Shades of Gray

Good morning, my friends. There were plenty of distractions yesterday, but I managed to make some progress on all fronts. We left early to take the truck into the shop to have its air conditioner repaired. It wasn't finished by day's end, and so I expect we'll pick it up sometime today. Also on today's agenda is to get my hair cut and colored. It needs it badly. I hate sitting for that process of coloring, but I'll be glad to get my overgrown mop tamed.

When we got home from taking the truck in, I spent some time with my slow stitching. I took the first stitches on the second of two sections for Block 6 of the Raggedy & Friends project.

It shouldn't take too long to stitch, which is good because I'm antsy to get started on the Sashiko piece. When we checked the mail yesterday, we found the floss I'd been waiting for had been delivered. These were the colors I was waiting for.

I've added them to some from my own stash, and so I now have about every shade of gray available. I won't use all of these, but I'm confident I have whatever colors I'll need to complete my project. And now that I have the floss, I'm excited to get started on it.

Okay, so I was ready to start quilting the sashing on the Stitching Wisdom quilt. I finally settled on an upsy-downsy loopity-boopity design. (Technical quilting terms. Try to keep up.) I wanted to do something that could cover the full width of the quilt without cutting thread, but I also wanted to make an "X" in those cornerstones. 

With this design I can go one direction on the "X" when I do the horizontal sashing. There were five rows of horizontal sashing.

That was pretty easy, and so I decided to do the vertical sashing too. In the image below, you can see that I went the other direction with the "X" to complete it.

Now only the two outer borders remain. Probably, I'll do the narrow one today and save the wider one for tomorrow. It's hard to see the quilting, but I'm hoping you can get an idea how it's looking in the image below.

Same goes for the back...hard to see much there.

After lunch, I went to work sewing together the Scrappy Plus blocks. I had one row done and was working on the second when Matthew called.

He and I had a long chat. When we hung up, I finished the second row and then sewed the two together.

It was getting late in the day, and I'd kind of lost my momentum by then. If there's time, I'll get back to this today. There are three more rows to do.

I'm not sure how much time there will be for sewing today. It seems like I'm going to be doing a lot of running around. I have a couple of errands to do while I'm out, and sewing might have to take a back seat today. There's always time for slow-stitching, though. I have some time before I need to leave this morning, and so I'll spend some time on that. 

Before I go, I wanted to tell you about this new breakfast we've been eating. The idea for this came from the book we've been following for the Mediterranean diet. I mentioned the book in an earlier post, I'm not necessarily recommending the book. So far, the recipes I've found there have been kind of boring. They are low in calories and high in all the good stuff recommended for this diet, but that's about the best I can say for it. Nevertheless, I tried this breakfast combination that we both really like. The way you see it here, it's about 200 calories. It's filling, and high enough in protein that it holds us until lunch. 

So what is it? Well, thanks for asking. It's 3/4 cup of Greek yogurt with a chunked up fresh peach and 2 tablespoons of slivered almonds. The almonds give it a nice crunch.

The recipe in the book had me using plain Greek yogurt with a teaspoon of honey. And even with the honey, plain yogurt is pretty flavorless. We like the Dannon Light & Fit Vanilla Greek yogurt, and it actually has fewer calories. Also, the recipe in the book used blueberries and walnuts. And, honestly, you could use any fruit and any nut here. Peaches are good right now, and so I'm using them. Also, we like the slivered almonds better than the walnuts. So if you're looking for a tasty, low calorie, easy-to-make breakfast, this is worth a try.

The weather is cooling off day by day. All the heat advisories have been canceled. It was cool enough to eat outside last night, and then we opened the windows when we went to bed.  Today's sky is pretty hazy, and that helps to keep it cool. On the other hand, the haze is from the so-called Flat Fire currently burning in Central Oregon. The fire is only about 2 miles from Sisters, Oregon, and it would be a shame if Sisters were to burn. Fingers crossed the weather will turn and give the firefighters (and Sisters) a break.