One Row to Go

Good morning, my friends. It's a new week, filled with promise. I'm promising to finish the Shop Hop quilt this week. There's just one row of blocks to finish and then I'll need to quilt the border. After that, it will be ready for binding. In yesterday's group of blocks were these:

We were in Albuquerque (above) just before their annual balloon festival, and that was a great shop. Below, we were in Yakima to have some work done on our camper slides. This fabric was selected to honor the Yakima Nation.

This next one was a fun shop on the northern boundary of Tucson.

It was there that I picked up the free pattern for the Cactus Cat.

This was another great shop in New Mexico.

And this is one of my favorite blocks in this quilt. While most sewing shops sell vacuums as a side hustle, this one sold wind-surfing boards. They had several pre-printed blocks to choose from. I looked up the pattern I was using to see if this one was large enough, and it was. It was kind of a perfect choice for this shop.

Remember that Lake Havasu City is where the London Bridge is now located. You can read about it right here.

Okay, so my wrist has been giving me trouble, as I expected. Any time I'm doing free motion quilting, it flares up some tendonitis in my left wrist. Even when I'm limiting my time at the machine, it still seems to be a problem. I wondered if it was more about holding the ruler than quilting, and so I looked back at old blog posts to see if I'd whined about it even without a ruler, and I had. So it's the quilting, not the ruler. Oh well. I've been babying it, and I immobilized it with a splint yesterday. As it turns out, I can quilt with the splint, and so I'm probably going to have to use a splint whenever I'm doing free motion quilting. Aging isn't for wimps, and quilting is bloodsport. Who among us hasn't drawn blood while sewing? I rest my case.

Speaking of cases, I mentioned yesterday that I'm on a mission to clean out my walk-in pantry. I've committed to doing one shelf per day until it's finished. My friend, Rita, asked me to do a before and after. I was reluctant at first...it's a little like showing an effort to clean out a garage. My pantry is sort of like an indoor shed for cooking stuff. Anyway...I decided I'd go ahead and show you what I'm doing. You can read on or not...no hard feelings if you're not interested.

Okay, so are you still here? I'd already done yesterday's shelf before reading Rita's comment. So I'm showing you only the after in the image below. I wanted to move all my mason jars to the bottom shelf rather than continue to risk killing myself in a shower of broken glass. (Yeah, I like to think ahead that way.) So I moved all the jars from the upper shelf to the bottom shelf. I was chagrined to realize I couldn't stack them as high there, but then I figured out that the half-pint jars will fit under the shelf, and that gave me enough room for almost all of them. There are still a couple of boxes stacked on the floor to the right, but I'm hoping I'll open up enough space on some other shelves to get them up off the floor.

Moving the jars to the lower shelf meant moving the things I had there to the upper shelf. These things don't get used more than a few times a year, and so putting them up higher makes sense. What you see here from left to right are my pickle crock, my canning kettle for water bath canning, my pressure canner, and a plastic bucket we keep inside and clean. We use it for brining turkeys. Yes, the turkeys are our heroes.

Before I show you the rest of the pantry, let me just tell you a little about how it came to be. Our house is kind of a funny house. By that I mean it has funny little rooms with no closets where there should be closets. We've added closets in some of those rooms. We bought our place for the property. The house was merely acceptable, and it worked for the two of us. 

The pantry was formerly a room too small to be a bedroom, and there was no closet. Initially, I set it up to be a music room. It held my piano and my guitars along with my library of sheet music and books. Eventually, we moved the piano downstairs to the family room. When I learned to quilt, I completely abandoned my musical pursuits (it never gave me much enjoyment anyway), and over time, we ended up selling all the musical instruments. 

That opened the music room up to become my walk-in pantry. It's about five steps away from the kitchen, and we changed out the door with this one we found at Home Depot. Mike stained the frame to match another door in our entry way.

Also, the doors you see below were once a solid wall. They're located on the opposite wall from the pantry door. Mike's office is through those doors, but it was once a single-car garage. We still crack ourselves up when someone sees Mike's office for the first time and says, "This is a big room!" And we say, "Big enough to park a car." I know...comedians we are not. (Sorry for the blur in this image.)

Okay, so this is the shelving unit I was working with. These restaurant-style shelves came from The Container Store. The second "shelf" is actually a basket where I put bags and boxes of pasta, rice, beans, and noodles. I really need to sort through some of that stuff. Probably I'll do that today. The shelf below holds appliances and pots that are too big for a cabinet. There's also a lifetime supply of parchment paper there purchased at a restaurant supply store many years ago.

Turning around from there are two more shelving units. All the liquor on the left top shelf mostly came from Mike's mom who passed away 25 years ago. I've been using it in recipes, but a lot of it just needs to get dumped. We don't drink it, and it's never going to get used. To the right of that are candles and table decorations. There are more large pots and things too large for cabinets there. Also, all my bread-baking stuff on the right bottom shelf. The rest is pretty self explanatory. It's messy, and some of it just needs to go away. Fascinating, I know.

To the right of those shelves is a window. Here I used some wire cubes that formerly held all my music. I was able to repurpose it for cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, and food storage containers. It was just a happy accident that it was precisely the size I needed for this space.

And that's about all I have to say about that. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

As I've mentioned before, Smitty demands his lovefest after dinner. We were still eating last night when he started meowing at the bottom of the stairs. A cat has his needs, you know.

So, I'm hoping to finish the final row of my quilt today. I left it needle down right here. Yes, the picture is upside down. It's that way on the machine. I'll keep my wrist splinted, and I should be able to finish it without too much discomfort.

Also, I'll continue on with my pantry project. And we'll be doing our grocery shopping tomorrow, so I need to make up a list. When you think about it, you need food to live, right? So making up a grocery shopping list can literally save lives. It makes it kind of heroic when you think of it that way, doesn't it? Yeah. Those of us who manage the food for our families should really get some kind of medal. At the very least, we should all get participation trophies.

So, off I go. Heroes R Us.