It's Summer!

Summer is here! In western Oregon, that means 2-3 months relatively free of rain. For me that means trying to do a zillion things during those precious dry months that are difficult to do when it's wet and muddy. And I never have enough time to do much more than make a small dent in my list of things to do. So far, I've managed to cross off 2 major items: set up a canopy (so I have a dry place to work under if it does rain) and add a deck to my sewing shed. Still have to add drywall to shed and prepare and move my trailer to a new spot with a better view and hopefully more sunshine.

Now that the Olympics are on TV, I'm getting even less done. Well, less outside stuff and computer stuff. I am making headway on a redwork project. And I gathered up 8 quilt tops that need to be sandwiched and quilted. I can do things like that while half-watching the TV, but my back is toward the TV when I'm at the computer. Once the rain returns, I'll spend more time at the computer and blogging.

New Quilt Blocks

I've been busy this week catching up on a block challenge for one of the Yahoo groups I belong to. The challenge is to make one block for each month that features a cat and represents that month in some way. We had snow in January, so I used yo-yos to make a snowcat and stitched it to a snowball block.

February's block features a heart for Valentine's Day and uses a pink fabric that I used in a project I was working on in February. The cat fabric just looked like Valentine's Day to me.

March's block is a 3-leaf clover made without a pattern - I just haphazardly cut some white rectangle and square shapes and sewed them to green squares to make the leaves. It's fun to ignore all the fussy rules once in a while! I drew the cat on a small piece of fusible web, cut it out and fused it in place. The stem is embroidered.

My oldest cat, Wylie, was born in April many years ago, so I searched my cat fabric stash for a black and white tuxedo cat. The kitten in the center of this block was the best I could find. The block features a 4" Puss in the Corner block as the center of an 8" Puss in the Corner block.