Powerless

We had grocery shopping to do in the morning, and so I wasn't able to make my way into the sewing room until after lunch. No matter. Any sewing is good sewing. I was looking forward to getting back to my list of WIPs. I've given them no attention since before Christmas, and I like to keep things moving along. Before grocery shopping, though, I stitched up the first hoop for Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. 

The next question I always ask myself is whether I'm working from bottom to top or from left to right. In this case, I decided I was stitching from left to right. It hardly matters, but you know...decisions. 

My next decision was whether to make Dutch Apple pie or Chocolate Cream pie. I had some apple pie filling canned back in 2019, and so I decided I should use that up. The Chocolate Cream would be a new recipe. Nevertheless, I did pick up everything I needed for the Chocolate Cream while we were grocery shopping, even though Dutch Apple won the day. It was Pi Day. Need I say more?

Finally, I could make my way into the sewing room, and I spent most of the afternoon rounding the pentagon of a crazy quilt block. If you haven't seen these before, I'm cutting the center piece from doilies, dresser scarves, old tablecloths, and other stuff I can't identify. This is my grandmother's hand embroidery, and I'm bringing it out into the light. It has been in my mother's cedar chest (which is now my cedar chest) since before I was born. I'm also adding a little bit of the crocheted edging from these pieces to each quilt block.

I'm mad at myself for trimming the block off-center. On the other hand, when I lay it out with the other two blocks, it isn't terribly noticeable. I expect this quilt will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 20 blocks, depending on how big it gets as I'm working on it. When I'm ready to sew it into a quilt top, I'll decide then whether to add a strip of fabric to the right side. I'm thinking it probably won't matter.

I have in mind to use a yellow sashing between blocks, and I'm going to make cornerstones from some of my grandmother's smaller hand-embroidered motifs. That is a long way off, however. For now, I'm just making blocks. Three down, many to go.

Next on my list is to make another block for the Shop Hop quilt. Searching through my fabrics, I think this one from The Quilter's Faire in Palm Desert, California was next. I chose it for...what else?...the palm trees.

Each time I make one of these, I have to slap myself in the face remembering I still need to embroider the name and place onto a piece of white fabric before I can even get started. And so I traced that out.

They don't take long. Sadie could see my problem, and so she hopped up on my lap. Black cats and black stitching go paw in hand.

When I was about 3/4 of the way finished, the power went out. Yikes. It seems a traffic accident, somewhere, some place, knocked out power to about 700 homes in our area. We can check the status online, and power was estimated to be back on around 9:15 p.m. It was only about 4:30 at the time, and so we ate dinner out. While we were out, Mike checked the status again...now they were saying midnight, and they didn't even have a crew at the scene yet. Okay, so maybe a movie? 

We hadn't been to a movie theater since way before the pandemic started, and so it was kind of like embarking on a new adventure. Not only that, but Mike had a gift card for the theater, given to him when he retired for the second time. It was still unused, and that was quite some time ago. There was almost no one in the theater,even though Oregon's mask mandate ended Saturday. We saw Death on the Nile. If you're a Hercule Poirot fan (an Agatha Christie character), then you'd probably enjoy this movie. It was entertaining, but it won't make the list of movies I'd watch again and again.

As we drove home, I kept noting: the lights are on there...and the lights are on there...and the lights are on there...until we got close to our driveway, where things were decidedly darker. Oh well. It gave us a chance to check the mail, where I found this happy mail from my friend, Darlene, at Creative Latitude.

It's about postcard sized. Very cute, Darlene. Thank you! It brightened our very dark house, for sure.

We sat and ate our pie in the dark, because obviously, we have our priorities. Then we moved some things around in the refrigerators and got things hooked up to a generator. I was worried about losing our food. The ice cream was already soft, but it seems everything was saved. The power came back on around 1:30 a.m. I thought it would wake me with all the beeping and booping of the appliances, but I slept right through it. Mike was able to get up and shut off the generator and the gas fireplace, where he found Sadie sleeping, warm as toast. And that was the happy ending to a rather wretched story.

Okay, so I'll get busy on the Shop Hop block today, and then I believe next in line will be the next block for New Mexico Kitchen. I'm eight blocks into this 12 block quilt. I'll be working on the 9th block, so I'm closing in on a group of finished quilt blocks for this one.

These take several days, and so it will probably keep me busy for the rest of the week. I have a special meal planned for St. Patrick's Day, and I'll say more about that later. I'm just noticing I probably won't do any sewing on Thursday.

When we returned from our trip last week, I gave myself a week's reprieve from any housework beyond unpacking. That all ends today. I'm back to some housekeeping chores before I can do anything else. But "before I can do anything else" is the heading above slow-stitching. Every day starts there.