Slugfest

Does rain have a way of making you lazy? It does me...especially when I've taken advantage of a sun break to do things that are physically taxing. For the past couple of months, I've been getting these little "Ray of Hope" messages from Sierra Club on the Messenger app. At first, they were just the "ray of hope" messages. As you might guess, they've morphed into more politically active donation requests. Oh well. I still enjoy the daily ray of hope. Here's the one from yesterday:

Given my weed-pulling activities over the past week, this seemed completely appropriate. Here's the lesson revealed to me by the weeds:

"Yes, you are old. 

You are much too old to be on your hands and knees pulling weeds. 

Hire a gardener to do this in the future."

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I needed to drop off the Snips & Snails quilt for entry into the Northwest Quilter's Guild quilt show next month. It was about an hour's drive total. When I got home, my kitty friends were waiting patiently to be set free. It was nearly noon by then, and so I let them out. Here's a cat on a mission:

He was on a mission to eat some of the tall grass that grows from the iris bed.

The iris bed has been out of control for a couple of years...a victim of neglect. The people we laughingly call "gardeners" here at the Three Cats Ranch never divided the rhizomes, and now they're hopelessly infected with grass. We're planning to take the iris out this year and create a perennial flower bed here. I'm pretty sure I said this last year too.

The rain made the new plantings look pretty. I love the way the drops bead up on the flowers.

The squirrels ate most of my tulip bulbs. The ones that are left are some of my favorite photography subjects.

After that, I got busy in the sewing room...or maybe I took a nap first...it's all a blur right now. My goal was to get to work on the Gingerbread Village. The first task was to choose some fabrics and cut them into 6 1/2-inch squares. There were to be two whites, four gingerbread tans of different patterns, one "candy red," one "pine green" and two candy cane stripes.

Okay, the next step was to cut certain shapes from these. When I made my first Happy Village a year or so ago, I followed the instructions and cut the fabrics stacked six together. That didn't give me very sharp cuts, and so I only stacked two this time around. Since this had to be done with scissors, I pinned a copied piece of the pattern to the tops and then cut away.

And that's only half the story because the large section in the middle gets cut into smaller pieces, thus:

When it was all finished, I had these shapes.

Meanwhile, this little person spent some time exploring her environs.

She really wants to get up on the book shelf over her head, but she hasn't quite figure out where to put herself. The whole shelf is full of books, which is rather inconvenient.

I'll give myself credit because I had to take a break during the day to make a paper-pieced greeting card for someone. I'll tell you more about that in a separate post. For now, I have to keep it a secret. But I have to give myself credit because it took me the whole live-long day to cut all the fabrics. It was a tedious and boring task, but cutting them this way gave me the nice sharp cuts I wanted.

When I had all the fabrics cut, I needed to cut a piece of batting to 16 1/2 inches square. Fortunately, I already had a scrap piece sewn together at some point. This will be perfect. I'll start building the village here.

That's as far as I got with the Gingerbread Village yesterday. Usually I don't take a lazy day like that, and so I felt a need to atone by stitching up the rest of the hoop for Heart & Home.

It's about two-thirds finished now, and I've moved the hoop to the top of the piece. When I finish here, that will be my next move.

On today's agenda is to get farther along on the Gingerbread Village. Also, I need to make a quick trip into town to drop something in the mail, but I'm also going to stop off at the grocery store for a couple of things. The bread baking activity of the other day was so disappointing that I feel a need to bake a tried-and-true loaf today. For that I'll need some whole milk. The gray skies continue, and I'm happy for the lazy days break from weeding.