Catching Up

Sometimes in life, it seems like not much has happened until you look back a couple days and see what you've been up to. Of course, when you hit your middle years, sometimes it's hard to remember what you had for breakfast that morning, let alone what you might have done a couple days before. Luckily, unlike our parents, we have digital cameras and computers and can engage in a little photographic flashback when necessary. So indulge me here in a brief trip down short-term memory lane.

Before my body tried to turn itself inside out on Sunday morning and when I wasn't digging through people's cast-off stuff at the flea market on Saturday, I was busy finishing the box for the Wild Child. Here are a couple photos--outside and inside. The "outside" photo doesn't really show the box as well as the couple I've posted previously, but I wanted to try to get the "feet" into this shot, so it's not full on. Of course, my photography lack-of-ability meant the feet didn't show up all that well either. Oh well.

The Wild Child seemed delighted with the box--at least that was my impression during what little quality time I was able to spend outside of the bathroom while she was here.

Of course, the rest of the weekend was mostly just a nauseous blur. On Monday evening, I started thinking about my Jo's Little Women Club meeting that was coming up on Wednesday night. Then I started feeling kind of guilty that I hadn't done any of the Jo's projects this session--and I think we're on the third or fourth meeting of a six-month session. So I pulled out my Jo's packet and looked at the project. I don't recall the name of it, but it's designed to be worked on over two months; the first month is an appliqued center and the second month is a gazillion relatively small hourglass blocks that go around it.

Oh, a slight detour in the narrative here. Look what came in the mail on Monday:

Okay, so that's what I was doing--looking at what came in the mail on Monday. And looking at the Jo's project. And feeling guilty. And thinking about cherries. Yep, multi-tasking at its finest. And what resulted from all those jumbled thoughts reminds me of that commercial that goes something like, "you got chocolate in my peanut butter!" Except in this case, I got cherries in my 1800s repro project. So, this is what the Jo's project was supposed to look like--it's that one down in the right hand bottom corner.

Instead, this is what my appliqued center looks like.

When I showed it at Jo's tonight, everyone laughed. Ha! Scoff they may, but just wait! Yes, I will add the gazillion hourglass blocks--sort of--but they'll be in the Blackbird Jubilee fabric. As soon as the rest arrives--a FQ of each fabric and then some. Waiting is hard, though. Still, making this little appliqued center gave me a chance to test out a few ideas for the BIGGER cherry quilt project I'm starting. I see a few things I'll do differently on that one--like make the stems narrower and alter the leaves a bit.

In the meantime, I think I said something about working on cherries the other night while recovering from my near-death stomach flu experience. Now I have 39 cherries all prepped and waiting to be appliqued to something, but I didn't have the right background. At the quilt shop tonight, though, I found the PERFECT background. Unfortunately, I've now discovered that I rather short-sightedly failed to check my stash for the perfect leaf fabric(s). Nope--the perfect leaf fabric is not in the house. It's always something, isn't it?

So tomorrow I think I'll need to make a great sacrifice of both time and money and treck on down to the quilt shop during my lunch hour. You guys know I can do some serious power shopping during my lunch hour, right?

Oh, that reminds me--I wanted to ask if you know how to make appliqued shapes using no-melt mylar templates. If you don't, do you care? Do you feel a great void in your life? If so, I can share with you some photos I took while I was prepping the cherries and leaves for my Not-So-Jo's-Little-Women project and I could do a little pictorial tutorial, but I don't want to bore you if this isn't something you're interested in. ("Pictorial tutorial"--Love those words together! Reminds me of tutti-frutti!)

And for those of you who may be disappointed in my greatly updated version of an 1800's quilt, I thought I'd placate you with a couple photos before I say goodnight. One of the gals brought two blue and cream quilts to Jo's Club for show and tell, and Lindy (the owner of Bear Paws & Hollyhocks) dated them to around the first couple decades of the 1900s.

Bedtime for me! Goodnight!