a little quilty sewing

Though I had high hopes for this week being more productive, I also didn't know until I worked at my new job on Monday if they'd add me in any extra shifts later in the week, so it was a limbo sort of week.

I didn't get any additional shifts (though after I made plans for Friday, a new coworker asked me to cover her shift that day - oops, sorry!), but I still didn't get as much done as I thought I could with all that time!

But let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Last week I left you with this small stack of carrier cover fabrics:

That floral on top was maybe four yards, which was a LOT, but it made a couple of large covers, which I haven't been able to make many of, since a lot of this donation were one yard cuts.

I finished the stack on Sunday and contacted my gal to set up a time to meet and turn these over.  I know there's always ongoing projects and needs, so I figured we'd chat about that, too.

I didn't come home with more fabric (!!!!) or the serger sewing machine that had been donated and she offered (maybe someday, but I left it with her in case someone more knowledgeable and more interested could use it), but instead with a request for more catnip toys!  They're finally getting back into the swing of things with adoption events that aren't just at local pet stores and these are great for "free for donation" donations - and they're nearly out!

My sister-in-law, via my mom (who is always game to let me raid her stash), found out I was looking for fabrics to expand my selection of fun prints and sent me home with this yesterday:

Lily is not intentionally in there for scale, but she is about 7 pounds of psychopath, so you can gauge the size of that pile.  It had been in a trash bag, ready to be thrown out, but she felt bad about doing that.  A lot of larger scale prints (she's making aprons for a craft fair) and a lot of batiks and tone-on-tone prints (not so interesting for cat toys - at least to the human eye), so not as much useable as I'd hoped, but it's all sorted by color, what I can use has been cut, and now I can move on to the boxes of fabric I borrowed from my mom.

There's gonna be a lot of cat toys in my future.

Freddie claimed the empty bag.  Wierdo.  (Loveable wierdo.)

There is also another project being researched, but we'll get to that later if it comes to anything.

Speaking of kitties - mine were in need of some new "treats of valor" that are rewarded after braving the vacuum.  I found these at the grocery store this week:

Note the flavor.  The kitties all liked them, so I guess humans are, in fact, tasty.

I sewed a little on the baby quilt, but it seems I couldn't catch a break for time this week to do much of anything other than chores and needed errands and whatnot.

The heart parts are now hearts.  I wanted to continue sewing, but it was time to go have lunch with my brothers and their wives and pick up fabric from my mom.  Maybe today?  (Though those two boxes of fabric are calling to me, too...I should have taken a photo, but they're fairly boring just being boxes.)

I read some this week, but I only finished one book.

This book was good, but I gave it only 3 stars.

Think DaVinci Code (or any Dan Brown book) but with Shakespeare.  So there was a lot of running around, flying to many different countries, driving at breakneck speeds through the Arizona desert, fighting off killers who might not be killers and questioning the guy you trust because he also might be the killer, which kept things interesting and moving fairly quickly.  But there was a lot of Shakespeare conspiracy (which apparently is a thing that I knew nothing about) and, for lack of a better word, trivia (that I also didn't know).

I read some Shakespeare in high school and was not particularly impressed.  Maybe it was the having to read who said everything at the beginning of each line that tripped me up - different "paragraph" structure.  Maybe it was that students were assigned parts and it was read out loud and some students are much better at that than others.  Maybe I had teachers who just didn't bring it to life.  Whatever the case, my lack of knowledge probably made this book less enjoyable because I was constantly trying to untangle the new revelation and how it fit into the rest of the story and that got old, fast.  I felt like I was skimming a good portion of the book when those scenes came along, so I gave it fewer stars than the action-packed drama may actually deserve.

If you like Shakespeare, this one is probably for you.

It's okay.  They can't all be enjoyable, even if they are good, right?  That's the beauty of having paid about 50 cents for this one. 

Time to head into the sewing room and see where the swirling mess up there leads me!

Happy quilting!

Katie

PS I officially start the new job tomorrow, so we'll see how things shake out with the new schedule!