Keeping Warm in the Cold

The Scrapper’s Delight version 2.0 is finished and has been put on our bed, just in time for a week of subzero temps:

It’s probably a bit oversized for our queen-sized bed, but someone (who is not me) has a tendency to hog the covers. The feather duvet is underneath the quilt. We’re going to need this quilt this week—the HIGH on Thursday is forecast to be -3, and that’s the air temperature, not the wind chill. The husband made sure the heat lamps were on and working on the chicken coop so my roosters don’t get frostbite on their combs.

I’ve done enough of the second batch of prototype DP blocks that I am fairly confident my idea is going to work. I pulled fabric yesterday and started cutting. I am using DP templates I made out of template plastic because I haven’t had time to get to town, but even so, the cutting is going reasonably quickly. This is going to be another quilt featuring reproduction feed sack fabric. I didn’t necessarily want to do that, but I literally cannot envision this pattern in a different fabric. (I can, but it doesn’t look right.) I’ve got plenty left over from Noon and Night, including some prints I didn’t use.

Susan and I had to meet a couple other people at church on Saturday afternoon to do some tech set-up for our service yesterday morning. She stayed after and helped me lay out and pin baste Cobbles on the floor of the fellowship hall. It went much faster with her help and we got to visit at the same time. And now it’s all ready for me to quilt this week. I just have to decide how I am going to quilt it.

The husband installed hooks on the railing in the new shop for me so I could photograph quilts. I’m going to test those out this week.

I managed to go to church yesterday without my knitting bag, which I had brought in from the car so I could work on the current prayer shawl during our Mennonite conference Zoom webinar Saturday morning. We normally keep an “emergency knitting project” at the church—a prayer shawl in a canvas project bag—in case someone shows up without knitting and needs something to work on. I couldn’t find it, though, which makes me wonder if someone (me?) finished the shawl. (It would not be outside the realm of possibility for me to have finished it and forgotten that I had.) I’ll cast on for a new one and leave it in the sewing room.

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One of the husband’s contractor friends called the other night to talk about scheduling a foundation job. After the husband got off the phone, he mentioned that his schedule is already booked through June. That’s unprecedented. He won’t be doing much concrete work this week because of the cold, but as things start to warm up—which it looks like it might do the first week of March—all hell is going to break loose.

I have all my seeds, though, and I’ll be ready to go when it’s time to start seedlings. Spring will be here before we know it.