Shut the Barn Door

Yeah, I'm not kidding about the barn because our neighbor's horses paid us a visit this morning. We heard the most horrible crashing and things falling down. It seemed like business as usual here at the Three Cats Ranch once the feline people come to life in the morning. Then, Mike was sitting at the desk in his office. There is a door that leads to the breezeway where we keep the bird seed. He opened the door expecting to see the squirrels having a party only to discover that the horses were out of the barn.

One had moved on when I took this picture, but you can see they were enjoying the bird seed and peanuts.

What a mess. When I went out walking later on this morning, I marveled at the gifts they left behind. It seems they enjoyed their snacks...a LOT...if you know what I mean.

So it seemed like a good day to make some barns for my newest project, And On that Farm. Today I made the "E" Barn with its attached shrubbery, 

 

and the "F" Barn with its attached shrubbery.

When you look at the picture from the pattern cover, you can see that these are the barns in the upper right and left corners. When I work on this again, I'll work on the red barn between those two.

So far, so good on these. It's a little hard to find all the pieces because they are grouped by color of fabric, rather than by design. Barn E had 11 pieces, and they were scattered all over both sides of four large sheets of newsprint. It took quite a while to hunt them all down. Barn F had 18 pieces. From doing Wind in the Whiskers, I learned that it's best to take these one step at a time and not look ahead or behind. By focusing on one small part at a time, I can keep from becoming overwhelmed at all the tiny little pieces.

Today I've been cooking for Mike and Matthew's ATV trip this weekend, and so that's all I've accomplished, except that I finished up Block #2 for the Wine Country quilt.

For my next hand work, I'll continue on with the big stitch hand quilting of Mumm's the Word. When I last worked on this, I was stitching near one of the fish.

My goal is to work on this for about two weeks or until I can't stand it any more, whichever comes first. So that's where I'll pick it up tomorrow.