March On

We've had such a lovely week.  The snowdrops are blooming at my son's house, the grass is visible again, the sun has been shining, the sky has been blue, and we have had temperatures up to 70 degrees.   Today it is chilly and dreary, and we are under a winter weather advisory, with 3 to 6 inches of snow predicted.  It's what we love about Michigan, the weather changes.   On the plus side, we can justify every type of clothing imaginable, because we might need to wear all four seasons in a single weekend.    

My quilting adventure continues, and I have completed my next two quilts-from-stash, numbers five and six for 2018.  No kidding, the AccuQuilt cutter (I have the big electric one), which I would never have bought for myself, has made all the difference.  My productivity has been a surprise to me, since I am, at heart, such a slacker -- quilters will notice how I have learned to embrace my mistakes as "design decisions" rather than do the extra work of correcting them.  

Meanwhile, having made 6 quilts out of my stash without making a dent in the apparent quantity, I have started to cull my fabric in earnest.  This week I filled one huge garbage bag with scrap to donate to a local agency, and I expect to fill several more bags before I am left with a manageable and useable amount.   The scrap I am donating now consists of pieces large enough to make a small zipper/cosmetic-size bag, but not enough to create a consistent colorway.   Later I will move onto the larger scrap pile,  yard cuts of flannel, for instance, that I am unlikely to use now that my Littles are big.  In those days I didn't have a reliable sewing machine and lots of projects never made it to take off.   I hope someone else will find the fabric useful but, if not, the agencies tell me they will recycle it, and that's good enough for me.  The truth of it is that, now that I am making quilt tops, I would like to make one out of chosen fabric, and I can't justify doing that while I am sitting on a ton of perfectly good cloth.

I also made a baby taggie blanket this week, although I have no babies at the moment to sew for.   My sweetie's family has been blessed with three new babies in the past few months and he wanted ideas of something simple he could make for his new grand nieces and nephew, so I created this prototype from an online tutorial, and wish I had thought of it when my own Littles were little!  What a simple idea, and I am pretty sure any baby would love it, although it makes no sense at all to my sweetie.

Meanwhile, life goes lazily on.  My fella is doing well, although life definitely offers him new frustrations and everything moves slower than it used to.  Just finding his socks can be a challenge because his missing visual field, while still blind, is always changing with phantom images.  But he is a trooper and handles it all better than I would.  Sundays are Dominoes days until the end of March, and other days we mostly do as we please.  My sweetie's son challenged us to a game of Trivial Pursuit this weekend, which I failed at miserably, a reminder to me of how rusty my brain has gotten.

The predicted snow will be a reprieve from most of my planned chores, I expect, but I can feel Spring Fever beginning to simmer.  It is (almost) time for me to get a little more energetic after a long, slow winter of slacking.   But not today.  Definitely not today.  Today will be one more day to enjoy hot tea and warm slippers.  Life is good.