Something Old, Something New

We were back to our usual Oregon gloom yesterday, and so I spent the day inside. I was in the process of making the first row of blocks from my newest project called "Jenny's Flower Garden." Eventually I'll give it a different name. The 49-patch blocks were finished, but I needed to make the "blanks." Smitty was very helpful in that regard.

He first helped with fabric selection, and then again with layout of the blocks.

This is a triple Irish chain, and I wasn't sure how all those randomly placed scrappy colors were going to look. This is just the first row of blocks, and I'll work on this project one row at a time. It's a little hard to tell with just seven blocks, but I think this will be fine when it's all finished. There are still many more blocks to make.

While it's tempting to sew together the rows as I make them, I'll keep going until all the blocks are made. I'll probably get a better and more random mix of fabrics that way.

From there, I caught up on the latest Tiny Tuesday block. This one was designed by Mari at The Academic Quilter. It's a cute "spinner" block.

As I mentioned when I worked on this last time, I seem to be one block ahead. We are supposed to be on Block #15, but I have 16 for some reason. When the quilt is finished, I'll use any extras on the quilt back. For now, here they are all laid out together.

From there I moved on to the oldest of my projects, the Mulligan Stew quilt. I've been working on this quilt for so long it isn't even funny, and I've written about the project many times. If you're new to this blog, you can read about the project and the book where it originates right here. There are 60 blocks in the quilt I'm making, and I've been making them five blocks at a time. Now I'm on Block #56, and so I'll complete all of the blocks in this go-round. Block #56 is this one:

Here's the story associated with it:

And here's the block I made:

I was ready to move on to the next one...this one:

with its associated story:

But then I kind of lost my sewing mo-jo for the day and decided to quit. I'll get back to it today. Three of the four remaining blocks are applique, and I needed to copy the pages from the book so I could make templates from the drawings. Instead, I went back to the April Heart embroidery that was nearly finished. I finished the last of it this morning:

And then I moved on to the May block. It's just barely started.

In the I'm-crabby-about-the-weather-and-so-now-I'm-going-to-complain-about-everything column, there's this:

Recently, I stopped ordering from Fabric.com because their website is so freaking slow on my computer that it's impossible to use. And so I've been doing any online ordering from Fabric Shack. Besides, Fabric Shack is a good source of solid fabric. They have good prices. Sadly, their shipping practices leave a lot to be desired. They stuff way too much fabric into a flat-rate envelope, and the envelope bursts in shipping. You might recall this order I received back in February:

I wrote an email to them at the time, and they assured me this wasn't their usual practice. Now, the same thing has happened again, and in wet, wet, wet Oregon, this sort of thing is really unacceptable. It's unacceptable no matter where you live, but it gives me another opportunity to whine about the weather. Anyway, I wrote to them again this morning with these words included in my message: "Strike Two." I'll move to another website if I receive another order like this.

Okay, so I seriously need an attitude adjustment. The sky is brightening up some, and it's supposed to be a dry week ahead. Mike and I have plans to get out and clean up the greenhouse today. I'd like to get some plants going in there this week, but it's full of dead tomato vines and their rotten progeny. We do this every year, and so we'll have it spic and span before you can say Bob's Your Uncle. But you might want to hold off saying it for just a bit, okay? I need to drink some more coffee first.