Today, Feb 7th, was a day when the rain poured down relentlessly outside our home in California. Per the weather man, we are currently experiencing an "atmospheric river". It was a good day to stay in my sewing room tidying up and dabbling with random small projects. I'd had a quilting friend over yesterday and we dragged out a bunch of kits and fabrics to look at and audition. I leisurely took the time today to put that stuff away, also, refreshing my memory and becoming re-inspired as I did so.
I continued my dedication to my ongoing project of completing Christmas stuffed ornaments. I found two more angels to round out the set of six that was my first project of 2024. These two were cut out and tucked away amidst other Christmas fabrics. Take heart. UFOs never go away; they just vanish to an undisclosed location to resurface at a later time. I sewed up and stuffed those two angels. Based on their hair, my guess is that they are African and Native American. Four of the set had been made with red ribbon loops and two with green ribbon loops so I chose green for these additional two to balance out the octet. I like that the green picks up of the wreath of the angel on the left and pick ups the tree of the angel on the right. Following the photo of the pair I sewed and stuffed today, I've repeated a picture of the other six from my post at the start of 2024. They are such a bright and cheerful lot, especially spirit-lifting on such a dreary day!
I also found nestled among the panels of fabrics two forgotten critters, a lion cub holding a poinsettia and a kitten with a Christmas ball. They were already cut out and just needed to be stitched and stuffed. I obliged. I suspect other members of the set are packed away with Christmas ornaments that had been displayed this past Christmas 2023, but there are no guarantees. Those other critter ornaments may pop up from some secret mysterious location, awaiting completion. Unusual among these type of ornaments, the kitten was labeled to be stitched at the side back rather than at the bottom. I wish I had ignored those markings, since the whip stitch closure is more visible on the side than it would have been on the uneven bottom. Oh well, what's done is done.
During my sewing room browsing (cleansing?) I came across a plastic scrapbook type bin with sixteen completed blocks and seven pinwheels. These had been made from block of the month packets from JoAnn Fabrics that I'd bought in clearance at $1 each. The block of the month kit was called
Spice Meadows and was originally available through April 2006. The colors are kind of a give away. I have an incomplete assortment of assembled blocks with duplicates of some. Yesterday, I became re-inspired to assemble the blocks into a quilt. My friend helped me pick out some spotted brown fabrics from my stash that I may use as sashing. There were some fabric scraps in the bin so today I sewed up an eight ~2" pinwheel. More details will follow when I actually work on this quilt but I least have the intention to do it in 2024. My real incentive is to free up that plastic bin. I have a self-imposed upper limit of 15 of these bins.
The colors of the previous set of blocks are very muted and not my normal preferred palette. I dragged out a kit title
Harvest Home that I'd bought at a show (©2006 pattern included within) purely because of its clearance bargain price (~75% off!) thinking to possibly raid it for completion fabrics. Instead, when taking it out of the package and really looking at it, I became re-enamored with the kit and now want to work on it, too, as designed.
All in all, today was an enjoyable day of indulgent dabbles and foibles indoors, heedless of the puddles and dribbles outdoors.
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