Friday, August 15, 2014

This morning I mentioned to Pat that I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything all week. When he pointed out that I’d done an extra Red Cross shift and had an afternoon of shopping I didn’t feel so bad. I think what I really meant was that I hadn’t had a finish for awhile. Sometimes the thing that keeps me going on a project after the initial joy of starting is getting it done and the line crossed off in my project book.

I finished up two cards and a Farmer’s Wife block this morning, so I finally had some finishes for my book. However, today is the day that the September birthday reminders come up; there are nine cards to be done. I think I might be dipping into my orphan block stash in order to meet all those dates. I’ll have Dylan and Taylor for a week and then we’re off to Ontario for a week so I’ll lose sewing time. I realized today that I only have next week for sewing so I’d better make my time count.

Part of making my time count was to get my Days for Girls bags finished. I brought a few more pieces of cut fabric home from the bee on Tuesday. Carola was going to serge the edges and I was going to make the bags. Carola’s serger has been stored in her basement and, when she first moved here, there was a rat problem in her basement. I won’t say anymore, but the machine is going to need a lot of work before it sews a stitch.

Unless these bags are done for Tuesday they won’t be of any use until we do a session next year, so I resigned myself to doing the stay-stitching myself. I started with a blanket stitch, but that really wasn’t working that close to the edge. Next I tried a zig-zag; although it worked okay it wasn’t easy to keep from catching the edges and ending up with a mess. Then I remembered that last year when we were doing these at the bee someone said an overcast stitch worked as good as a serger. I looked up what I needed to do to make Ruby do an overcast stitch and that was the answer. When I volunteered to bring the bags home from the bee I thought there were half a dozen at the most. There were nine bags in the bundle, and I had five bags left from last year’s bee so now I have 14 bags to try and finish before Tuesday.

We’ve been watching the weather (and the forecast) all day. Tonight is the Blackberry Street Festival and we have been hoping all week that the forecast was wrong and the weather would be good. It has rained off and on all day so conditions won’t be ideal for strolling down Marine, or for the fireworks tonight. Regardless of the weather though the blackberry shortcake (with a large dollop of whipped cream) will taste as good as ever!