Mostly Slow

The Blogger platform is behaving weirdly lately. Just now I typed the first paragraph of this post...different from the one you're reading now. But the template looked strange to me, and so I saved what I had and then went back to the draft to see if it was working. It wasn't. There was an "Untitled Draft" where I'd given it a title, and then nothing in the text. So I'm glad I checked because I would have been majorly pissed if I'd typed the whole thing and ended up with nothing. Fair warning, my Blogger-using friends.

So, getting back to what I was saying...it rained the whole live-long day yesterday. It poured at times. We've always said that summer doesn't really start in the Pacific Northwest until July 5th. I can't tell you the number of times we've celebrated the Fourth of July under umbrellas. Also, we have this Rose Festival celebration in Portland at the end of June. There's a queen and a parade and floats and all the trimmings. And, again, I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen the queen and her court on a float, all waving and holding umbrellas. Here's a picture from a few years ago:

It sort of takes the pomp and circumstance out of the whole affair. And all of that to say that We. Are. So. Tired. Of. The. Rain. We're used to rain here, but we usually get a lot more sunshine this time of year. It's just as well we hadn't planned to start a garden this summer because there hasn't been a dry and warm span of time long enough for the soil to dry out for tilling, nor to warm it up for planting.

Okay, so enough complaining about the weather. I spent the wet morning finishing off the third Domestic Affairs block.

This was a block of the month from Jenny of Elefantz some years back. Here are the three blocks I have for this quilt so far.

With that finished, I needed to make up my next stitching project. My embroidery dance card includes one slot for a "short" project; meaning, one that can be finished in one go-round. You might remember when I picked up this freebee at a quilt shop in Tucson, Arizona, last fall. They had a whole rack of these, and of course, I took one. It'll be a great little embroidery project. When I checked out, she made me promise to give it a good home. Of course!

So I pinned and traced mine yesterday morning.

Now it's ready for stitching.

But first, I want to make up June's block for the Books and Roses BOM. This is another one from Jenny of Elefantz. Jennifer is making them as bookmarks, but I'm making little quilt blocks from the designs. Here is the next one. I'm combining this with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and doing them in the color of the month. June's color is dark and bright blues. 

So, I'll stitch that first. These go pretty quick, and I should be able to finish that this morning. And this being Sunday, I'll be linking to:

The only other "sewing" I did yesterday was to cut the pieces for June's Jericho Walls blocks. This is another quilt I'm making for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

That was as far as I got with this project. I had in mind to finish watching a television documentary. It's one I'm watching without Mike. I kept thinking I'd stay up late and watch it after he went to bed, but that never worked out. I was always falling asleep during our evening television watching, and so staying up late was not really an option. Instead, I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon finishing it off, and so there was no more sewing for the rest of the day.

And so, as you might guess, it's raining again today. Sigh. When I said there was nothing standing between me and my sewing yesterday, I'd forgotten I had a pile of laundry to tackle. That's all finished now, and so really, there's nothing standing between me and my sewing today. It's going to be an NBS day...fast or slow...nothing but sewing all day long. I'm confident I'll have plenty of help with that.

And I don't know about you, but when I have an NBS day ahead, I kind of want to get started on it right away. Time to get to it.