Santa's workshop revealed

I took photos of the four Christmas stockings and five table runners I made over the last few days for the holiday craft fair.  I'm sure you don't want to see them all, but here are a few photos.

All five runners have a Christmas theme on one side and a red-white-and-blue theme on the other.  This made quilting a little more challenging, and I found a simple grid looks better than outlining something on one side and having it wonky on the other.  Today, I'm heading into the wonderfully cool sewing room to work on some pot holders.  When I finish, I'll set this holiday stuff aside for a while and get back to other things:  a row for a row by row swap, the "Atlantic Crossing" wallhanging I started at the Vermont Quilt Festival, and, perhaps, quilting the guild mystery quilt.

Online shopping...

...oh, it's too easy!  but oh, so much fun!  This was today's indulgence, along with some "almond" fossil fern.  Not sure what I'll do with them, but I know it will be fun.  Blame the hot weather - too conducive for armchair shopping!

Quiet morning

The neighborhood had a quiet visitor on this damp, cloudy morning.  It's so nice to see a deer nibbling while I'm making breakfast.  It's a sign of our town's quieting down after a busy weekend.  The newspaper said that 15,000 people were expected during the Heritage Days celebration, but it seems that everyone participated in some way, either by helping organize an event, setting up, or cleaning up.  Today when I drove through town, several crews were quietly taking down the tents and others were picking up trash.  In an hour or so you wouldn't even know anything out of the ordinary happened, except that a sore back or feet might linger!

Today I'm going to get back to working on items to sell at the Rustic Moose holiday sale.  I have finished five reversible holiday table runners (Christmas/patriotic colors) and three Christmas stockings.  More stockings and, perhaps, a few potholders are on tap today.

Heritage Days

I guess most small towns have their summer festivals, and Barre is no exception.  Heritage Days, formerly Homecoming Days, were this weekend and included all sorts of street activities, food, music, and, of course, the library book sale on the lawn.  It is exhausting but worth it.  Tomorrow I'll think so, anyway.  Today I'm tired from working at the book sale since 7:15 am.  We did make the front page of the paper with a very nice photo, and there were lots of people spending money and, at the end, filling boxes and bags full of freebies.  I came home with a few books, including an old Bobbsey Twins one that I'm going to try to sell for the library via Ebay.  We were lucky that it wasn't too hot today, but my feet are still in need of relief.  More tomorrow!

Red scrappy blocks

On the Quilting Board someone asked how many people make one quilt at a time and how many work on several at once.  I'm of the latter variety, partly because I get sucked into working on blocks of the month promoted by quilters online.  This year I'm working on a rainbow scrap challenge organized by So Scrappy in 2014.  I liked her final result so thought I'd make the blocks this year.  Each month features 6" blocks using scraps in a particular color, and July's color is red.  I'm making 9" blocks to use up more scraps (silly me!), and here are mine for July:

In order to get the ten blocks into the picture, I had to stack one on top.  You can see that they are fairly easy which means I can usually get them made in a couple of days.  Despite my efforts to use up scraps, I still have plenty.  Still, this offers a good opportunity to focus on one box of fabric each month and I do spend some time weeding through.  I've found some nice big pieces for future projects, as well as some polyester pieces that have ended up in the trash.  My boxes of 2" and 2.5" blocks have grown, too.

Progress, but not photo-worthy

We spent 4th of July weekend painting our bedroom, which naturally involved moving furniture round and round the upstairs while we painted.  Things were stashed in odd places, and we slept in the guest room a few nights.  That was fine because we have air conditioning in there (it's my sewing room, too).  It did feel odd going to sleep in a strange bed/room.  We chose the same color as was there before - off white - because my blue and white Dear Jane is hung over the bed and I tend to change out our quilts periodically.

 Paul's gigantic, unused dresser went to the Salvation Army and was replaced by a slimmer bookcase which he is filling up fairly fast.  The new, queen-sized bed arrived Tuesday, and it's higher than the old.  How do short people get into them?  I ordered a padded headboard via EBay and it should arrive in a day or so.

Meanwhile, because it's been hot, I've been working in the sewing room a lot.  I finished this month's 10 red blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and also caught up on Pat Sloan's "Vacation Time" block-of-the-month.  I was a couple of months behind on that.  I looked at the fabric I had picked for sashing and don't think it will go well with the blocks.  But I love it, so I guess I'll find another quilt to make with it.

I also worked on Linda's round robin quilt, but I can't show a photo just in case she is reading.  She sent a fairly large rectangle and only wants rows on the upper and right sides.  Her colors are light green, yellow and a goldish brown on a cream print background.  It is amazing how many greens there are, and also that I had only one piece of fabric in my stash that went with Linda's.  My 3" round (she wants to keep it small) didn't take long to finish and I hope she likes it.

Today I'm staying in the sewing room because it's going to be hot again.  I have one seam to put into a back for a sweet baby quilt top I made a few months ago.  I'll be sandwiching and quilting in the AC today.  When I'm not doing that, I'll be curled up with a good book on my Kindle, One Hundred Names, by Cecelia Ahearn.  My Kindle arrived during the painting project and it has been on constant use.  It's is too easy to load books, but I'm enjoying it even more than I thought!

A rainy start to the summer

It has rained 3 out of 5 Tuesdays mornings, but yesterday we were lucky enough to hold a nature walk in the town forest.  And walk we did!  It was a small group so we covered quite a bit of ground in less than two hours.  My fitbit counted over 10,000 steps yesterday - yeah!  We wanted to see some maidenhair ferns and also looked for Jack-in-the-pulpit (saw one that was gone by).  On our way up the Empire Lookout we saw something that might have been a coyote, although someone thought it was a fox, and I thought it was a small deer.  It was reddish anyway.  I'm glad we got outside, though, and hope that's the end of our rainy Tuesdays!