LONG AWAITED DAY

I always look forward to the day when I can hang out the wash to dry on the line.  Today was that day!  We had had sufficiently warm weather earlier this week, but the slab of cement to stand on for hanging out the wash was covered with a big snow pile until this morning.  I had helped the melting along yesterday by chopping at the pile and washing some away with the hose.

There was a lot of laundry piled up waiting to be done:

That's a lot for just two people!

Here are loads #5 and #6 on the line.  The first "summer" laundry day is such an event I always take a picture!

Before that there were four loads of whites on the line.  That included all of our bedding.  Yesterday I "unexpectedly" did the spring-cleaning of our bedroom: washed walls, windows, rubbed the furniture with orange oil, took off all the bedding and the eyelet valances, vacuumed the spring and mattress, vacuumed the rug, washed the mirrors.  Wow!

I was very stiff when I got up this morning.  You know the cure for stiffness from unusual exercise (cleaning all that in one day was unusual exercise): it's MORE of the same!  So I worked really hard today--that included finishing the window washing on the main floor.  Some had been done earlier this week, and now that spring cleaning job is finished!  Yay!

A clean house makes me feel so good!  

Oh, and I scrubbed the balcony floor.  That's 7' x 44', so it's not a small job.  I hook up the hose by the back door, thread it through the window, run it to one of the living room windows that looks out on the balcony.  Spray, scrub with a push broom, rinse well.  Tiring work!  But, oh, it looks so much better with the winter grime removed, and the accumulated bird leavings scrubbed off!

I'm cutting and sewing a "Disappearing Four Patch" lap quilt.  It would have been nice to sew today, but the next three days are forecast to be cold and rainy.  That's good sewing weather.  I'll post a picture when the quilt top is together.

Now for a glass of cold water, a cookie (?), a book and my feet up on the coffee table in the sun space.

"WINDFARM"

Today I finished the small quilt I'm calling "Windfarm" because it's all pinwheels.  This pattern was in the March/April issue of Quiltmaker, but in that form there were several different colours of pinwheels.  That made it tricky to piece because each center of block pinwheel had four "blades" of another colour surrounding it.  Each of them, in turn needed to match the colour blades in the blocks surrounding the current block.  A little hard to explain, and much, much harder to do as you are making the blocks.

My version uses just two colours of pinwheels, vastly simplifying the process.

This will be a donated "comfort quilt" either here or in Arizona.

I was so enthusiastic about this quilt when I started making it, but was very thankful that I had made just twelve blocks when I sewed it together.  It was a beast to sew together as each quarter of each block had four bias seams.  It was really hard to get the blocks sewn together properly.  So this quilt is a "one off."  I won't make another in this pattern.  Funny how some patterns just match up beautifully and others give a lot of trouble!

Yesterday we had a year-end windup: a Show and Tell with snacks that we invite friends to come see what we've made.  It's always fun and was especially nice this year.  I forgot to take my camera, so I'll ask Cathy to send me some photos to share.

This morning we took delivery of a lot of plants, trees and shrubs from Jeffries Nurseries in Portage la Prairie, Sask.  The driver arrived when we said he would, our neighbours helped with two fork lifts and two drivers.  In about 45 minutes it was all unloaded and placed in the greenhouse.  The driver did such a good job that I am going to call the trucking company to tell them what a good driver he is.  See you later.

THE BIG MELT

The snow has been melting very gradually, until today.  Now the BIG MELT in on!  Here's the end of our driveway and the road out front:

But it's not to wet for the Dear One to be out in the landscape pruning off the old, dead ends of shrubs and perennials.  Just happy that it's warm enough to be outside!

SPLIT 9 PATCH FINISH

Just now I finished putting the binding on a Split 9 Patch quilt, one of the UFO's from the fabric closet.  This is a quilt that I demonstrated last summer at IDA, our local quilt store.  That's always a fun time.  I set up my sewing machine, a design board and start making blocks.  There's a handout showing each of the steps in the process and quilters drop by during the day to pick up a set of directions and watch the process.  It means I go home with quite a few finished blocks that need some more blocks made and then they can form a quilt.

There were some of these Split 9 Patch blocks in the fabric closet, and this is the second finish of those UFO's.  Two other projects ended up in the burning barrel, a Jacob's Ladder (9 blocks of varying sizes) and a failed denim bag.

I made the extra blocks and put the quilt together.  Then I picked out borders.  Here are  two possibilities:

It looked to me that the blue was a "hands down" better choice.  So that's what I went with.  The first time I applied the borders they were too "wavy."  That happens when a border that's a bit too long is sewed to a quilt.  They needed to be taken off and be shortened.

I took a short cut and ripped them off.  Yikes!  Yes, just remove a bit of the seam, take hold of the quilt top in one hand and the border in the other and give a good hard pull.  The border will separate from the quilt.  I should have pressed the borders after that maneuver, but forgot to do that.  That meant that one side of the border was longer than the other.  Now that's not too bad if you sew the longer edge to the quilt.  That will make the borders nice and snug on the outer edge.  Three of them were sewed on that way; the fourth had the stretched outer side to the outer edge.  Well!  That was quite a few missteps along the way.  But I went ahead and made the 3 layer quilt sandwich.

 Yesterday at the town quilt club meeting I got most of the machine quilting done.  This morning I finished up that step, made the binding (same fabric as the border) and got that applied.  I sewed it to the back of the quilt, folded it over to the front and top stitched it down.  All that needs to be done now is to snip off the thread ends on the back of the quilt.  The back is also from the stash, a large piece of polkadot flannel, cut in half and a fairly large piece of blue flannel.  The blue flannel is in the middle, with a wide strip of polka dot flannel on either side.

This next photo shows the border with the binding, and the variegated thread stitching on both sides:

Another finish, this one two weeks ago, was a pair of hand-knit socks, a Christmas gift promised to Lola in the Christmas gift exchange of the town club.  She chose the yarn and I knit this pair after returning from AZ.  I hadn't sewed in the end thread, just in case they needed some adjustment.  But they fit beautifully just this way.  I finished them at the club meeting two weeks ago and they went home with her.

LEARNING SOMETHING NEW

Today I am trying out something I haven’t done before—using my new iPad to make a blogpost.  AND I want to learn how to import a photo from the camera.  So here goes.
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Well, that was a bust!  Couldn't find the way to get a photo taken with my iPad to the blog post, written on the iPad.  Someone will know how to do that--I'll ask around.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THIS DAY

We got up this morning to another new layer of snow!  This is a winter that just won't quit.  And we are all so ready to see some green!  I thought about complaining.  Then we watched the latest chapter of The Kennedys on CNN.  So much talent, so much promise,  So Much Tragedy!  It's heart wrenching even now. fifty five years later.

On the day JFK was killed I was in my first year of teaching.  It was a Friday afternoon, near the end of the day.  My fifth grade class was busy with an art project.  The principal came to our room and delivered the dire news.  Who doesn't remember where they were and what they were doing when we heard the news.  If only. . . .

When that program ended we turned to CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and watched the last part of the service in Humboldt, Saskatchewan.  This was a community service following the dreadful accident on Friday that killed 15 members of the Humboldt Broncos Hockey team.  What we saw of the service was very good.  The politicians in Humboldt had decided that the leaders of faith--the pastors of the various churches there--should be in charge of the service.  There were hymns and prayers in the part of the service that we watched.  One of the hymns was "What a Friend we have in Jesus."  Would you hear a hymn like that sung in a memorial service in Toronto--or any other major city.

Could it be that being sophisticated means losing something deeply basic and comforting?

Also, this afternoon I finished reading one of Jodi Picoult's latest books, Small Great Things.  I heartily recommend it!  I hope that many people read it and take its message to heart, a message that is desperately needed in these times of deep divisions and hatreds.