Hello Lovelies! How were your Fourth of July celebrations, my American friends? And how were your Canada Day celebrations, my Canadian friends? Those are the only ones that come to mind at the moment, so I apologize if I missed anyone’s big international things. I can only keep track of so much!
We did basically nothing beyond grilling some sausages and hot dogs and then driving around to look at fireworks and get bit by mosquitoes. It threw off my sleep schedule mighty bad and I’m reminded of why I choose not to be a night owl. CARA DOESN’T DO STAYING UP LATE.
Just thought I’d pop in and figure out where I am with the crafting so I can have my head wrapped around where I’m going with things in the next week. Here we go:
Patriotic Mini Chiffon Baby Quilt: The top is complete, I’ve got the backing and batting cut, and all that’s left is basting, quilting, and binding! I’ve hit a bit of a snag with quilting that I’m trying to figure out, but it’ll be fine. My friend actually had her baby on July 4th, which is just so ridiculously on-brand for their family’s patriotism, so I’m sewing like the wind to get this made up quickly and out the door. Nothing bad will happen if it takes longer, but you know how it starts to feel with baby quilts for babies that have already debuted. Apparently I haven’t taken any photos since I finished the blocks though, so no photos for you this week.
Scrappy Thursdays: I finished the blocks for the Brickhouse quilt! Now on to picking out fabrics for sashing and borders and then assembling all that. I won’t come back to this until the first week of August, but it feels great knowing that all the blocks are pieced!
Smitten EPP Quilt: I finished the last full block and laid it out in the living room to figure out placement and what colors I’ll make all the extra little bits. There’s still a lot of work to be done on this quilt, but I’m really enjoying the process.
New Rabbit Hole: As I was working on the Patriotic Baby Quilt this week, I got to thinking how I’d like to add some more handmade items to the total gift and thought about the idea of knitting up a little stuffed animal to include. I dived headfirst into that rabbit hole, decided I’d quickly knit up a free pattern that I found, and then the next morning looked at it all again and decided that this was not the time to make this happen and that a quilt is plenty enough gift.
HOWEVER, during my mad dive into stuffed animal knitting territory, I discovered the most cutest knit designer who keeps a blog and it is just so beautiful and inspiring and it makes me want to reclaim those glory days of blogging so very much: Little Cotton Rabbits. Oh my gosh, do I love reading her blog and, once things calm down and I can indeed include little stuffed animals with baby quilts, I am going to knit up every single one of those little patterns (Ravelry link) until my fingers bleed because they are beyond cute and I’m weirdly obsessed with how quintessentially British they are. My whole family is sick of hearing me talk about them, but I’m not going to stop talking about them anytime soon.
Alright, happy crafting to you all in the upcoming week! Find time for the things that make you happy!
I feel like the Tinman squeaking out, “Oilcan, oilcan!” as I recommence with old bloggy habits. It’s the beginning of a new month, so let’s discuss some crafty goals, shall we?
My last #craftygoals post was way back in February 2022, and the goals from back then were:
A clothing item: Nope
Finish the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt: I got pretty far on this; it’s basted and ready to be quilted.
Continue/maybe finish the Far Far Away quilt: I worked on this a lot during last year’s summer quarter of classes and it’s up to the point where the rows are pieced together, but just the rows, not the entire quilt top.
Complete the Brick House blocks #5-8: I just checked the bin for this project and I have completed twelve blocks and have the strips finished for blocks #13-16. No recollection of when I did that, but I have physical evidence that it happened!
Complete the Clementine Quilt Along blocks from Months 3 & 4: Looks like I finished Month #3.
Start the Berry quilt: Nope. I’m eager to get this one started, as I’ve had this quilt idea in my mind since I first received my Farm Girl Vintage book forever ago.
Start the HST Leaders & Enders quilt: Doesn’t look like I did. I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do with these HSTs, but I’ve got a million of them. Maybe just a totally scrappy thing? We’ll see.
Find a new hand-stitching project: I dug out my Smitten quilt, which I never mentioned on the blog before this, and have put a lot of work into it over the past year. I’m almost done with creating all the blocks and can start putting the top together soon.
So now that we’re all caught up on all of that, let’s set some goals for this next month:
Time-Sensitive Things that need Working on ASAP:
Patriotic Mini Chiffon Baby Quilt: A friend is having a bae-beeeee! I spent a little bit of time in the last week cutting fabric and beginning to piece this quilt. I had hoped to have the blocks completely done by today, but I’ve got all of next week to assemble the top and it should be fine.
Farm to Table Mini Chiffon Baby Quilt: Another friend is having a bae-beeeee! She’s not due until August, though, so I have a little more time to get this one done.
Things to Work on after the ASAP Projects:
Rainbow Coin Strip Quilt: I’m still warming up to full-steam-ahead sewing speeds, so I’ll be extremely happy if I manage to get both of those done before the end of the month. IF I find myself with extra time on my hands, I’ll unearth the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt and start quilting it.
Scrappy Thursdays: I’d like to resurrect Scrappy Thursdays and start making a dent in the scrap bins. Rotation will be:
As far as hand stitching projects, I’m working on the Smitten EPP quilt during the kids’ music lessons and I’m quite near the end. It’s feasible that I might get all the individual blocks completed by the end of the month. Then I have to start connecting them. Whoo boy, that’s going to take a lot of time. I’ll work on that in the car until it gets too big to be a car project, and then it will have to become a craft room project.
Years upon years ago, I discovered the Houseworks Holiday Plan, which would later be renamed the House & Holiday Plan. It was originally published on the OrganizedChristmas website, which has since shut down. Since I’d printed out all of the schedules, checklists, and printables in 2011, I was still okay to continue with my tradition of following the plan each autumn, which I’ve attempted to do every year.
I’ve never completed the entire plan. I think I’ve been attempting to complete it since 2005 or 2006, and I’ve never made it all the way through because there was no way to complete those room-specific decluttering and cleaning tasks in the one week allotments when you’ve got four children and you’re dealing with back-to-school activities. I was thinking on this predicament during one of my planning periods during the last week of teaching school this year and realized I could just start the plan earlier and schedule extra time for decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. Don’t you just hate it when you have such a simple idea that really should have occurred to you, like, a DECADE ago?!?! Ugh.
The house is destroyed, which was the expectation after spending a year studying and student teaching, so at least things aren’t worse than originally planned. Regardless, there’s a lot of work to do to get things back in shape around here. I hit the “go” button on the House & Holiday Plan this last week and will use the extra time to get things reorganized over the summer. I’ve allocated two weeks to each kid bedroom, my bedroom, and the craft room for a total of ten weeks of decluttering, deep cleaning, organizing and, hopefully, a little redecorating and prettying up.
I started with Nathaniel’s and Emily’s shared bedroom this week because: 1) It’s got the most stuff in it, and 2) We never did a thorough clean out/declutter when Emily went off to college in the fall because she decided at the last minute to live on-campus and I actually packed up her stuff while she was at class before dropping it off that evening. Yeah, I packed up my kid in less than twenty-four hours. (Last summer was super stressful!!) I was too busy to deal with the leftovers and it’s been waiting for me for almost an entire year to get back to it. Well baby, I’M BACK FOR IT.
I like to completely gut a room when I’m doing a deep clean–take out every last thing, physically touch everything à la Marie Kondo and decide if it’s going to be kept, donated, or thrown away. This means that my living room is currently holding every physical possession of Nathaniel’s and Emily’s. So, another mess in order to deal with the original mess. *mirthless chuckle*
But, man, does it feel good to empty out an engorged room, rearrange the furniture, deep clean that sucker, and then judiciously bring things back in. *satisfied sigh*
So that’s what I’m up to right now, and I plan to come back next Friday/weekend and show you some pictures of something organized. I do much better when I have deadlines, so there it is–let’s get a bedroom put back together and prettified.
Yes, it’s been particularly quiet here on the blog for a long while.
Yes, there was a good reason:
There were a few days when I thought I would be able to handle completing the requirements of earning a Master’s Degree in Teaching on an accelerated schedule and still keep the blog running at the same time, but then I read through the syllabi of my first quarter’s classes and knew that something would have to give, and it would most definitely be the blog.
It was a good trade: I’m now one Master’s Degree smarter! Ha ha ha.
I’m hoping to come back to a regular schedule of blogging sometime this summer, but it might take until autumn if it turns out there’s a lot more messes in my house to clean up than originally thought. There were many trade-offs to make time for studying and student teaching, and we’re now a full year from when I had to give up on a steady housecleaning routine…there’s definitely some messes that need attending to that have been piling up since then. Once I get them all taken care of, I can unearth the craft room from its current designation as the landing spot for everything that didn’t have a place and get back to some good ol’ crafting!
But yeah, MASTER’S DEGREE, baby! Woo hoo! But not woo hoo for the outdoor commencement ceremony in SEATTLE that rained all over my parade. Graduation pictures will definitely NOT be this year’s Christmas card photo! *sigh* I try so hard, y’all, I really do!
The weather has done its thing where it finally shifts from dragged-out summer to definitely autumn, and that always puts me into a reflective mood. Another year is beginning its spiral towards completion, while at the same time being in full-on chaotic upswing due to the steady hum of a new school year and the holiday season sneaking up behind us. It’s a weird little time in the calendar year: A constant pull between calming down and ramping up.
I’ve not posted much this year. I made a decision, many years ago, to not post while feeling overly emotional or snarky, and every time I’ve broken that rule, I’ve regretted it. So I heeded the wisdom of a lesson learned the hard way, multiple times, and kept myself to myself and focused on my children. It seems to be the most winning of strategies when I’m working through difficult phases of life. We had a quiet spring, a quiet summer, and were ready and refreshed to tackle what autumn had in store for us, and wow, autumn has not held back on amazing moments. I’m so glad we were in prime form to go with its energetic current of events.
But then the rain (mercifully) started up this morning, and I decided to take a pause on this Friday and still myself after so much rushing. The kids are doing so good right no; it’s so great to watch them blossom. That blossoming comes with a lot of driving them around and last-minute schedule changes, but remember how two years ago there was nothing for them to go to? This frenzy is evidence of life being lived. I’m so grateful that we’re in this moment of time, moving on from what was a very difficult couple of years.
I don’t write a lot here because I’m not creating a whole lot of stuff these days. I don’t know what to write about to you all anymore. I struggled with this same conundrum years ago when I shifted out of homeschooling–what do you write about on a homeschooling blog when you’re not homeschooling anymore? I tried to morph into a homemaking blog, but readers abandoned me in droves, so I packed it up and called it good. Thankfully, I was getting going with the crafty stuff, and that created this blog. But here we are again, with no crafting happening, and me wondering about what to write about now?
I am busy with my children. I am busy with cooking, laundry, and cleaning. There are blogs enough out there that talk about those topics, and they’re not really topics I feel like I have much to write about–we all need to eat, we all need to not be naked, and we need to keep ourselves and our homes clean enough to stay healthy. It’s not a calling in life–it’s just life, regardless of your relationship and parental status. Everyone eats, everyone wears clothes, everyone cleans. I don’t know how to craft essays about those topics that will make us feel better about them.
But maybe I’ll try. It’s nice to have a written record to read in future years. (I go back and read through my homeschooling blog once or twice a year because I dearly love reminding myself of the cute things the Brookelets were doing during their elementary years!)
And maybe I’ll find time to craft again in the future, but it’s not looking like my time will open up anytime soon. I knit a little when I watch TV, and I have a knitting bag in the van for when I’m waiting to pick up kids, but it’s slow progress and nothing like when I was actively trying to create content for this blog and Instagram. (It’s so nice to take a break!) Most of my favorite craft bloggers admit they now have teams helping them produce content, and I refuse to try to keep up with it all. We have so many quilts in our house, and the kids no longer want new winter hats each year–there’s just no demand in our home for most of what I craft anymore, and that’s ok…it was fun while it was desired. What is needed from me right now are the basics and the logistics and they are all-time-consuming. We are making hay while the sun shines on these awesome teenage years!
It’s a great time of parenthood, and I do not resent how much of my time it is taking to help my kids flourish. This is what we’ve been working towards all these years and it is Go Time now. All the preparation, all the lessons, all the learning…it’s all coming into play as they start taking their very own footsteps out into the world and start showing up for themselves at the things they’re choosing to continue…and I am the woman behind the curtain, making sure they show up on time in a clean, healthy, and calm state. It’s just so much fun to watch it all come together in these precious moments.
So that’s what’s going on here, and I’ll share what I’m comfortable sharing when I have the time, but it’s hardcore busy around these parts right now, and I have very little knitting to show for it.
I hope you are all having a fantastic autumn season (spring for you southern hemisphere folks!) and I wish you a beautiful season of joy and contentment to help refill our precariously-drained wells after so many years of isolation and suffering. Enjoy living life again!
Modifications: I used the wrong needle size somehow. It should have been a US 2 (2.75 mm).
These were supposed to be done in time for Christmas, so I had to enact the “public shaming” method of pressure to get myself to work through to the end despite missing my original deadline. I will say that this method definitely works for me.
I did use the wrong needle size somehow. The last pair of socks that I made for him, I didn’t write down what size needles I used, and just looked at the picture of them to guess what needles they were and then hunted down a similar-looking set and got knitting. I think I may have a set of gold-colored US 2s and a set of gold-colored US 0s, and…there you go, mistake made. As a result, these are a dense fabric and a little on the snug side, but he says they work well in his church shoes, which are a snug fit, as most church shoes are.
He likes that they’re bold and peppy. I wasn’t expecting that. He’s more of a “dark, monochrome colors” for his socks kind of guy. I was trying to use up stash and I’d had this yarn since 2013.
I wrote a few days ago about how I’ve been hit by the February ennui that tackles me every year, and how I’d decided to just give in to every new project that flitted across my radar in an attempt to give myself some happy chemical boosts and weather out the rest of this gray month. I published my post, went off to continue working on the new Linen Stitch scarf, and as I was knitting away the day, my mind wandered and I remembered something I read about in the The Twelve Week Year called the “Emotional Cycle of Change,” which comes with a handy little visual in the book:
I recalled the first time I worked The Twelve Week Year system, way back in the summer of 2020, and how much impact that little image had on me because I absolutely identified with it. When I was putting in the work on that cycle’s goals, I hit that nasty wall of despair right around Week Five and it stuck with me for a good two or three weeks where all I wanted to do was give up, give up, give up. But, thankfully, I was aware of it, I had people to talk to about it who encouraged me to keep going, and yep, I kept at it and eventually pulled up and out of that funk because I didn’t give up and I didn’t shift my focus onto something else. I got to experience the high of sticking with that project until the end, even though I really wanted to just die for a few weeks whenever I thought about another stupid day of doing this.
And I think that’s what’s going on right now. I started the new year with the idea of doing good on crafty goals, and I’ve been going forward with all the energy and zeal of an optimistic goal-getter, and it’s now hitting really hard that progress isn’t an overnight thing and I am smack dab in the Boring Middle of it all. The answer isn’t to quit or switch focus, because when I get to the end of this twelve week cycle (in the last week of March), I don’t want to look back and regret that I stopped working on these goals. Honestly, it’s a bit of a weird goal cycle because I don’t have anything huge going on because I just couldn’t come up with anything except “take a break from striving all the time,” because I’ve been striving hard for eighteen months straight and just felt like I needed a break. So I’m only doing some low-key stuff to help prep me to do bigger things come April, but it is important to me to tie up a lot of these loose crafty ends, if only to “close the circuit” on these open/unfinished projects.
So the answer right now is that I’m having a normal reaction to change. I’ve been really good at showing up to work on these crafty goals; it’s become my routine and it’s no longer a new, exciting thing, and I’m jonesing for the high of a new project…but that’s what gets me into this mess of having eighty-seven UFOs cluttering up my craft room and driving me crazy all the time. The answer is to just keep showing up and doing the work, even if I need to grit my teeth somedays, and remind myself of how good it’s going to feel to get that pile of quilt tops completed. In a few weeks’ time I’ll start seeing the results of that consistency and I’ll start getting excited about the dash to the finish line, and the high of finishing a big goal is way bigger than the high of starting a new project. Lasts longer, too.
Another thing I might to watch out for is the impulse to indulge in retail therapy–it might be one of the first signs that I’m approaching Stage 2 or Stage 3 of this cycle. That being said, there is a still an ungodly amount of yarn currently making its way to me in the mail because…well, I didn’t figure this out until after I’d already ordered it. Guess I’ll be making a lot of socks and fingerless mittens for the foreseeable future, even though I know I’m only capable of about seven pairs a year, given my “comfortable knitting” calculations I just figured out.
How many skeins of sock yarn did I order? Nine. *sigh*
I’ve been working away on the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt, spurred on by the, frankly, heartwarming reception my kids have been giving it whenever they wander through the craft room. Everyone loves to look for fabrics they remember, and oh my goodness, have I been feeling like a Winner.
I finally got all the borders attached and laid out the quilt on a bed so it wouldn’t wrinkle while I prepared the backing. I mentioned to Emms that the quilt was pieced in its entirety and laid out on the bed if they wanted to see it in its full glory, and they headed off to the room. Moments later they shrieked and then started laughing, which piqued my curiosity and Nathaniel’s, so I went into the room after he ran in and saw this:
So I walked around the end of the bed to see what was so interesting, and saw it:
And those little punks squealed with glee, took pictures of it, and texted it to their friends for a laugh.
And you know how people say, “Will it matter in ten years?” I decided that yes, it would still matter in ten years and they would probably still be making fun of me, so I decided to fix it:
I don’t think it will matter much, jokes about snipers and presidential assassinations are going pretty strong in our house at the moment.
And it’s no longer the “Rainbow Coin Strip quilt” to my kids, it’s now called the “Kennedy Sniper quilt.” Which is not a name you want people to adopt for anything you make, ever.
Seriously, who OK’d the decision to put that on fabric?!?! Why?!?! What quilt would be elevated with that headline?!?!
I imagine it was one of the fat quarters included in a low volume or text only bundle, and when I was cutting fabric for the border I just grabbed white fabrics with black on them, no reading necessary, stacked them in a pile and did a batch cut. And then I sewed them together, right sides facing, so I missed it again. Ugh.
Oh well, the hexagons are cute, and it allowed me to use up a little bit of canvas that’s been sitting in the stash since I made the original Storybook Hexagons quilt with it. It was nice to revisit memories of that quilt, which is still to this day the most popular quilt on this blog.
And now that adorable fabric is covering up a presidential assassination headline. Lovely.
I do have a finished project post to show you, but I also keep procrastinating driving to the post office and actually mailing it off to its intended recipient, so…I could spin it to sound like the USPS is sucking at its job, but it would be an absolute lie because it’s really just me.
Although, the USPS is taking its sweet time getting a package of yarny goodness to me that was supposed to be delivered last Monday, but then it disappeared from their radar for a couple of days, and magically popped up at a regional distribution center yesterday. Hmph.
As predicted, February has cast a grayish pallor on everything in sight, and I’m feeling it, hard. I keep telling myself that it is a temporary feeling, that life really isn’t just cold and dreariness, and that spring will be here soon with sunshine and birds twittering and flowers, but then you have to stop thinking about spring and re-focus on what’s in front of you and…it’s February. Usually there’s some crazy weather going on to distract me, but not this year. Just cold and drizzly rain, and a lot of fog, which is just unsettling. There’s not supposed to be fog when you’re driving to the school to pick up your kids in the afternoon. It gives me the heebie jeebies.
We are having a couple of nice days right now, but I absolutely do not trust them at all and I refuse to allow them to get my optimism engaged, only to have it crushed and ground into the asphalt next week. No. This is fake spring. I’ll try to get outside and soak up some desperately needed sun, but I’m not going to let my heart get carried away. It would be a great time to do some clean-up in the garden, though…
I think the fabric and yarn companies have figured out this February sloggy feeling, because geez, the sales and deals coming out of ’em right now are incessant. It’s been bad, people. But oh so good. But I may need to set up a temporary email filter on any incoming messages from the crafty stores because this past week has shown that I have no known defenses against their February sales. Dear goodness. Cara, it doesn’t count for much if you’re trying to reduce your stash and UFOs, only to then gorge yourself and bring in more stash.
The Yarn Harlot wrote up a blog post in recent days that echoes my sentiments about February, and she admitted that she’s just giving in to every “start a new project” impulse that rises in her heart. And I kinda sorta love that idea, because I am in desperate need of dopamine hits at the moment and indulging in some Startitis to achieve the effect is far friendlier to my bank account than retail therapy.
So I’ve started making wild promises to my kids about knitting them things and I will probably regret it in a month’s time, but whatevs. Michael’s socks are finished, and I was looking through my Ravelry project page to figure out which family member has gone the longest without receiving a handknit from me, and it turns out I’ve not knit a thing for my boy since he was in the first grade. (That’s five years for those of you who are also experiencing the Februaries and don’t want to do the math.) I called him over and we perused the Ravelry pattern database, and he finally decided that what he wanted his dear ol’ mum to knit him was a pig hat. Because he’s sad that his monkey hat doesn’t fit anymore.
ca. 2010
Guys, I knit that monkey hat for his first winter of his life. He’s worn it ever since, and would probably still be wearing it except that I outlawed it because it’s simply too small. I don’t care that he can technically stretch it over his noggin…it’s too small. The boy is knitworthy, to say the least…but only if it’s an animal hat, apparently, because I made him a fair isle hat in the first grade, and he dutifully wore it that year, but then reverted back to the monkey hat in the second grade and I don’t think I’ve seen the fair isle hat on his head ever since.
ca. 2015
The pink yarn listed in the pattern for the pig hat? I ALREADY OWNED IT. Can the Universe be any more clear on what a great idea this project was?!?!
Except, when I went to go unearth it from the stash, I couldn’t find it. I scoured the stash from top to bottom three times, went through the knitting UFO bin twice, and then looked around in every other UFO bin just in case it randomly got put in them when we moved, but alas, none of the perfect pink yarn could be found. I think I got rid of it when we moved? It’d been sitting in a partially-knitted state for years because I bought it to make a vest for Nathaniel when he was little, but it turns out that he gets heat rashes from wearing vests, so I never finished it, and I was trying to cull crafty supplies and it wasn’t a shade of pink I particularly liked to begin with…so, I think I got rid of it. There’s no notes in my stash listing on Ravelry, but I can’t find the stuff, so I’ve now marked it as “given away.” But I honestly have no idea what I did with it.
Undaunted, I hunted down various shades of pink bulky-weight yarn, screenshotted them all and cropped them into a grid, then texted the image to Nathaniel and asked him to pick one, and he picked one of the most brightest shades of bubble gum pink and he is thrilled that it will be adorning his head in a few weeks’ time. I love it that he loves pink, it’s adorable.
Since I was paying for shipping anyways, I figured I’d throw in some more yarn to my order and looked up which family member was next due for a handknit, and it turned out it was Renaissance, who I last crafted for three years ago. She wasn’t terribly interested in anything, but then I had a bold flash of inspiration and reminded her that football season will be back all-too-soon, and wouldn’t a pair of fingerless gloves with fold-over tops just be amazing during the outdoors flute-playing season? She immediately agreed, and I added in some maroon superwash merino to my order. I did also add two more projects’ worth of yarn for things for myself, but then got rid of them because knitting season will inevitably wind down come spring and gardening and English paper piecing time, and most of my stash is comprised of these kinds of orders–the extra skeins I buy because I was paying for shipping anyway. If I’m still interested in the projects for myself come autumn, I’ll buy the yarn for them then.
Sooo…not exactly “knitting from the stash,” but I am excited about two new projects. And while I was rifling through the stash, trying to find the perfect pink yarn, I noticed that I had a lot of blue & green sock yarn leftovers in the yarn scrap bin, and I thought they’d probably go together fabulously in a linen stitch scarf. And since my yarny goodness package fell off the radar for half a week and I finished Michael’s socks and I think I may have knit them on the wrong size needles but won’t know until he finally tries them on but it’s a busy week and we’ve really only seen each other as we turn off the light to go to sleep, that hasn’t happened yet…and I don’t want to start another pair of socks for him from the stash because I don’t know what size needle to use anymore, but it’s February and darn it I need a project, so I cast on for a linen stitch scarf with those sock yarn scraps:
I think the scraps go together a little too well, actually, so it will lack that fun contrast that I like in this pattern when you use colorways that don’t match perfectly, but it’ll still be a pretty, analogous scarf. It took me a year to knit the last linen stitch scarf I made, so I’m not expecting a quick finish with this. I think it will be my couch knitting project.
And, just for fun, I’ll finish with another picture of the Monkey Hat of Yore:
Hopefully he’ll love his pig hat just as much, minus the yarn-chewing. Good luck surviving the rest of February, however you choose to do it.
It only occurred to me now, as I sat down to write this blog post, that this isn’t actually a scrap project. BUT…it was in my scrappy project bins for some reason; I’m thinking I threw the blocks into whatever bin was handy as I packed up my craft room three years ago, and I didn’t think beyond “What’s in the scrappy project bins?” when deciding what projects to put into the Scrappy Thursday rotation. Oh well. It’s been a long time that this has been waiting, and this is the way I’ll be able to get it done the fastest, so I’ll just go forward with it.
Of course, just because I put some of the fabrics into the project bin didn’t mean I put all of the fabrics into the bin, so I spent a large portion of my sewing time trying to locate the background fabric for this quilt. It was tucked away with a completely different quilt I was working on when we had to pack up, and those two quilts were jammed into the back of a Christmas drawer, despite not being Christmas-related quilts whatsoever. (I never want to move again.)
Alright, Month #3 is the Peaches & Plenty block, and geez…these blocks took forever to make! I don’t know if I’ve gotten extremely slow or what, but I think I put at least six hours into these. Not my favorite pattern, but it doesn’t matter anymore because they’re DONE and now I’ll move on with my life. Woo hoo!
It was nice to revisit this project and look through it again and start getting excited. It’s an interesting-looking finished quilt that is different from anything else I’ve ever made, and I’m looking forward to the completed project…which should hopefully happen in May. Slow and steady…
Month 3 blocks are the ones on the right. Building up a collection!
I was supposed to get these done last month, but it didn’t work out that way. I’m hoping to get onto the Month 4 blocks this month as well, but we’ll see how well that pans out.
