was just about to use this thread to quilt some moon glow.

I didn't do all the moons, but some of them (where I had enough room, and I didn't think it would distract from the other quilting).

Then I switched to the green thread and stitched some veins into the leaf here

I used brown thread to give the wolf some fur

And I stitched some woodgrain into the tree.

I went back to to the gold thread to quilt a rocket ship in the sky.

I'll use some crystals to put four windows on the rocket where I left those marks.

Then I used some yellow thread to give the hedgehog some quills. I gave him some grass too.

Also, I did some grass and put some details in the cheese...nothing special. I wasn't exactly sure what to do there, but I wanted to do something.

I put some water in the ocean and some mountains on the continents.

And that's as far as I've gone. All that's left now is to switch back to the black thread, outline all of the applique, and then quilt the cornerstones and sashings. I'm hoping to finish it up today or tomorrow.

So that brings me to Slow Sunday Stitching.

This morning I finished up the Peppermint Arch block for the Gingerbread Square quilt.

The next time I work on this, I'll be doing the "Snowman with Cocoa" block.

And that meant I was ready to make something new for my hand stitching. I traced out the first block for Jenny of Elefantz's new free block of the month, The Vintage Kitchen. You can find the link to her free BOM right here.

Here's what her finished quilt will look like:

Recall that I purchased that "Home Ec" fabric a little while back:

Today, I traced out the first block. These are tiny, and I'm using my tiniest hoop, which encompasses the entire motif. It's done in redwork. I expect this won't take me more than a day or two to stitch.

And now you're all caught up on the life of the Crazy Cat Lady and Company. Time to get stitching if I'm going to finish up my Shoot for the Moon quilt.

What's going on at your end?