One Quilter's Trash

Good morning, my friends. I'm sitting in a cold RV this morning. The temperatures in Boulder City have been nothing to write home about for the past two days. It was a very blustery day yesterday. The wind has died down, but it is still cold. For whatever reason, I can't get the furnace to come on, and Mike is still in bed. I have an idea we're low on propane. It isn't the end of the world, and it's probably just a matter of switching to a second tank. I think it's supposed to happen automatically, but then...maybe that isn't the problem at all. It's okay, I have a bean bag that I warm in the microwave and it functions like a hot water bottle. It's keeping me mostly warm, but my hands are cold. Just now I heard Mike stirring. His ears (or maybe his eyes) must be burning with me writing about him. If he doesn't get up by the time I'm finished here, I'm going to wake him up and get him to stoke the home fires.

Okay, so we didn't do much yesterday because it was too unpleasantly windy to be outside. With such cold temperatures the wind was bitter and biting. (I'm sure all you folks buried in snow will feel sympathetic for this poor quilter in sunny Nevada. Not.) As I'm writing this, there is a hummingbird stationed in the tree outside our window. I can't get a very good picture of him in the low light.

Here I've zoomed in a little...still kind of blurry, but it's the best I can do until there's more sunlight.

It's about to drive Sadie to distraction.

So yesterday's inchy was posted, and I've stitched it up. There should be another one posted within the hour. I'm hoping my fingers will be warmer by then.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, my friend Dorothy posted a picture of some pretty heart quilt blocks she's making, and it gave me an idea for using up the many red and white half square triangles I generated a couple of days ago.  And it works! 

I have enough of these to make four hearts...enough to make a little Valentine's Day table topper. It'll be another quilt for my "trashy" series, meaning these are the sorts of things I might otherwise toss in the trash. These were all cut-off bonus triangles from when I finished off the "I Believe in Snowmen" quilt. 

Okay, but if I'm going to make a trashy quilt, I need some fabric. So that gave us something to do. We had a couple of other errands to run, but we finished off with a visit to Quiltique, which is a truly great quilt shop in Henderson, just to the north of Boulder City. I've written a post about Quiltique before, and so I didn't do another one. If you want to know more about this place, you can read my old blog post right here. I met up with my friend Heidi on that day.

It's a big shop with lots of fabric, but surprisingly little Valentine's Day fabric. I couldn't really find what I was looking for since all their heart fabric was in shades of pink. I was looking for a solid white and some red hearts. Strangely, I couldn't find a solid white, but I found this one with just some sparse tone-on-tone polka dots. It was hard to get a good picture, but you can see the polka dots in the lower right corner of the image below. It should work for my trashy quilt.

And then this one for the red. It isn't hearts, but it will work.

While we watched the news later in the afternoon, I filled in the next hoop of the blackwork basket.

It's about half finished now. Smitty would like you to know that he had a paw in this effort too.

Okay, so it's a better day today weather-wise. I'm going to get outside for another photo scavenger hunt. Also, I'm going to sew together the four trashy hearts. If there's more time for sewing, I'll start sewing it into a finished top. I'm kind of excited now that I've found a purpose for all those reds and whites.

Mike is finally stirring, and his phone just started ringing too. It must be time to start the day. My first stop will be stitching the next inchy. It's going to be a good day. I hope you have a good day planned for yourself too.