Mostly Slow

Good morning, my friends, and welcome to November! We had to turn a calendar page since the last time we chatted. Also, we fell back an hour! Did you remember? 

Sheesh...so much excitement in such a short period of time. If I were a southern girl, it might have given me a case of the vapors. 

Before I go on, I want to thank those of you who stopped by to admire Mermie's Cabin yesterday. Thank you for your kind comments. I had fun making that little quilt. With that as my post yesterday, I have two days of sewing and cooking to catch up on. My stitching was slow, and I was slow. It rained hard yesterday, and that always has me feeling lazy.

So just what have I been stitching on? Thank you for asking. July's block for A Year in the Garden was pretty close to being finished on Friday morning.

Then yesterday morning, I spent a little extra time on it and finished it off.

Here are the seven blocks I have for this quilt so far.

When I made my way to the sewing room yesterday, I first needed to trace the next block for Le Jardin. I'll get started on it this morning.

These are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

And those stitch up pretty fast, so I decided to select the next "short" project for my embroidery dance card. Mr. Random selected this one. Either I printed this from the website for free, or else it was a gift given to me during a class I took with Meg Hawkey.

It's fairly detailed stitching, but a small piece. I have some white fabric to use for the background. Yesterday, I spent some time choosing floss colors. I had some of the colors listed. For others, I substituted something similar.

Also, I went to work cutting pieces for the next row of blocks for the Stair Steps quilt. Most of the blocks have a common color running from corner to corner. I cut those first. I needed 16 pink patches (for two blocks) and eight of each of the others.

That was as far as I got on Friday. Then, yesterday, I cut the remaining neutral pieces for the whole row: ten rectangles and ten squares.

And then I went to work sewing together the first block. I still needed 32 scrappy squares to complete it. By day's end, I had a single block. That's one down, four to go for the second row. It might not be obvious, but this block has a row of pink running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right.

Also, since there's a pattern to this, I've decided I'm going to start sewing together the rows as I make them. It'll save me trouble down the road.

The only other thing I have to tell you about is this new recipe I tried last week. This is called Marry Me Tortellini. This was so easy...all made in a single skillet. I love a dish that doesn't make a lot of dirty dishes.

We had this with some breadsticks on the side, and I'll make it again for sure. It's easy enough to make in the RV.

Okay so today's agenda will be mainly making more blocks for the Stair Steps quilt. I'm just at the beginning of the WIPs section of my white board. I want to work my way through those, and I'll need to make November's Kitten in a Cup. Here are the blocks I have for that quilt so far.

November's and December's block color will be my choice. I usually pick from my multi-colored bin when nobody tells me what to do.

Also, I'll need to start on my next art quilt for The Endeavourers fairly soon. The reveal won't be until February, but we'll be heading south at the end of December, so I have less than two months to work on it. The prompt should be announced by Monday.

Oh yes, and I have an update about my Paypal dispute. As I mentioned in a previous post, I received an email from Paypal telling me the seller had increased the amount due by $4.50. After that, I looked more closely at the site itself. It’s started looking  fishy to me, and so I attempted to update the dispute I'd begun with Paypal. Although Paypal gives instructions on the website for making changes to an open case, none of it worked. Their links just took me in circles, and so I kept updating the case with "more information" more days than not. Yesterday, they updated my dispute by refunding the original $4.50 and closing the case! Obviously, no one had read the "more information" I'd written wherein I told them it was a scam and that I wanted a "refund on the entire amount of $34.55 without delay." As if that made a hill of beans difference. Dream on. 

Since then, I've done more clicking round and round on the website, and eventually put in a call to customer service. There, I had a very frustrating repetitive session with an "AI assistant." Again...I went round and round eventually repeating over and over again, "I want to talk to a human being." After about four tries, I actually did get a chance to speak with a human. He was very polite and cheerful, and he reopened the dispute to refund the additional $30.05. More time will have to pass now, but I'm confident I'll be refunded the additional amount. 

Probably I should have just given up. I don't care that much about the money, but I really, really, really don't want the thief to get to keep it. It'll probably be at least another week to ten days, but I'll continue to update you with whatever happens next. Okay, and just typing all of that made me mad all over again. 

Just now Smitty showed up to let me know that my lap is required downstairs.

Slow stitching is next. That'll help calm me down. Enjoy your Sunday. You get an extra hour today. What will you do with it?