More Strings and Things

Hello friends! Welcome to another weekend (hallelujah!). It’s crazy that even when you’re retired, the weekend always seems to be the best time to relax and spend time with family and friends. And this is going to be a great weekend. Later this morning I head to the closest fabric shop to me (five minutes away), where our monthly Quilts for Kids workshop will be. I have five of my own little quilts to take, as well as about 11 from my friend Ruby who started quilting quilts for them on her longarm. 

The fabric store, Nuttall’s (a local chain of 4 stores from along the Wasatch Front), is also where I agreed to accompany Ruby last night, along with her sister Cathy, as well as Cousin Kim and niece Jenny to a year-long quilt class. We will meet once monthly, but from now on we’ll be going on Saturday mornings. One big happy group of family and friends. 

This past week I didn’t work on my Halloween quilt at all, but I will be focusing on it heavily this coming week. I’ll be able to get a lot of sewing time in, and I’m looking forward to it. I did, however, sew the remaining Little Bricks blocks into a quilt top, and made a backing for it. The one I did last week was in pastels, and this one is all brights. These were also blocks that I did for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge back in 2023, so they are sufficiently “aged”, LOL. 

So now I have three more little quilts waiting to be pin basted, and I’d love to get them done in the next week. But I do have a lot of batch cooking planned for the week. I do it (batch cooking) to some extent every fall. But with me facing knee surgery in a couple months, I’m particularly interested in making ahead and freezing lots of dinners. This week I’ll be focusing on lasagna and chicken enchilada casserole. The following week I’ll make chili and start on some soups. After that, I’m not sure. But I’ve got time.

And then there were the strings. Lots and lots of those. First there were three sets (of 15 blocks each) in brown, to finish off all those. My brown scrap drawer is breathing a sigh of relief!

And then I did two 15-blocks sets of multi-colored strings.

I’ve started pinning the sets up on the very left area of my design board to keep track. I’ve now completed  180 blocks of my goal of 600 blocks by year-end. 

And yes, I know I need to take a lint roller to my design board. That will be the first order of business when I get back to my sewing room after my Quilts for Kids workshop today!

Darla was rolling around on the floor by my chair yesterday morning, meowing away and generally just being a happily little girl. I couldn’t resist snapping some pictures. She is usually so refined and elegant, but she is still a cat, and sometimes a girl just needs a good back scratching. She also has a very fine and fuzzy tummy, and you can easily see the orange undertones of her coat. 

Tomorrow for our weekly “Church of Bernina” sewing day, Bruce’s daughter Stacy will be coming down (she lives about 40 minutes away) to hang out. She already knows Kim, of course (they are actually true cousins) and she knows and really likes Ruby too. We’ll chat all morning and have pizza for lunch. Then Stacy will probably head out and Kim, Ruby and I will sew away the afternoon. 

That’s it for me this week. I’m off to QFK - the car is already loaded up. Like I said, it’s going to be a great weekend. I hope yours is too.