What I'm Working on Wednesday--July Ends

Well this has been a busy month, it seemed to last a good long time because of that.  We have been lucky out here in SoCalif that the summer weather has been typical for us, morning low clouds and fog burning off by late morning or early afternoon, mid-upper 70's at the beach with a nice breeze, just a bit warmer inland.  We'll try to remember these good times when the heat and humidity are likely to show up in August and September!   

I  haven't spent much time in the sewing room yet this week, but there was some slow stitching accomplished this Wednesday.

I finished the Blackwork Slave Quarters panel I was working on--finally.  I have one of the two remaining panels already traced out and will commence with that immediately.  

Caught this checkmark in the sky over the weekend, it was an appropriate symbol for another accomplished task, sanding down the doors to our bathroom vanity in preparation for paint.  It did take almost 20 minutes to find the palm sander, however, as it was buried under my husband's workbench.  It took another two days before we got to Lowe's to get more paint, the can used to do the other bathroom vanity having been purchased in 2013!  The people-watching at home improvement stores is pretty good, though, so we didn't mind.  

Further consultation with the newlyweds on the Dreamweaver quilt settled some of the fabric choices and the background. The Jen Kingwell pattern has disappearing 9 patches as the background, but that is a lot of cutting, sewing, rearranging and sewing back together to do for the expanded size I'm making for them.  I showed them another version with simple squares as the background to the appliqued Dreamweaver, and we settled on 3.5"squares.  For the 60x80" throw I plan to make, that means cutting a whole lotta squares--520, in fact!  I looked at a chart for fat quarters and it appears I can get 30 from each--and if I stack and cut them several at a time, the squares will add up even quicker.  Good thing I have plenty of fresh rotary cutter blades :)

In the meantime, the County  Fair started today, my sister Kathy went and told me she saw ribbons on my entries--all of them--but didn't tell me what they were.  She reported mostly 2nds and 3rds on her entries, and Honorable Mention.  Kathy said our older brother told her that "Honorable Mention is just the First Loser ribbon".  What a brat!   Hopefully I'll get down there tomorrow to see for myself how my entries did.  I'll take a First Loser over nothing :)