mystery quilt progress and socks

There hasn't been much sewing going on this week, but that's just become the normal around here lately.  With no projects in process and an abundance of unfinished tops, I just can't bring myself to start anything new that doesn't have an end purpose.

That's okay.

I DID make progress on the mystery quilt - the next clue was released Thursday morning about the time I finished doing my morning chores, so it was perfect timing!

It's not much, and making the baby size means not too many units to make no matter the instruction, but this is okay.  Keeping the pace slow enough that everyone can stay caught up is important and there are bigger quilt options happening!  (Never mind the crazies who are doing TWO quilts!)

This took about an hour, trimming and all.

I SHOULD be working on the stack of unfinished cat toys, but I just haven't had the motivation lately.  I'll get there.

Instead I did a little more sock mending...

We'll see how these hold up.  I love those stripey socks and the shamrock ones are also fun.  It looks like there is another spot in the heel that needs attention, but it is just missing the green color - it's not thin there at all!

And the socks I was wearing at the time also developed a hole.  The socks I don't much like will get tossed, but the ones I do like, I'll experiment with fixing them.  (Eventually I know I'll need to buy more socks, but this is fun and not hurting anyone.  Plus it's using my Christmas present.  So no matter how much my hubby rolls his eyes, I'm going to keep doing it until I can't.)

I tried another method on the stripey ones - it's basically a blanket stitch that works its way inward until you hit the center.  It fixes true holes, so we'll see how they feel when worn.

I worked, of course, and then on Friday spent most of my day at my hubby's work, as he decided we were making fajitas for his whole maintenance crew.  That included the engineers and project planners AND the guys who actually fix stuff.  They have a big grill there, so he grilled the meat and veggies once I got there, but all the prep was on me.  And then slicing up the cooked meat and veggies once they were cooked.

But the guys (and a few gals) were appreciative and I know how much this kind thing can mean to an employee.  Not so much me being there, but the boss taking the time to plan a meal and feed you.

I did get a bunch of reading done this week again.

This one sounded more like a ghost story than it was.  Well, a scary ghost story, I guess.  Technically it IS a ghost story.

An older man passes away and the task of cleaning out the house falls to his ex-wife, children and one grandchild - a fairly dysfunctional family.  But the house is inhabited by two ghosts - former inhabitants tied to it.  But they're not like you'd expect.  No floating entities that people see.  They're part of the house itself - the wood of the floors and metal of the pipes, etc.  They talk to one another and see everything, but the living humans cannot see or hear them except in the creak of boards or clank of pipes - noises that you'd attribute to an older house.

The story is told through many eyes - both living and dead - and you get the story of how the ghosts died, though you also see a lot of why the living are struggling as well.

I expected the cleaning of the house to be a sort of cathartic experience for the family (they weren't really in touch with the ex-husband/father/grandfather), but it was not.  I think it was more about the ghosts letting go and moving on to whatever is next for them.  We just got the treat of the crazy family as a part of that.

It wasn't good and it wasn't bad.  It was just kinda different.

And then...

Set in 1942 in Paris, this is the story of a man, an architect, and his growth as a human during the time that the Germans occupied his city.

He is approached by a wealthy older man to create a hiding spot within the walls of his apartment for a Jewish man.  It will be temporary, in the event the place is searched, but must be undetectable.  He doesn't want to do it - he knows it's dangerous, but also has no real opposition to what Hitler is up to (it doesn't affect him, so he doesn't worry himself about it).  An offer of a job designing a German munitions factory as part of the deal convinces him - he wants the fame that can come with creating something like that.

When the hiding place works, he is asked to do it again, in a different place, again with the offer to design a factory as part of it.  HIs desire for fame again trumps his worry, but he also finds he enjoys finding ways to outsmart the Germans.

Over the course of the book he designs at least half a dozen hiding spots and in the process his attitude changes to one where he wants to help the Jewish people escape and survive and the design work is just a job.  His marriage, his mistress, and his life in general all change in the process as well and in the end he has become a person I liked, where at the start he was kind of a self-centered jerk.

I did enjoy the book (despite all the awfulness of the war), but the cast of characters was limited in a way I thought might be inaccurate, but I suppose it helped me keep people straight more easily?

Time to go get a few more chores done.  I work this afternoon, so I'd better make the most of my time before I have to go do what someone else wants me to do!

Happy quilting!

Katie

not sewing, but some quiltiness

This past week has been a little less crazy, despite switching jobs.  The shifts are shorter, so I'm not as exhausted when I get home, but also, it's just a better place for me to be working.  Yay!

The cutting instructions for the Colour Value Mystery Quilt Along came out on Thursday, which meant I needed to kick my procrastinating behind in gear and get those fabrics washed!

(You can still sign up for the free quilt along - it's free for about another month - the link is what I've highlighted above.)

But I just couldn't get over the floral print.  It didn't fit.  I tried and tried.

Lily even helped - though I'm not sure she was encouraging me or discouraging me to use that print.  Either way, this is one of the few shots where she wasn't licking her behind, silly girl!

I caved in and went back to my local quilt shop and got an off-white grunge.  I should have done this a week ago, but...

Of course that meant the new fabric had NOT yet been washed, so that set me back a little.  I got that done on Friday, but the hubby had plans for the afternoon and I had to work Saturday and and and...

Finally on Sunday I got the pieces cut.  Since I'm doing the baby size, there wasn't a lot to do, which meant it went quickly.  If I had been planning a larger quilt, I would have probably procrastinated less.  Or not.  Who knows.

Now I have a few more days to relax before the first set of sewing instructions come out.

If any of you are on the fence, I know Joanne writes really great patterns with really great instructions, so I'd say just go for it!  Join us!

Oh, and I got to use these super cool clips my friend Carol got me for Christmas!

I didn't need all of them, but it was fun to break open the package and put them to use finally!  I'm sure they'll come in handy again and again, but I need to figure out a way to store them so they're in order the next time.  It was a little bit of a hassle to sort through all of them to find the letters I needed...  (So of course I threw them all back in the bag when I was done - lesson not learned!)

I finished two books this week also!

Set in the early 1960's in Sydney, Australia and then London, this is the story of a young woman who wants to be a newspaper journalist in a time when women just didn't do that outside of the women's pages.  She works hard to move up through the system and does it at a perfect time in history where women were gaining more access to roles previously reserved for men.

After proving herself in Sydney, she is sent to London to cover the marriage of the queen's sister when the guy who usually covers the royal family is out for an extended illness.  One things leads to another and she gets the job permanently.

In addition to the newspaper job story (which fades as the book moves along, sadly), she is witness to a mob murder early on in the book and it factors in far more than I anticipated, though in ways I wouldn't have expected.

And then there's the romance.  Ugh.  That takes over midway through the book where I would have much preferred to hear about her efforts to rise in the newspaper world.  There are two men: one is good, one is bad, but who is who flip flops some, but if you might want to read it, I'll just leave it at that.

It wasn't a bad book, but I was frustrated that the romance kinda took over for a while.

And then I flew through this one:

Having been made into a movie here in the US (the book originated in Sweden), starring no less than Tom Hanks, you'd be pretty likely to guess this is going to be good.

It was.

Ove is a grumpy old (though not that old) man.  He loses both his wife and job in a short period of time and decides he's ready to join her.  But his attempts at suicide all fail for one reason or another, creating friendships and loyalties along the way.  The story moves back and forth in time to tell his life story and it turns out he's always been grumpy.  He sees things in a very black-and-white manner and has little patience for those who don't.  His wife helped him see things differently, but she must have been an incredible person to not give up on him.

I enjoyed this one very much and finished it in just a few days.

Lily says I'm done typing now.  She's in my lap, trying to chew on my fingers while I type, so I guess she's right?  (The lemon pound cake is probably about done in the oven by now anyways...)

Happy quilting!

Katie

still no sewing

It continues to be a little crazy around here, which explains SOME of the no sewing.

The kitty I mentioned last week with the teeth issue may not have to have them all pulled.  Further info from the vet tells me that this may be a once or twice flare-up event, or it may continue beyond that.  So we wait and see.  Good news is that we know what we're dealing with and it should cost a whole lot less to figure out next time.

She is continuing to do fine and eating like a maniac - her usual.

So strike that off the list to worry about!

The week between then and now has been a little wacky.  After about 6 months of struggling with the job working for my vet, I bailed out.  I'm going back to the farm store to be a cashier again.  The job, being mostly dogs, and new dogs every day/week (patients vs. boarders) was a lot for this cat lady.  And there was a LOT of cleaning, which is fine and good and important, but the crawling around on my hands and knees to get it done - that's a bit of a younger persons game!  I was also alone a lot, or at least doing jobs where chit-chat wasn't possible and while working as a cashier at a farm store isn't exactly a chatty job either, anyone who has ever been to a store knows that the cashiers DO talk to you and even those little interactions are enough for me.  I don't need much, but I was feeling left out.

So I worked 6 days straight (just how the schedule fell) and then have had a few days off to decompress and mentally prepare for the change.  It's been a nice break, but you know that didn't last long, right?

Last night I thought I heard the pre-heat stage of the furnace kick on, right before bed, but the blower never kicked in.  The temp on the thermostat was right at the threshold, so I figured I heard something else in the basement kick on (there's the well pump, a condensate pump on the furnace, I think a humidifier thing, etc), so I went to bed, trying not to worry.

At 3am when I got up to use the bathroom it was 5 degrees colder in here than it should have been.  And the furnace wasn't cycling.  It would try, but it never got past that first stage.  And it seems it gave up trying by then.

The hubby did what he could at 5am when he got up for work, but this isn't his specialty, so he texted our furnace guy at 6am, got a return call around 7am (poor guy, but he's family) and was here shortly after 8am.

Knock wood, but it's running properly again.  Seems it was a dirty flame sensor.  (This old house has taught me WAAAAY more about furnaces than I ever wanted to know.)

I'm so thankful to have a family member who is knowledgeable and makes himself more available than most repair places.  And I'm thankful that we've hit a warmer stretch so the problem wasn't as dire as it could have been and we were only down 7 degrees from the set point when he got it back to right.

Though I haven't really sewn anything, I made use of a little mending loom I got for Christmas and fixed my favorite sock-slippers!

Just one sock had a very thin spot at the heel and I have no idea why, but these are so fun!  The socks are fun, I mean.  But the little loom wasn't too bad either.  It went quickly and I have one other pair of socks that has a small hole in it (a real hole, not a worn spot), so I'm going to maybe tackle that, along with the new books I showed last week, and see about fixing those fun socks, too.

I also finished two books this week.  With the chaos of everything, reading was a good escape, though both of these books had some edge to them that made them not the best escape, but it was better than sitting around worrying.

First up:

Set in the early 1940's in London, the story of a girl and her sister who are evacuated to the countryside to avoid being killed in the bombings happening during WW1, 15-year-old Emmy does not want to give up her new job at a bridal shop and her dream of becoming a wedding dress designer.  Not understanding the gravity of the situation (though who could have - false alarms had been going off for a long while at this point), she runs away to meet with a man who, if he likes her sketches, could make her dreams come true.  That was the day of the Blitz - or at least the start of it - and she was caught in it.  She survives (one of the many ways her life is charmed), but her life is forever changed.

She is telling this story as an elderly woman and understands that there are many things throughout her life that were better than they could have been, which is the charmed part of the title.  But there are also the secrets that I will not spoil.

I really enjoyed this book, but the war/bombing part is where it got a little less than desirable as an escape.  The book wouldn't have been right without it, though, so it's all good.

Next up:

Written a few years before The DaVinci Code that rocketed this author to stardom, this book is every bit as much of a escaping and outsmarting the bad guys thriller.  Though this will be a spoiler, it's revealed very early in the book, and I'll keep the others to myself - a meteorite is discovered in the glacial ice in the artic north of Canada.  The main character is a woman who I'm still not entirely sure why she was sent (except her father, who she does not like and does not align with politically, is running for president on an anti-NASA platform, so if she validates he might back off?), and a few other civilian scientists are sent to validate the find because it contains...fossils of giant lice!

Soon after the fossil/meteorite is pulled from the ice, questions about its validity begin.  Scientists die, the woman and the two remaining living scientists are pursued by assassins of unknown origin and it's thanks to their combined life experiences that they get away as often as they do.

It was a quick read and enjoyable, but the whole political twist while running for their lives was, again, not as relaxing as I might have wanted.  But the random number book decider chose this, so I read it.  I might have done a re-pull had I known, but it's all good.  At least this chaos I can put down and know it's not real.

I should be working on the Bramble Blooms quilt, but I just haven't had the motivation.  Reading books and snuggling kitties and finally feeling like cooking meals again has taken the bulk of my time.  It's been a nice little break.

I'm kinda excited to go back to my old job, but I'll miss this snot...

She's the clinic cat.  And spicy.  She'll hiss at you and swat (she has claws!) just for walking by.  Or she'll flop on the table and demand pets.  You never know.  But I gave her her space for long enough that we got along pretty well at the end.  No I don't need another cat.  And she has other people who love her there, too.  (Some not so much, but I guess if you never take the time to work with a spicy animal, you get what you pay for...)

Also, I have Lily who is now actively trying to unplug my computer by climbing behind it.  She will not be told no, but at least she won't bite me when I try.

Time to go get some groceries.  I had to wait for the furnace guy and then wait for it to warm up to shut off to see if it would cycle and it's done all that, so I guess I can leave now?  (I like to go early to avoid people, so wish me luck.)

Happy quilting!

Katie

no sewing, some reading and a new project!

It's been a WEEK around here.  SIck kitty (she's better now, but will eventually have to have ALL of her teeth removed to solve the troubles), lots of shifts at work and the hubby taking an impromptu vacation for the second half of the week.

I did get a few things done, though.  Not exactly quilty things.  Or even blog-worthy things.

But first, the new project, because it's quilty and the most interesting of the list.

Canuck Quilter is doing another mystery quilt and since I have another great-niece on the way, I thought this would be a perfect time to join the quilt along and get a quilt made for her at the same time.

This is what she posted on Facebook

But after a little more effort today, it looks like you can sign up not only through her facebook group, but also at her website here!

It's free (for now) and she always writes really clear patterns that turn into something wonderful.

So I went shopping yesterday - it was a crappy day at work, so this was a nice treat.  Plus I haven't been fabric shopping in AGES.

The colors aren't quite right here and now I'm second-guessing the floral on top (which is what I loved most and pulled from, but I suppose could be substituted with a peachy-tinted cream if needed and this can just go in the stash to be petted and used at a later date), but for now it's what I'm planning to use.

The first of the directions don't come out for a little over a week, but that gives me time to get them washed and pressed and ready to cut!  (And procrastinate some.)

In other exciting news, the hubby gave me a gift card to Barnes and Noble for Valentine's day.  We usually don't celebrate, so I was caught unprepared, but he didn't seem to be too upset.  I mean, I had to do the hard part after, all...

I ordered some reference books:

The mending book I REALLY wanted (it came highly recommended) was only available as a digital copy and that is just not how I want to do things.  I want something I can prop open and reference as I'm doing the task.  If I want it online, I'll just ask the google.  But these look great, too.

And I'm debating about getting a dehydrator - it all started with the overabundance of the few herbs I planted last summer and my desire to not waste so much of it, but oven-drying takes a long time and I'm pretty sure it's less energy-efficient and not a cool enough temperature for maximum success.  So these books have been recommended and I thought I'd do a little more research before spending the bigger bucks to get a semi-decent dehydrator.

The hubby wants jerky, but I think I'm gonna start easy (herbs and fruits) if I get one and work my way up!

With a little $$ still on the card, I also snagged this novel:

It came recommended by a gal on Instagram who generally seems to read good stuff, so we'll see.  (The blurb also sounded good.)  So it's been added to the stash and when its number gets pulled, I'll read it.

Speaking of reading, just one book finished this week.

Though not bad, I'm really glad this wasn't the first novel I've read by this author because it would probably have been my last (and she has quite a few out there).

It's the story of two families linked by divorce and remarriage and is told by many narrators.  There are six children, some of whom get a chance to narrate, plus four parents, some of whom also get a chance to narrate.  It jumps around in time before and after the divorce, spanning probably 30 years.

The early part seems to drag and I kinda got lost in the characters, but the second half seemed to settle down.  Maybe it was because I finally sorted everyone out?

Every story deals with the death of one of the children, so I think maybe this is just an exploration of how different people deal with grief?  But not an in-your-face way of doing it - clearly, if I'm questioning it.

Anyways, not great, not awful.  The next book I flew through the first 100 pages yesterday (after a crappy half-day at work (we're only open till noon) and a trip to the quilt shop) and it's good and interesting.  More on that next week I'm sure!

Time to go find some breakfast and then regroup for heading back to work at noon (I did the breakfast shift already) and the dog that inevitably, no matter how long you let her stay outside, will poop in her kennel.  And walk through it.  Good times.

Happy quilting!

Katie