Spring Snow and a Bit of Piecing

We woke up to snow yesterday morning; it was gone by lunchtime, but the weather stayed chilly enough to keep me inside. A quick peek at the weather forecast for next week shows that it’s not going to get much better. Last spring was cold, too, but this year seems to be even worse. And now the weather people are talking about the fact that we are moving into a strong El Nino pattern, which will bring a drier winter and warmer spring next year.

Thank goodness for our greenhouse. The plants inside are nice and toasty.

After breakfast, I sat down at my desk and knocked items off my to-do list one by one, which brought my stress level down considerably. I discovered long ago that procrastinating on anything never helps me. I can’t formulate a plan until I know the exact scope of a problem, and that means tackling it head on. I had a few items on my list that had potential roadblocks in the way—roadblocks not of my making—and I needed to figure out how to get around them. Those problems are either solved or have a plan of attack in place.

My reward was to spend the afternoon making four more 12-1/2” squares for a cream and white string quilt. This is a great project for when I want to sew and not have to think, as it doesn’t require any measuring. I just sew strips of fabric together until the block is a bit bigger than needed, then trim it to size. The block looks like this:

This is the quilt I made for our bed. The block is a variation on a Log Cabin that starts with a small square in the corner. Strips get added to two sides alternately. I need 64 of them for a king-sized quilt. I’m up to 36.

The number of blocks needs to be a multiple of four in order to be put into this setting:

This is one of the blocks I did yesterday:

(It is square, even though it doesn’t look like it in the photo.)

I could do an alternate setting with a different number of blocks. We’ll see how many I get done. I’d like to put this in the co-op sale in September, and it would be nice to have it be at least a queen-sized quilt.

All the baby quilts have been delivered to their destinations—thankfully, before the babies arrived. I put the red churn dash quilt back on the Q20 to work on as I have time. The forecast is for slightly warmer weather today, so the husband and I are planning to get the potatoes in the ground. He also has “fixing the hot water system” on his list. For some reason, our limitless supply of hot water has dwindled to barely lukewarm over the past week or so. The hot water heater is barely 18 months old, so he suspects the problem is with a mixing valve.