Irish Spring

My "senior hours" grocery shopping excursion exhausted me yesterday. Maybe just submitting to the label of "senior" was enough to make me feel ten years older...or maybe it was the ridiculousness of panic buying. Hard to say, but I was tired and took a nap after lunch. I had a few minor housekeeping chores to do, but then made my way into the sewing room to pick-up again on this nearly-forgotten project started last year.

This year's goal is to finish up the many quilts to be quilted, and the many quilt blocks that need sewing into a quilt shop. Last year's quest was to use more scraps. I did knock off quite a few last year, but I'm pretty sure I ended 2019 with more scraps than when I started. To that end, I decided to start this triple Irish chain quilt...a favorite pattern of mine...using the smallest of my scraps. I know this can be done with strip-piecing, but I'm trying to use of those itty-bitties, and so I'm cutting mine piece by piece. Yesterday's effort meant cutting 156 of these 2 x 2-inch squares.

It's surprising how fast this goes, but it still took quite a bit of what remained of my sewing day. I'm picking randomly from my red, orange, blue, and purple scraps. Any piece that can't be cut into a 2 x 2-inch square is getting added to a zip-lock bag for a friend who makes crafty items with little bits of fabric. Smitty helped me keep it random by mixing things up as I went.

He's keeping one laser turned on at all times in order to detect Sadie movements in the room. Sometimes she sneaks up on him and tries to hug him by throwing her front leg around his neck. She gets her cooties all over him, and he hates that.

When I had all the little squares cut, I sewed together the first of three blocks. (I'll need four "blanks" for this row as well.)

When I finished that, I realized I'd sewn the first four blocks together wrong. They should all have a white patch where I've indicated in the image below.

I checked to see if I'd done them all wrong...yes, of course I did. So I'll have to fix those. I fixed one yesterday, and it wasn't too difficult to cut out the patch of color and exchange it for a white one. I'll get the other three fixed before I get back to work on the second row of blocks.

That's where I left off yesterday. It was time for dinner and time to stir my sourdough starter. When I looked at it this morning, I had some bubbling action going.

I'll keep stirring it today, and after dinner, I'll give it some more flour and pineapple juice. I've mentioned the use of pineapple juice before, but if you're wondering about that, here's the explanation. It seems some kitchens are inhabited by a microorganism that inhibits the growth of yeast. My kitchen seems to be one of these, and when I tried getting a starter going, it would go gangbusters for a few days, and then turn soupy and die. After doing some reading, I discovered this pineapple juice method. The acid in the pineapple juice inhibits the growth of the bad bugs, while encouraging growth of the yeasties. You can read the science behind this right here. It's something to keep in mind, and you can find the method I'm using for making this starter right here. Also, in my travels over the internet yesterday, I found this article from Food & Wine, entitled An Extremely Chill Beginner's Guide to Sourdough. If you'd like to give this a try, I can recommend the article.

Yesterday I finished off the embroidery on the ninth snowflake.

For this morning's slow stitching, I'll add the beads. Wherever you see a little circle in the image above, a bead will go there, including a few more. By tomorrow, this one should be finished. And that means, I'll be tracing out the next block for the Appalachian Memories quilt today. It'll be good to get back to some of the projects that were left behind while we traveled this winter.

The sun is shining this morning. Rain isn't supposed to start up until around 2:00 p.m. I'm going to get out and do some weeding this morning. Oh my...there are a lot of weeds. All I can say is, baby steps. I've told myself I'll spend an hour each day plugging away at them. At that pace, I can do the whole yard, and then start back at the beginning. By then, it should look as if I haven't pulled any at all.