Surfacing

Let's see.  I've made a flannel rag quilt (35"x49") for Squiddle for the car.  He picked out every single pink flannel I had; I ended up telling him that a quilt needs contrast, so it's pinks and blues now.  Ten bajillion snips into the seams!  It took me three days to do them all because I'd worn a spot sore on my thumb after the first day.  Next up is a rag quilt for Jazzy for the car.  I think I'll pull all the bright flannels and see if he likes those.  No picture right now because the quilt is in the car, as intended.

Jazzy will be starting preschool on Monday.  On one hand, I feel bad that I am not the one helping him with his speech delay, but on the other hand, I know a good parent gets their child the help they need, even/especially when it comes to outsourcing things to professionals.  So for now I'll be driving both boys to school four days a week and picking Jazzy up four days a week and Squiddle on Wednesdays.  We'll see how long it lasts, whether the parking lot in the morning will drive me mad or not.  I'm just not feeling sanguine about putting my three-year-old on a bus yet.

At the auction last weekend I got two chairs and a side table and set them up in the living room bump-out.  It's a nice little spot for sitting and reading, drinking tea, or working on handcrafts.  Which is what I've been doing, since I found a 90% complete Bucilla's Celestial cross-stitch kit at the thrift store.  For $2!  That's at the level of insult on top of injury.

I also got two more bookcases set up and hauled a bunch more boxes of books in from the garage and got them sorted on the shelves.  I think we need one more half-bookcase on the right, but Wonderful Husband disagrees.  Me, I'm of the mind that if we're leaving our books in boxes in the garage, what's the point of having them?  We can't read them if they're out there.  We also went through an interesting little experiment where much of our childhood reading is mutually unknown to one another.  There are a few overlaps - Narnia, Tolkein - but largely we were going "huh?" at each other. :)

Also this week I went to Quilters By the Bay, which meets across the toll bridge and is a little bit farther from me than the group that meets in Port Orchard.  But I had such fun!  There was laughter and joking during the meeting, and I've missed that.  The meeting itself was a sort of workshop on string blocks.  Which I know how to do, but there were some variations I hadn't thought about before.  The team I was on made the ten blocks below, for charity quilts:

I liked the bright fabrics we were working with, so I asked if I could keep the scraps to turn into a mini.  One sandwich baggie of scraps plus a black remnant has so far yielded this (10.75"x9.375"):

and I still have ninety half-square triangles to pair up and sew with black to make a second mini.  Part of me is hoping that I can use the eight hours of child-free time I'll get from Jazzy being in school to do some serious writing and sewing again.