Quiet Afternoon

Good morning, my friends. We survived our grocery shopping trip yesterday. The store was surprisingly empty. Where I live, the first Tuesday of the month is Senior Discount Day. Usually we see all the assisted living buses pull up for senior discounts, but we must have been ahead of the crowd. We were in and out pretty quickly, despite our long list. 

Mike's back was bothering him yesterday. It isn't surprising because the man has been doing hard physical work pretty much every day for the past two months. He was forced to take a day off yesterday, and I expect he will again today. It meant a quiet afternoon here at the Three Cats Ranch...the best kind.

After lunch, I went to work sewing together the two Grape Basket blocks I needed for the Girls' Getaway quilt. I'd cut and labeled the pieces the day before.

It was a fairly complicated block to sew together. First, I made the pieces, mainly half square triangles.

And then I laid them out for sewing together. I probably looked at this at least half a dozen times before sewing the first seam.

With just one mistake, I had them sewn together in about half an hour's time.

Here are the pieces I have for this quilt so far. I'll expect I'll start working on the third embroidered section before the week is over.

The last project on my list of WIPs is to make two more blocks for the Shop Hop 3.0 quilt. These are the two fabrics and shops I'll be sewing together.

It involves a little bit of paper piecing, and I wasn't in the mood for that. Instead, I decided to stitch up August's block for the "Joy in the Ordinary" quilt. This took about an hour.

Smitty was my stitching cat.

That brought me to the end of the day. The bird feeders needed filling. While I was out, I heard a crow who sounded distressed. He flew straight up and then dove straight down as a falcon might, strafing something in the trees. I couldn't see what it was, but I could see movement. So, I got my camera and zoomed way in to find this intruder. It looks like a Cooper's Hawk. He was high up in one of the Douglas fir trees at the far end of our property. I was using my point-and-shoot camera from about 200 yards away. Surprised I could catch him. "What are you looking at?"

Okay, so it's possible I'll finish up the Kittens stitchery this morning. I want to get in a Bowflex workout, and I have one housekeeping chore on my list. Except for that I'll just do some more sewing. I should be able to get the two blocks for the Shop Hop quilt finished, and then I'll be ready to move on to my next art quilt from this photo:

Yeah...sorry. Just a peek for you.

We've had some lovely weather the last couple of days...warm without being too hot. It's been nice having the windows open and the breeze blowing through. We're expecting similar weather today. Things could always change between now and the end of summer, but so far, it's been fairly cool. We've managed to avoid running the A/C for all but just a few days back in July.

Okay, it's time to get busy. Have a good day, Everybody!