Cleaning Up

 You all know how it works. When you have guests coming, the first thing you do is clean the house.

So I worked one evening and cleared off the work tables. Looks good, right? Well, hold on...

Yeah, this is WAY too much fabric to fit in any of my little bins. I may have to make slabs (bleh), or just stuff the fabric IN the big bins and say to hell with it.

I shredded a lot of junk mail and cleared the top of my desk. I'll do the filing tomorrow and do some heavy duty dusting and tidying in there. Then I'll pay the bills.

I cleaned the refrigerator and ran the oven self-cleaner overnight. I put away some quilts and generally cleared out some clutter in my bedroom. I cleaned both bathrooms. I also got my Covid booster. I decided not to get my flu shot and the RSV vaccine at the same time. I'll get those next weekend.

After dinner I worked on sewing the binding on the Black Abacus quilt.

And of course I've been the go-to person to communicate the comings and goings of my California family to my local family for the upcoming wedding. Who's coming which day and how, who is staying where, who needs a place to park and a local place to eat breakfast. Who's going to the wedding rehearsal dinner and when is it? Who's going to collect my niece and her boyfriend from the bus station in Londonderry? When is my DIL arriving? Who's driving to the wedding venue with who and in which car? Who has dietary restrictions and what are they. (One is glucose intolerant and the other can't eat dairy). Blah blah blah.

It was one of those days where it doesn't seem like you make headway on anything and then you start listing all the things you accomplished...

Round and Round

 

I thought I'd have the birds going around in circles- sort of like concentric circles, with birds in each "row" facing away from the other.

Then I rearranged them so they were all standing up. This didn't sing for me either.

What I'm trying to do is two interlocking coils where one set of birds faces one way and the other set of birds face the other way. This isn't working either.

I finally had to get out my sketchbook. Each square represents one bird block. If I did this, I'd need 70 blocks - a lot more than I have right now, so no matter what happens, I need to make more blocks.

I've laid out the bird like the plan above, but you can hardly tell the birds are arranged in any particular way at all. 

Here when a bird turned a corner, I rotated him. It's mildly interesting, but doesn't really convey the idea.

So I will make more blocks. If you want to join me you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop.

 

You may be wondering where I was all last week. I was home. I've been busy. I've been making decisions; choosing lighting fixtures (I've decided to replace them in both bathrooms), searching and getting quotes for a mirror for the new bathroom, and making other decisions for what's going in there. I also chose a new ceiling fan for my living room. The guy that has been doing the work on my guest bathroom injured his back, throwing my schedule right to hell. 

I've been reading. I just finished A Gentleman in Moscow, which I enjoyed very much. I've also been watching Top Chef (Season 19!!).

I've been continuing to go through drawers and cabinets and closets going through my excess "stuff" so I can sell it at the community yard sale at the end of June. I've also made the annual trip to the garden center for the herb garden I grow each year. I have Parsley, Basil, Thyme, Rosemary, Oregano, Chives, Mint and Sage.

Anyway.

The Discovery

We all have stuff. The boxes sitting on the footstool are filled with photographs. I have to sort through them. I had to move them to get at the portrait of my grandmother and her sister so I could move it to the living room. It seemed like a good time to sort through the photos inside. (My pal Julie has a good starting point: if the picture is of a place or a thing, you can throw it away. If it's a picture of someone you love, you can keep it. If it's a TERRIBLE picture of someone you love, you can toss it. This method alone reduced the amount of pictures by at least half. Ask me how I know this.)

In order to HANG the portrait, I had to move the bureau. Well, the bureau is solid maple, and the drawers were filled with... stuff. I could have just put them back in the bureau, but my self assigned task for this year is to go through every single box, bin, closet and drawer and get rid of the stuff I no longer need or use.  So I decided to clean out the drawers before I moved the bureau back against the wall.

Getting back to STUFF. I know the boxes above have pictures in them. I knew MOST of what was in the bureau. What I didn't expect was to find a treasure.

I found something really special I didn't even know I had. Didn't even know EXISTED! This picture postcard of Buckingham Palace in London was in the drawers of the bureau. Check out that deckled edge. They don't have postcards like that any more.

In 1962 my father was sent to England as part of the US response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He left in January (according to my memory) and was gone for about three or four months. My mother was left alone with three kids under seven, and pregnant for a fourth. This is a postcard he sent to me while he was gone. I found it with other postcards for my brothers. 

To say I was surprised to find this is an epic understatement. I didn't even know these existed. I was thrilled. My father always sent me cards, for my birthday, for Mother's Day, for Valentine's Day, for Christmas. I'd keep them on the side table for weeks, until finally I'd throw them out. It never occurred to me to keep any. I hope I have some in my stack of stuff. But if I don't, I sure am glad I have this. The cards were all signed, "Love, Dad," but this is a whole lot more than that.

And yes, I called him Daddy.

Catch Up

 

After a day of food food food, Friday was a day of playing catch up. 

After I planned my menus for the coming week, I placed my grocery order before I went to bed on Thursday. It was ready by 9AM the next day, so I had a quick breakfast then went to pick it up. I filled the car with gas then did another errand and went home. I made a big batch of tomato soup for my lunches during the week, made a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and then packed the Christmas presents into their gift bags, calculated all the shipping costs, printed the labels and then drove to the post office to drop them off. Back at home I did all the laundry, folded it; changed the sheets on the bed, cleaned up the kitchen and made dinner and ran the dishwasher.

I switched out the pink pillows and quilt for the Holiday Boxes quilt and silver pillows, hung the Happy Holidays quilt and switched out Millie's summer tent for the winter version. As you can see Millie wasted no time in covering it with her furs. I'll put up the Christmas decorations a little at a time over the next few days.

I still have to clean off the dining room table and cover it with the Christmas table cover, pay a few bills and move some garden tools to the shed. It's snowing as I write this, and although it won't stick around, it does mean the end of the garden season, so it's beyond time to put the garden tools away and bring out the snow shovels.

I've got a few more bags to make too.

My mother was so funny. She saw the bags I made for my son, DIL and DGG and said, "So Lynne, where is MY bag? Am I going to get one...?"