Tops in Time Out

While I was pulling quilts yesterday to send to Ritzville, I corralled all of my works-in-progress. Having unfinished projects hanging around is a drag on my creative process and I need to see if I can move some of them along. I’ve got a stack of table runners that need to be quilted. They will be good for getting back up to speed with my free motion quilting on the Q20 because I also have at least five tops basted and ready to quilt. I also have several quilt tops in progress. Either the blocks have been made but not assembled or more blocks need to be made.

This first one has languished far too long. One of my Ritzville quilts from a number of years ago was a blue-and-white scrap quilt comprised of 1000+ half-square triangle units. My friend Pat, at church, quilted it for me. I had so many of those HST units left that I made an additional 20 sampler blocks with them. The blocks were in a box, partially sashed, so I took them out and finished sashing them. Two hours later, I had a top:

I am still thinking on this one a bit. I might take off that outer border and replace it with something else. Or I could leave the top as is and quilt it and bind it.

I also unearthed another top I started several years ago. I think I finally have a prayer of getting this one done. It’s from about the same time as the blue top. Corey Yoder, of Coriander Quilts, had designed a fabric line back then called Pepper and Flax. The colors were cream, gray, a butter yellow, and an acid green. It sounds weird together but I loved it. That was back when I wasn’t sure how much fabric I needed to make something—obviously, because I had made enough blue-and-white HSTs for two quilts, one of which fit a king sized bed—and I had only purchased a small fat quarter bundle of Pepper and Flax. By the time I realized that I couldn’t make much with it, that whole line had sold out. I tried supplementing with fabrics from the stash, but I couldn’t get the colors right.

Corey released Spring Brook, which had similar colors to Pepper and Flax with a blue thrown in. I bought a fat quarter bundle of that, too, and used a few pieces, but the colors still weren’t entirely correct and I didn’t want to add the blue to the mix.

Corey’s new line, Buttercup and Slate, just hit stores. The colors are very similar to Pepper and Flax. I picked up a few more fat quarters when I was teaching on Tuesday and NOW I think I can finish this quilt. Finally.

Our church is sending six quilts to Ritzville this year, four of which are mine. I dropped them all off with Elaine last night and she will make sure they get where they need to be for the sale.

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I couldn’t get out to the garden until it warmed up yesterday, so I spent the early part of the day ripping apart the living room. I took the slipcovers off the couch and loveseat and washed them, took down the valances and washed them, and I’ll wash the Ruggable rug today. I dusted and wiped down every surface so I could get as much dust as possible stirred up while the air scrubber was running. I think it has made a tremendous difference. Usually when I clean like that, my eyes will be dry and gritty afterward. I am not having that problem now. I’ll need to do a similar deep clean in other parts of the house and then, hopefully, we’ll just need to run the air scrubber periodically.

Most of the garden has been cleaned up and put to bed. After it warmed up a bit, I drove the tractor with the wagon out to the garden so I could toss all of the overripe cucumbers and other produce in it to haul back for the chickens. I brought in a giant box of acorn squash, one last watermelon, and half a dozen cantaloupe. All of the spent plants have been pulled up and stacked on the compost pile. I rolled up all the hoses and put the tomato cages away.

We were planning to dig potatoes on Saturday, but the husband got a call yesterday that the wood boiler is at the dealer in Missoula and ready to be picked up. They had given him a delivery date at the end of October, so this was a bit of a surprise. He’s going to try to pour the pad for it tomorrow afternoon and we’ll drive down Saturday and pick it up.