a top and some longarming and nerd stuff

The hubby was way up north last week fishing, so I thought I'd get a lot more done than I did.

I did get stuff done.  Just not as much sewing stuff.

(Cleaning stuff happened instead.  But it was needed.)

I DID get some sewing in, though.

I made the dumptruck on Monday.

As you can see, I ran out of the blue print.  But that's okay.  It looks fine this way and that smaller piece of blue is gone.  Yay for using it up!

Then it was time to figure out a layout for the top.  I chose the blocks without any thought to how they'd fit together - all are the same width, but not the same height.  I knew I could figure it out, so I wasn't worried.

I sewed and sewed (and had to remove one of the outer borders due to a math error - that made me mad) and, about late-dinnertime, I had a top!

Hooray!

I sort of think I know how I want to quilt this, but first I had to get the back pieced.  And the back for the Positivity quilts, too.

Since the Positivity quilts have a deadline (well, at least the one), they went on the longarm first - yesterday.

I did some math to figure out if the piece of fabric I bought was large enough to do both quilts.  And then more math to figure out how to piece it so I could get both on and quilt them together.

Each got different quilting (the leaf quilt got a custom design, the "bonus" top just got swirls).  I used a lighter green thread, which blended nicely on the back but gave the tops a little pop.  There's a LOT of white in these quilts, so I thought some thread color would be nice.

They're finished and trimmed, and binding has been made, but not attached yet.  I plan to head up and do that soon.  (Though today is running out of time for me due to chores I need to do with the hubby - he is off this week, too.)

Toby was happy his daddy was home...

He is a daddy's boy.  He loves me, but probably just because I'm the food lady.

While the hubby was gone, I hit my reading goal.  I have a couple of apps on my phone to track reading.  What started out as a way to make sure I wasn't reading books a second time (you know how you get 20 pages in and things start to sound familiar? that was the original reason) turned into apps that have reading challenges.

Goodreads was the first one.  Pretty basic.

But then I heard about this one called Storygraph late last year.  I've mentioned it before.  It appeals to my nerdy side.  They also have a reading challenge, but what got me to get the app is all the nerdy stuff.

The challenge met screen is pretty simple.  But you get some party poppers in there to celebrate, so fun, right?

But then there's the graphs.

What I read this year by mood in a pie chart:

What I read this year by genre in a bar graph:

And even better is this line graph of books vs pages by month:

There is also one for tracking pages read but it only does the current month:

There are so many more.  You can do monthly, yearly, all-time, etc.

See.  Nerdy.

But I swear almost every fiction book out there is designated as "reflective" and "emotional" so I don't put much stock in the larger wedges of that first graph.

I'll keep reading, even though I've met my self-imposed challenge.  (I thought one per week seemed reasonable.  I never thought mid-August I'd hit it!)

So back to quilting and sewing.  Nothing on the cage mats yet, but sometimes the wheels turn slowly.  And since the kitties needing rescue and care are far more important than having matchy-matchy enclosures, I can wait.

Happy quilting!

Katie