New Blocks

The wind is crazy today. Alexa says it's only 18 miles per hour, but I don't know. Seems worse than that. It's cold and there's a slight chance of rain today.  

The wind is keeping the birds from the courtyard feeders, although earlier, before the wind started, they were around. I saw hummingbirds and several pairs of our little house finches. Yesterday, they were joined by quail, the resident thrasher birds and by what I think was a juvenile chipmunk (it was pretty small) that ran around the courtyard checking things out and picking up sunflower seeds that the birds had dropped. (I just looked out the window--which Dave cleaned for me yesterday!--to see a little hummingbird perched on the feeder having a drink.)

Our nest of baby house finches is empty now. I was reading online that they hatch in a couple of weeks and fledge in 12-19 days. That's a quick turnaround. A nest of babies born and raised in a month or so. Amazing, right?

Yesterday, I tried my hand at a new quilt block, a southwest design that I saw on a website called All People Quilt. My three attempts did not go well. (Luckily I had only used some leftover scraps of fabric I had laying around.) For one attempt, I just plain sewed the block together wrong. Another attempt ended up kind of wonky and half an inch too small. My final attempt ended up half an inch too big.

I'm not great at precision sewing and the blocks are comprised of twenty-one different pieces (and twenty seams) that have to be sewn together accurately in order for the block to look right and come out the correct size. This may not be the block for me. The quilt I had been planning on making would require 80 of these blocks, 1600 seams using 1680 pieces--and that's not counting sewing the blocks together to make the actual quilt!

I did have some sewing success yesterday, drafting a pattern for and sewing two tissue box covers. I'm going to make a couple more, then I may be all out of custom made tissue box sewing energy. 

I've had some energy recently though. I've been sewing more, cooking more, writing more. Just doing more. I even got on the elliptical trainer this morning for a short stint (and will probably do a little more time this evening, if my neck and back are okay with this morning's efforts).

 I also had therapy this morning. The hour went fast. We talked about recurring bad times of year. And about covid. I'm tired of both.