I’m still here

I appreciate my blog. I do. I appreciate my daughter Lyza for quietly renewing the URL every year. It’s just that there are so many other things to do than write entries in it. Things mostly involving fabric and yarn, but also physical exertion and eating.

Last night, to put myself to sleep, I started counting ongoing or recently completed or even envisioned projects instead of sheep. I drifted off around #18. Here are a few that I’m working on or just finished.

• Knitting socks for a friend
  

  Two knitting projects and some redwork.

• Knitting a wrap with the popular Wingspan pattern, probably for myself
• Red work embroidery patches for a child’s quilt. Other recent embroidery projects include dishtowels and an apron.
• Four quilts in various stages of construction.
• At least one quilt being actively planned [I think of it as “Roosters Up the Ying-yang” as rooster-themed fabric is everywhere. Along with chickens, eggs, and chickenwire.]
• Which leads to thinking about other quilts using barnyard animal patchwork, possibly with plaid or checked fabric as borders.
• Two patchwork chair pads using random piecing techniques from the book “15 Minutes of Play.”
  

  Wonky-pieced chair pad. A lot of fun to make.

• Knitting a seat pad for my car with huge #32 needles and a double strand of strips of waste fabric. Like the rag rug I knitted for my bedroom.

• 

  One of the shop hop blocks. The store provided the material and the pattern.

• Fifteen individual blocks from the Sunshine and Stitches shop hop in June,
  where I visited 1 quilt shops, ving materials for one lock at each. I found some great resources and spent agreat deal of money.
• Ten yards or so of 2-1/2-inch pieced quilt
  

  My favorite shop hop block of the ones I’ve made so far.

  border. My sister Catherine clued me into a clever technique: Sewing the scraps to 3-inch register tape.

• Six 12-inch pieced blocks for the Northwest Quilter’s block of the month, which will net me six chances to win everyone’s blocks for that month. If not, someone gets mine.

There are many more projects, conceived, begun or even finished. Some of them are gifts.I have lots of other things to do besides play with fabric and yarn: cooking, baking, playing the fiddle, taking my scooter to the library, working out at the gym, reading, downsizing my hundreds of books, listening to audiobooks. … But mostly, I just want to immerse myself in making things.
Writing for this blog is far, far down the list.

Simple 9 patches of 4 patches for a block of the month drawing,