Telling Right from Wrong

Good morning, my friends. It's one of our last sunny days of September. We're promised a week of rain next week. When Mike and I lived in Phoenix in the first three years of our marriage, spring would approach, and folks would start taking bets on the first 100°F day. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, fall arrives, and we start wondering when the rain will start. It comes on gradually...a rainy day here and there...until eventually it's rain, rain, rain, every day, all the time. So with rain in the forecast several days next week, we begin to wonder, is this it? I'm thinking not. I expect we'll still get some nice weather into October, but it's time to start thinking about preparing the garden for winter. I'll need to cut the peonies back to the ground. Eventually, we'll move the dahlia pots into the garage. For now, we'll just wait and see and hope for the best.

Okay, so I started a new project yesterday. In answer to a question from my friend, Anonymous, the pattern is from this book:

It's called Stair Steps. This will be the third time I've posted a picture of the finished quilt. Soon, I'll stop, but for now, it will help you understand yesterday's progress.

As I've said, I'm making this quilt one row at a time. And, to be clear, I won't sew anything together until all the blocks are finished. So, looking at the picture above, you can see there are same color diagonal patches running through the rest of the scrappy patches. I counted how many I would need for the first row of blocks, and I cut those first.

Also, I cut the lighter rectangles, but apparently didn't take a picture. 

When all the colors common to all the blocks in the row were cut, I cut 40 scrappy squares, each 2-1/2 inches, and enough to make one block. Those went into a small bin to be picked out randomly. 

I'm only working with my darkest scraps for this quilt, except for the "common" colors pictured above.

The next step was to sew them into 2-patches, and then into 4-patches. And, honestly, it took me almost the whole afternoon to do all that cutting, and so I stopped when I had it this far.

But here's where right from wrong comes in. When I had these finished, I sucked in my breath, thinking I hadn't accounted for the common colors. Only then...look again at that picture above. Some of the blocks are just scrappy, with no common color running through. Phew! Here's the diagram from the pattern. Block 1 is scrappy. Blocks 2, 3, 4, and 5 are made using the common colors. Here's a diagram from the pattern showing their placement.

So, yesterday's progress was to make Block 1...the scrappy block...and all is right with the world. A cat would have known this, and helped me to avoid the momentary panic. But there was no kitty help yesterday. It's hard to find reliable help.

The good news is that I'll need only 32 of the scrappy squares for each of the remaining blocks in the row, as opposed to the 40 I cut yesterday. And it seems important to point out that if I were to cut all the scrappy blocks for the whole quilt from the get-go, I'd need 984(!) of them. Yikes. Yes, one row at a time will ward off the urge to use my rotary cutter to cut my own throat. 

I'm only hoping to have time for sewing today. Also on today's agenda is to make the Spicy Dilled Carrot Spears from the carrots I scored at the farmer's market on Saturday. It's an easy enough job, but a little time consuming to peel, trim, slice, blanche, pack, season, and process them. I'm hoping to have it done in a couple of hours, but sometimes things take longer than expected. My jars and lids are ready, and my peeler awaits.

We've had our breakfast already, and so I'll spend some time on my slow-stitching. I'm about halfway with this piece.

Now I've moved my hoop to the lower left corner, and I'll start there this morning.

So...off I go. Plenty to keep me busy today. It'll help me stay out of trouble.