Snuggle Season

Good morning, my friends. It's been raining solidly for at least the past 12 hours. Kitties know what to do. There are two ways of thinking about this kind of weather. You can be furrustrated that going outside is very unpleasant. Or you can be grateful for quilts and quilt-covered laps. Smitty and Sadie have made their choice.

Yesterday turned out to be a super fun day. As I mentioned, we were leaving for an early lunch with friends. I can tell you who they were now. It was Kathy and John! Kathy blogs at Life in Pieces. We started our blogs within months of one another way back in 2010, and we've been blogging buddies for all that time. Finally, after 13 years, we were able to meet in person for the first time.

It was great fun hearing about their recent travel to Oregon from Oklahoma and getting better acquainted after exchanging blogs and comments for so many years. Thanks for getting in touch, Kathy. It was a delight to meet the two of you.

Also, I said we were going to do our grocery shopping, but then we had a big lunch, and we forgot our grocery bags. I don't know how things are where you live, but here, those flimsy plastic bags have been banned. And that's fine with me, but if you don't bring your own bags, you have to pay 5¢ per bag for the paper ones. Well. That could have totaled up to a whopping 30¢, and we're nothing if not cheap. So, we bagged (🤣🤣) the whole grocery shopping trip and went home instead. We'll have to do our grocery shopping today, though. No excuses. Don't forget to bring the bags.

Back at home, I had a good part of the afternoon for sewing. You might remember I'd done all the cutting for the October Homestead block. The block I'm doing this time is "Corn and Beans." I had lots of little pieces laid out, paired up, and covered with a ruler. 

I was a little worried about fur-covered critters who might decide a different layout was purrfurred. And so it was easy to convince myself that I should first sew together the Corn and Beans block before finishing up the Tiny House I was working on. So, I sewed all those triangles into half square triangles.

And then I trimmed them to size.

Then, paying careful attention to the diagram, I laid them out, and checked them thrice.

And then, amazingly, I sewed them together correctly on the first try.

Here's what the "Quilt Discovery Experience" booklet says about the Corn and Beans block.

Quilt patterns reflected our country's agricultural society and the family's dependence on the crops they harvested, the fruit and vegetables they grew, and the foods they preserved. Up until 1920, most people lived on farms. Only 2% of the population resided in towns or cities. A quilt pattern that reflects this agricultural influence is Corn and Beans, both of which were essential to the homesteaders. 

Quilting allowed women to escape from the hard work, rigors and drabness of their everyday routines. With 7-8 women gathered around the quilt frame, a quilting bee, offered an excellent way to socialize. 

The Quilting Bee was such a popular event that Stephen Foster, one of America's beloved songwriters, wrote a song about it: 

In the sky the bright stars glittered

On the banks, the pale moon shone,

And was from Aunt Dinah's quilting party

I was seeing Nellie home.

Here are the ten blocks I have for this quilt so far: 

It was tempting to stop then, but I decided to put on my Big Girl pants and finish off the 34th Tiny House. The pieces aren't sewn together yet, but I'll finish this today. 

Okay, so that brings me to a fork in the road. I want to start quilting the Strips and Stripes quilt, but I want to wait until the Handi Quilter Square Foot is delivered. So I'll keep working on finishing off the last two Tiny Houses. Next up will be this one:

And when I've finished my hour's limit on that, I'll skip ahead to one of the other projects on my white board. It's time to start sewing together the blocks for the Jericho Walls quilt. This was last year's RSC project.

I have a plan for sewing this together. The blocks will be set on point, and so it's going to take a while to do all the cutting and getting it all sewn together. I'll probably do some project hopping between the Tiny Houses, Strips and Stripes, and Jericho Walls, working on each a little at a time.

The only other sewing I did yesterday was to finish the mouse in the Kittens block. 

Now I've moved my hoop to capture the whole of the kitten's ears, and I'll do some more work on that this morning.

But now it's time for breakfast. We'll be bundling up in our rain gear and venturing out to do our grocery shopping after that. We've nearly forgotten how to act when it's raining buckets, but I'm sure those skills will all come rushing back to us pretty quickly. There should be plenty of time for sewing later on today. 

What's on your to-do list for today?