A Little of Everything

It's been a little of everything for me so far today. I have been sewing this afternoon, but I'm taking a break to write this post. This morning I started out by doing some work on the 10th of 12 of the Quilting Snowlady blocks. This one is a little confusing because of the stack of quilts there on the left side. Here's the drawing I traced my design from:

You know I dislike the process of tracing the designs onto fabric, and this one was a bear with all those lines swirling every which way. It was hard to see it on the tea-dyed muslin fabric, even with a light box, and so I found myself flipping the fabric back every few seconds to make sure I knew what I was seeing. I'm sure there are some mistakes, but it's good enough. 

I usually work these blocks from the bottom up, and I started with the quilts this time, working from the bottom up. When I finish one color, I look to see if that color repeats anywhere else on the stack, and that's why some of the quilts higher up are stitched while some of the lower down ones are not. (Clear as mud, right?) Anyway, this is what it looks like so far.

I'm keeping the original drawing and the pattern picture close at hand and using them as cheat sheets when I get confused (which is often). Also, I have Gracie at my feet to consult whenever I can't figure it out. She purrs her approval and flicks her tail when I'm doing it right.

After that, I got to work making my frozen breakfast burritos to take with us this weekend. Also, I suggested to Mike that I should make some granola bars or a healthy breakfast cookie to have as snacks while we're out riding our ATV's. He suggested I make the Chocolate-Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries. Hm...they do have oatmeal, pecans, dried cherries and dark chocolate. No wonder I love the guy. That's my kinda health food, for sure.

I still want to make some Cottage Pies before the day is out. The recipe makes four servings, and so we'll eat two for dinner tonight, and save the other two for Sunday night. Tomorrow, we'll grill some steaks. Also, I happened to pick up a couple of lobster tails that were on sale before Valentine's Day. So, steak and lobster. Camping. Yeah. That's how we do it. I'll get to the Cottage Pies a little closer to dinner time. 

For the afternoon, I continued sewing together the blocks for the Dream Machines quilt. When I left it yesterday, I had the remaining blocks and cornerstones laid out in order so that I could remember where I wanted everything to go. When I went downstairs this morning, I found this:

It seems Smitty has his own ideas about how these should be set. 

Anyway...I continued on with my original idea and sewed the second row of blocks and the third row of spools on. I thought I might have more time to continue on this afternoon, but the day is later than I thought. This may be as far as it goes until I get back from the beach.

I probably won't blog again until Tuesday because I'm not taking my laptop. Sometimes, I post a picture here and there, so I can't rule that out. Just don't look for any prose from me for a couple of days. "Prose." As if. Sort of makes it sound all fancy, doesn't it? 

Before I go, however, I need to say a little more on this tiresome issue of the comments. If you saw my bloggy housekeeping remarks at the end of yesterday's post, then you know I've attempted a change in settings so that nobody's comment gets rejected.

Several of you had some knowledge about what's causing this, and it seems AOL and Yahoo are the real culprits in this whole mess. I'm still not sure I understand the ins and outs of this, but I don't need to. And today I realized that by changing my settings to allow all comments, I haven't really addressed the problem because now everyone can comment, but I don't necessarily receive an email notification that you have. I only know because I go to the Blogger dashboard and see that I have "X" comments awaiting moderation. Sheesh. What a hassle.

As Patrica noted, this really matters to those of us who try to respond to every comment, and I am one of those. If you go to the trouble to leave a comment for me, then I can certainly respond to you, and I want to. So I'm going to stick with this for a while, but I encourage you to do what Lyn has suggested, to-wit:

[T]he only work-around is to make an email address in a non-bouncing domain (such as gmail) and tie *that* email to their own blog instead of their real email. That's what I did, used gmail, because then you can also tell the gmail account to forward everything that comes into it to your "real" email address. So now my blog is tied to my gmail account - when I comment here, your blog sees a readable identifier from gmail and tells you I commented (the AOL, Yahoo, and somebody-else's-domain are not readable and Blogger can't fix that). If you reply to me, it goes to my front-man gmail account, which immediately forwards your reply to my real AOL account that I actually look at on a regular basis. 

Thanks, Lyn. I've had a gmail account for a long time, and so if anyone is having trouble understanding this, email me separately, and I'll be happy to help you out with your settings.

Until then, I'm signing off until I get back from the beach. The forecast is holding, and so I'm looking forward to a few days in the sun.