Fevered Fervor

Remember how I was whining about being achy and creaky yesterday? If not, you didn't miss a thing, but I figured out why I was feeling so crappy. Turns out I was running a low-grade fever. I took some Tylenol late in the day, and I started feeling better right away. Today I feel fine, so it's anybody's guess what that was about.

Despite feeling crappy, I made five pints of salsa. This was from our own greenhouse tomatoes and some from our CSA share. Also, the jalapenos, red bell pepper, and garlic came from the CSA, but I needed one more jalapeno and some cilantro from the farm stand down the road.

While that was cooking and processing, I watered the annuals and harvested some zucchini. This is one day's harvest from just two plants, and it doesn't include the three that grew to baseball bat size. They have a way of positioning themselves so that I'm looking at them straight on. Then I don't see them until they're large enough and have accumulated enough wealth in investments to start a farm of their own.

The Baby Birds quilt was on my mind, although I haven't gotten into a staring contest with it yet. Here's the quilt I'm contemplating:

Here's my thinking about this: The quilting shouldn't be too dense because this is a baby quilt, and I want it to be soft. Where the appliqued chicks are, I'm going to fill the background with one of the designs from the free motion quilting sampler. This is a simple design, and it should fill in nicely while still maintaining the softness.

For the chevron, I'll do some ruler work similar to what I did on the sampler. Not too much...probably just a few straight lines. Instead of circles, I'd like to put some bird tracks there.

After doing a search online for some inspiration, I happened on this "bird tracks" design. I'd show you the original, but it's copyrighted. Here's my initial practice on paper. Since I'm hoping to do this in the chevron section of the quilt, I was trying to turn the corner there on the right. That didn't work out well at all. Also, when I turned the corner, I started getting the feet headed in the wrong direction.

Nevertheless, I decided to try this on a practice scrap to see if I had even a prayer of actually quilting it. I was working from left to right. You can see right away that I got my lower feet headed in the wrong direction. As I went along, it started seeming possible.

Then I decided I needed a larger practice piece, and I drew a line to simulate the angle of the chevron I'll be quilting. Again...feet heading in the wrong direction on the bottom portion of the design. Nevertheless, I think it would be possible to turn the corner.

So then I practiced a little more. Obviously, I'm not ready to commit this to the quilt until I have better muscle memory. I'll keep working on it. As for other portions of the quilt, I think I'll do some stylized hearts and flowers and call it good. At least the designs are starting to gel in my feeble mind.

Block #17 for the Bee-utiful quilt is well under way. Still a long way to go on this one. It takes a long time and several lengths of floss to stitch the petals on the flowers.

The next blocks should be released today or tomorrow, and so it looks like I'll stitch straight on through without doing any more on Hocuspocusville in between. That's okay. These are almost finished. Also, I think I've settled on "Bee Loving" as a name for this quilt. It reminds me of beekeeping with my dad, and those are some of my fondest memories of him.

Today I'm dropping my quilts off for entry into the Northwest Quilting Expo. The show is still more than a month away...not until after we return from our trip to Idaho. We'll be back in plenty of time, and so I'm getting excited to see my quilts in the show. Before dropping off the quilts, however, I'm getting my monthly pedicure. On the way home I'll pick up a few groceries and then I'll have some time this afternoon to practice quilting a little more.