Snowmen in August

Good morning, my friends. Well, let me just start off by saying that Smitty's life was sucking bad yesterday morning. He whined and moaned and groaned for the door to be opened. But, nothing doing. We had grocery shopping to do, and he had to wait.

You might notice the spot on his nose in the image above. Looks like something took a whack at him. I'm not sure if it was some small furry mammal or if Sadie smacked him. Although, come to think of it, the term "small furry mammal" could include Sadie. Either way, he probably had it coming.

Finally, finally, finally, we were home and opened the door so they could return to their places in their happy hunting grounds.

By day's end we could see that it was a gratifying day of gopher digging.

My afternoon was spent finishing off the eighth of nine blocks for the Merry, Merry Snowmen project. I first top-stitched all the applique.

And then I added details with both machine and hand stitching. There were a couple of buttons to sew on as well. I always dread the hand-stitching in these because I'm stitching through layers of applique. Really, though, it isn't that hard, and so I don't know why I keep dragging my feet about it. I suppose it's a little like childbirth...the pain is forgotten once it's over.

Here are all the blocks I have for this quilt so far. Just one more to go before I can start sewing it all together.

The last one will look like this. Cute.

Our heat wave seems to have subsided. The temperature was up to 99°F in Portland yesterday, but our weatherman tells us we haven't broken the 100°F mark yet this summer. That's okay by me. We're always cooler on our hill, and our temps have been in the high 80's. Still, it'll be nice to have some cooler weather. Since it's cooled off some today, I'm going to get outside and do a little more yard work. Our little rose bush was eaten away by deer while we were gone. It doesn't look like it's managed to put out a single rose that wasn't devoured before it could bloom. (The deer love the rose buds as much as I love fudge.) 

Also, there's an azalea that continues to live despite half its branches being dead. We've talked about replacing it, but I'm going to try cutting the dead stuff out first. Possibly it will fill in. Certainly it can't look any worse than it does now. 

When that's finished I'll get to work making another row of blocks for the Land and Sea quilt. These are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

My plan is to make two more rows of blocks. I saw a similar quilt made up on Facebook. The quilter added a sashing between the blocks, and I kind of liked how it tamed it down some. My goal is to use some of my blue and green scraps for this. A blue sashing might be a nice addition. I'm still thinking it over.

Also, I'm trying to decide what to do about this quilt I started at the beginning of the year. This is a free BOM from Jenny of Elefantz called The Sewing Room.

It was originally going to be a nine-month BOM with one embroidered block each month and three pieced blocks. I've created the blocks you see above, but I have not yet finished June's blocks. You might know that Jennifer shut-down her blog in June, and discontinued this BOM. She's also gone back and edited the original instructions to show only six months worth of blocks. And now I'm kind of stuck trying to decide whether to finish June or just bag the whole thing. 

I can't say I'm happy with what I have so far, and I can't imagine how I'd set it to make it any more desirable. What ideas do you guys have? At this point, I'm thinking I'll finish off June's blocks and then see what I think about it. Possibly a solid sashing could make it look better, but I'm doubtful. Also, I wish she'd finished the whole nine months, but then...it was free. No whining.

Okay so slow-stitching is next for me. And then I'll get on with my day. I hope your day will be comfortably cool.