Odds and Ends

Apparently Mike and I are on different calendar pages. It was my understanding that we would be leaving today. He had in mind that we would leave tomorrow. He even scheduled a haircut appointment for today, and that sort of settled it. It meant that the food was packed up way early, and the weekend of weeds could have been stretched into three days instead of two. No worries. It gave me an extra day with little on my to-do list, and so I spent some time sewing.

As is often the case before a trip, I awakened in the wee hours of the morning with my brain rifling through all the things I'd left off my packing list. Try as I might to get back to sleep, I could not, and so I got up and finished off the last of Hildegard. This one seemed to go pretty fast.

The next block, Buelah is already prepared, but she'll have to wait until June 1st.

If you're stitching along with me on the Bag Ladies, please choose whichever bag lady you like. Assuming I can get myself organized, I'll be doing the embroidery for the third Summer Holiday block next.

These are so much fun to stitch. When the embroidery is finished, I'll add a scrappy pieced border. All of the stuff I'll need is now packed away in the trailer, waiting for the finish.

The 21st of 25 Solstice Challenge blocks was released yesterday. The block is called "Tile Time" and it's a 6 x 6 grid of 2.5-inch squares.

Aye yi yi. (Insert HST whining and moaning here.) My block was to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and the scale of my fabric was much too large to be chopping it up into such tiny pieces. It was tempting to choose one of the blocks done earlier for this quilt, but then I started using my aged brain to figure out a way to cut the fabric into larger pieces. With only a couple of seams sewn in the wrong direction, I got 'er done. Yay me!

It reminds me a little of some of the Aztec symbols I've seen, and so I didn't want to lose the design. Just four blocks to go on this quilt, and then I'll be ready to start sewing them together.

Since the last time I wrote, I received a package in the mail from my friend Felicia. Felicia sent two pincushions. Aren't these cute?

And knowing I love polka dots, she included cuts of these two fabrics. Aren't these great?

Thank you for that thoughtful gift, Felicia. These will be put to good use. That one on top might even be a candidate for the scrub jay quilt. (I say that about all new stash accumulations now...just covering my bases, you know.)

Today I'm packing up clothes and toiletries. Most all of my electronic devices have finished charging and their respective charging cords are packed now. You might remember that I said I wasn't going to blog again until after we got on the road. My only defense is this: The best laid plans. Now I'll go back to blogger silence for the next day or two. Just pretend you didn't see me here. I'll write when we get where we're going next. By then, I should have lots to tell you.