Rainy Days and Sundays

Good morning, my friends. We're pretty well back to what passes for normal around here. The outdoors is still looking pretty ratty, and I'm afraid that's going to take some time to set right. Knowing rain was coming, I thought Mike would just wait to start on the mowing. Silly me. I might have known he wouldn't be able to stand it, and so he went to work on Saturday trying to hack through the Amazon. 

Mowing almost always begins with first fixing something on the tractor or mower deck. It took him about an hour to get going, but then, he was hard at it.

Wanna know who else was hard at it? Mamma squirrel. She has at least four kits.

They're looking longingly at the annual pots, not yet planted. They're wondering when I'm going to plant some flowers for them to eat.

Also hard at it...the bees. They really love the chive blossoms.

Before the rain started up, I was out for a bit to see if anything new had bloomed. I didn't see any new flowers, but I noticed the Stargazer Lily is all budded up and ready to bloom. When it reached this point last year, some critter came along and relieved it of its flower buds. Hopefully, nothing will munch on it this year, and we'll get to see some flowers.

Back inside, my next couple of months are going to be devoted to these two books. 

In planning a trip to Alaska, I might as well be planning a trip to the moon. I know almost nothing about the place, although I follow several Facebook groups devoted to Alaska. From the folks there, I'm gleaning quite a bit of good information, mainly about road conditions, scenery, and places to see. Already I have a rough trip planned out from our pre-COVID trip planning. Studying up on these guides will help me finalize it. There's no rush, but a year can go by pretty fast.

Okay, and I had some time to spend in the sewing room yesterday afternoon. I first spent time making the template for my "Vintage" art quilt. I'm working from a photograph, and so I traced out the details on a sheet of plastic. You only get a peek. Sorry.

Maybe it will help to show you some of the fabrics I'll be using. I'll probably also pull some more reds from my red bin. For now, these are my selections.

Smitty was very happy to be back in the sewing room. He purred and purred.

Then he helped me sew the one seam I needed to make a back for the Whimsical Garden quilt. You might recall I found this fabric while we were traveling.

As a reminder, this is how the quilt top looks:

With that finished, I wasn't sure what to do next. I'm instituting the one hour rule on my art quilt, and I'd already spent more time than that. I couldn't remember what I'd done just before we left on our trip. As it turns out, I'd finished a second quilt top from my WIPs list, and I had two open slots on my WIPs dance card. It seemed like as good a time as any to decide what projects to fill in there.

Sadie helped me with that.

Do not...I repeat...do not choose anything that includes papurr piecing.

Well, the boss has spoken, and so I steered clear of any of those patterns. I wanted to do something scrappy, and so I settled on this one. I'm pretty sure I found this pattern for free at some point, but I can't find it now. Nevertheless, you can find a download for it right here.

I still needed something else, and I spent quite a lot of time looking through books, notebooks, Dropbox, and other places I store patterns. Most everything left me feeling kind of meh. I have a couple of cat patterns I'd like to start, but I'm already have two cat quilts in the works. Then, I remembered this block from when I made the Full Circle quilt. This is the Virginia Reel block. There's a tutorial for the block right here.

This is the block I made for my quilt. I liked the design so much, I wanted to make a whole quilt from it.

And so it shall be. I'm still mulling over what fabrics I'll use...whether to make it scrappy or not...and the other things one considers when embarking on a new project. I'll figure something out.

And that left me moving on to the next project. It seems I might as well start catching up on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and so I went to work making March's cat wearing purple pajamas.

The face was finished.

I was just getting started on the leg sections, when I decided to stop for the day.

As a reminder, these are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

Okay, so that brings me to this morning. There was a hole in the sky this morning. For a while, it looked as if it might clear up for a bit.

As I've been writing, it's turned dark again. If there's a dry spell, I'll get out and pull some weeds. Eventually, I'll make my way to the sewing room. I'll spend an hour on my Vintage quilt, and then I'll get back to the Cats in Pajamas. 

We're expecting more rain over the next day or two, but things should start looking up by Wednesday. We're both itching to get outside and do some yard clean-up. For now, it's time for breakfast. Mike is waiting for me downstairs. Time to go save a life.