Dark Green for May

Things have been busy around here. Today, with the help of extended family members, we are going to be tilling up the raised garden beds (we have a tiny tiller just for that purpose) and installing the drip irrigation. If we have time, the planting will begin. Since it will all be done outdoors, it should be easy to maintain our proper 6’ social distancing during these crazy pandemic times. No masks, but no hugging either. And sometime this weekend I’ll plant flowers in my Mexican Talavera pots for the front walkway.

It finally feels as though I had time to do some quality sewing this week, and I made a good start on May’s Rainbow Scrap color, dark greens. I’ll be linking up to Scrappy Saturday to share and see what other quilters have been sewing up.

Here are the 10 Twin Sisters blocks I sewed yesterday (above) and the Scraptastic Star block, below.

It was quick work to get the pink and blue Happy Blocks sewn together into a flimsy, which used up all of the leftover Monet-like floral sheet I had left from other backings.

I also sewed up a backing for this with leftover blocks and some pieces of pink and blue fabric, so this can hopefully be sandwiched up soon.

But the fun project I’m working on this week, and it’s my One Monthly Goal (OMG) for May, is sewing up the garlic knots into a flimsy. But I have a decision to make about the layout, and I’d like your help.  I’m not sure if I want to do a random, scrappy layout or a rainbow color wash (gradation) layout. And should the blocks all be facing the same direction or turned to form linking chains? My design board isn’t large enough to hold all the blocks at once, but the quilt will be 8 columns across (shown) by 10 blocks down. I could only fit 6 rows for these examples; the teals, blues and purples are not shown, but will be included in the final quilt.

Here are the options. Which one(s) do you like?

A.  Color gradation, same direction

B.  Color gradation, chains

C.  Scrappy, same direction

D.  Scrappy, chains

I should tell you that I plan to quilt it in an overall pattern, something simple as usual. Even if I end up going with a chain pattern, I won’t be doing any fancy patterns in the white areas. In fact, I’m not overly enthusiastic about all the white areas (give me COLOR!), but as this is a potential gift quilt, I’m trying not to let that “color” my choice. Pun intended.

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Alfie and Darla have been having lots of fun over the last couple weeks with a pair of blue scrub jays that have apparently set up housekeeping somewhere nearby. Whenever we have the front or back doors open, leaving the screen or storm doors, the kitties like to lay nearby and watch “cat TV”, most especially the Bird Channel.

The scrub jays are large and loud and relatively fearless (like Magpies), for a bird.  I’m not sure if they are taunting the cats or trying to communicate.

For Alfie and Darla’s part, I’m pretty sure they’re just considering menu options.