Saturday morning I headed out to meet my sister at one of the local quilt establishments for the unveiling of their Christmas fabric. Always one to support the local shops, I picked up 4 yards of WinterBerry Lane from Red Rooster. Looks like it'll make a nice little table quilt that will serve through winter...that is if I can actually finish it by the end of the year.
Heading home, I had the windows down, and I'm cruising down the road, about 40 mph when I hear something hit the windshield or the side mirror, and as I glance in that direction, something somewhat large and very black has sailed into my driver's side window and is now ON ME. Momentary panic, but I'm coming up on a red light so if I can just keep it together until I stop I can jump out of the car screaming and flailing wildly at myself when I come safely to a stop.
As I look down at my shirt I can now see just what the big black monster hanging on to me is...it's not a bird, it's not a bat, its not some mutant gigantic bug...well, okay, it is a bug, and while it is the size of my fist, it's not so threatening once I discover it's a beautiful black and blue butterfly, that is clearly not doing very well, having just bounced off a 40mph impact with my car.
I'm trying to gently pick it up by a wing, or scoop it up in my hand, but now it's crawling across my stomach and trying to get under my seat belt. While I am not a bug fan...pretty or not...especially when they are crawling on me, I'm trying to figure out what I can do with it. Clearly, this isn't one for the vet, and from the looks of it, this butterfly is mortally wounded. I'm also the 2nd car in line at a light with a dozen or so cars behind me, and the light has just turned green. The best I could do was take it in my hand and hold it out the open window and hope it could fly.
(At this point, it would be best to just let you write the ending to this story yourself..I'm a 'glass half empty' kind of gal, while you might be a 'glass half full' type.)
On the sewing front, I spent the rest of the day attempting to make 3 turtle pincushions.
....Got so far as to stuff one and it was not good. No, not good at all. So I unstuffed her, tweaked the seams a bit, laid it aside and set off on another project:
This is an 18"x18" quilt block carrier from Elly Sienkiewicz's Baltimore Elegance book.
It's made from some JoAnn fabric I bought when I first started quilting and have had sitting in a cubby, and the hubs finally bought the FoamCor home from scraps from work on Friday, so this was a 'free' project.
You lay your blocks, fold in the side flaps, fold up the bottom flap and tie it up. Keeps your blocks nice and flat until you're ready to put them all together. The block on display is one of the papercut blocks for my Baltimore Album that I finished on the trip to Ohio last week.
If you're liking this block carrier and want to make one of your own, let me just warn you that Elly doesn't provide the clearest directions, and unless you have a set of Fasturn tools, you're going to need an alternate method for making the ties and the handle, and you're also going to have to adjust the sizes of your FoamCor pieces if you go with where she tells you to place your handle and the side flaps....I'm just saying that this is not a project for the faint of heart. This was an all day project, and I expected it was something I was going to knock out in a couple of hours (bwah ha ha ha).
Well, tomorrow it's back to pincushions....FEAR THE TURTLE! (if you live around here, you get that :) ).
Glad to see you're able to get back to sewing - that must be a good feeling. Well, intil something goes wrong, like having to unstuff a turtle!
ReplyDeletePS My word verif. was "singing" which I thought was a good one for you for this post.
The turtle brought back memories. I attempted him for a swap and finally used what was left of the material for another project.
ReplyDeleteI like the block carrier!
Ninja turtle?
ReplyDeleteI have not had good luck with those pincushions, hope you can "tweek" it into submission. The block carrier is cool, but I'd need a couple dozen of them for all of the completed blocks but not yet quilts that I have (see my glass is half full too...) sorry about the poor butterfly. New fabric is fab!!
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