Lotsa Sewing

It was close to an NBS day yesterday. I had a few little things to do around the house, but mostly, I stayed in and sewed. There was a pretty steady drizzle for most of the day, and it was a good day for staying in my sweats. I call them my "daytime jammies." Nevertheless, I braved the wet weather and went out to pick the ripe cherry tomatoes and a few more plums. They looked so pretty together I was compelled to take a picture.

The cherry tomatoes were just a bonus. I was really on the hunt for the plums because I wanted to try this recipe for Caramelized Plums. It took minutes to make it.

We put it over ice cream last night. Even if you don't have it over ice cream, I can tell you that straight from the pan, it tastes pretty darned good.

After that, I headed into the sewing room. Helper cat was on the job.

I was ready to make the black and white blocks for the Rainbow Jubilee blocks. The strips were sewn together and the blocks were trimmed and cut corner-to-corner.

Then I laid them out with their dark blue counterparts. It's easy to get them facing in the wrong direction if I'm not careful.

Then I sewed them together and September's blocks were finished.

Tomorrow I'll link up to

Here are all the blocks I have for this quilt so far. Three more colors to go.

After that, I got to work on the blocks for the Shop Hop quilt. The first one was this block from Canada. It's the only quilt shop I've visited in Canada, and so the choice was obvious. And may I just say, Canada, that I've always loved your flag.

This was a great shop. You can find its web presence right here. When I looked up its web presence, I remembered their Row by Row kit that so enchanted me on the day I visited. It's still very tempting...as if I need another project. The blog post I wrote about my visit to the quilt shop can be found right here.

Next up was Auntie's Attic Quilt Shop. Its web presence can be found right here. We were noticing the change of leaves at this point in our trip, and so this fabric with falling leaves seemed completely appropriate. It's a pretty fabric with some metallic gold. The shop was nothing fancy, but the woman working there ("Auntie," I presume) was friendly as can be. You can find my blog post about Auntie's Attic right here.

Next was a shop we visited near Acadia National Park. Acadia was a big bucket list item, and the quilt shop was just a bonus. While we were visiting the park, we were standing looking out at one of the spectacular views and watching a boat dropping off lobster traps. We could see one even though it was some distance away. Here's the picture I took of it.

You can read more about our visit to the park right here. So when we visited the quilt shop in Ellsworth a few days later, it was very tempting to get some lobster fabric as my regional print. But the colors of this one with the lobster trap buoys was so colorful and fun, I chose it.

You can read my blog post about Sewing by the Sea right here. Their web presence is right here. As I was writing this post, I noticed that the quilt shop is listed as being in the town of Trenton. I took the city name off the receipt from my purchase when I created my embroidery strip. Now I'm wondering which is right, but it doesn't matter...I'm not changing it.

I was getting kind of tired of sewing by that time, and so I did just one more block. You might recall that the two center blocks for this quilt are doubles. I had two fabrics with a scale too large to fit into a single block, and so I made them twice the size of the others. This is one of them. It's from the first quilt shop we visited when we took our epic journey around the perimeter of the United States. We'd been driving, and driving, and driving for days. Our first sight-seeing stop was the Ringing Rocks near Butte, Montana, and this quilt shop was nearby. In all of our driving, I'd been taking pictures of barns...hundreds of pictures of barns...and so this fabric seemed the right choice. Also...it was just a bit of Americana, and I was feeling all misty-eyed at the beginning of our decades-long-anticipated trip.

This was a fun shop. You can read my blog post about it right here. There was a lot there that made me smile. They don't seem to have a web presence beyond their Facebook page, which you can see right here.

So there are three blocks left to make to finish off this row for the Shop Hop quilt. I'm walking with Sue this morning, and then I'm hoping to have some more time to finish them off this afternoon. It's always hard to say how the day will go, but that's my plan.