A Day of Rest

Good morning, my friends. My wrist was begging for a day off from quilting, and so I relented. Actually, my wrist was just an excuse. We were slow off the blocks yesterday to do our grocery shopping. After finishing yesterday's post, I went downstairs to where Mike was sitting. "We don't have to rush out the door, do we?" he asked. And that was all the whining I needed to hear to help me decide to do my slow-stitching first. So, we weren't home until after 1:30 p.m. We found the kitties sitting in solidarity after our mistreatment of Smitty with the deworming medication.

You'll have to go through me to get to him. I'm his purrtector, and my murder mittens are razor-sharp.

Before we left, I'd stitched this far on the latest block for Grandpa's Bridges.

I decided to move my hoop up from there in order to finish the lines of the roof. 

I'm nearing a finish on this, and so it seemed a good way to avoid quilting would be to make up the next two blocks for "The Story of My Day." These will be blocks 19 and 20 of this 25-block quilt.

Sadie stood by. She's wondering if that trailer has a catio. If it doesn't, she's not going.

When those were finished, I turned my attention to the Shop Hop 4.0 quilt. I've only gone so far as to choose a pattern for the next shop hop blocks. I'm going to use these suitcase blocks to showcase the next fabrics. 

I spent some time deciding where I could embroider the names and places for the shops. Probably the best place is below the suitcase. That strip of fabric is 3 x 10 inches, and so that would give me a good "palette" for the embroidery. I could also do it above the suitcase, but that strip is narrower. Below seems the logical choice. In any case, I needed a background fabric, and so I went online and ordered a solid Kona "Sand" color. I like how the quilt pictured above is done in two background colors. I worried the embroidery would be difficult to see if I went with a darker color, and so I'll just stick with one background color.

With that settled, I looked through some photographs with an eye toward the next art quilt challenge. We're onto our last prompt which is "Mosaic." I'm going to try a whole new technique for me, and I've been paging through this book in preparation.

I'm a little ahead of myself here because the reveal for my previous quilt...this one:

won't be until next week. Still, I like to think ahead, and I've been thinking about the next project for a while, trying to settle on a photograph to use for my quilt. When I first started thinking about this, I had a certain photograph in mind. Then I had second thoughts, and I auditioned dozens of photographs and ideas. As of yesterday, I've gone back to my original idea, and I'm probably settled on that. Here's a peek at the one I'll use.

Maddening, isn't it?

So, that was all the time I could kill in the sewing room yesterday. I still needed to do a shelf in my pantry. Yesterday finished off the fourth of the four shelves there. It didn't require much other than removing things and dusting it off.

We'd reached the news hour by then, and so I spent a little more time on my slow-stitching. I'm pretty close to finishing this now. Probably I won't finish it today, but maybe tomorrow.

Thankfully, it's a day at home today. I have lots on my to-do list, not the least of which is to finish quilting the border on the Shop Hop quilt. There's one housekeeping chore on my list, and I want to get in a walk on the treadmill. This would ordinarily be a day for a Bowflex session, but I'm avoiding the Bowflex until my wrist feels better. Also, I've enlisted Mike's help tackling the "booze shelf" in the pantry...this one:

As I mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of these bottles came from Mike's mom when she passed away in 1999. Some of it gets used in recipes. Some has never been opened. Some just plain tastes nasty. The shelf is up too high for me to reach without a step stool, and so the two of us will empty the shelf, sort through it, and pour out anything we don't want. At least we can recycle the glass. And those are cereal boxes there on the left. Those might get a new home in the basket where my pasta lives now that I've cleared out some space. 

This is an uninspiring task, but it's gratifying to get rid of extra baggage. We've done a good job over the past couple of years of cleaning out closets and discarding things we no longer want or need. Cleaning out this overstuffed pantry is just one more thing. When it's finished, there's a linen closet I'd like to tackle. These are good cold-weather projects.

Okay, I've been up for hours, but Mike only just now got up. Breakfast is next, and then I'll get on with my day. How are you passing the time today?