And piecing again

Sorry no photos today...it was very windy by the time I got home, and also the sun had gone behind clouds. (We did get rain later - not really storms but at a couple of points, there were tiny hailstones mixed with the rain, like pinhead sized hail).

I finished the Sherbet Pips quilt.

(Oh, wait: I do have a photo. I took a picture of some of the blocks when I had just begun it in October and never posted them here:)



I like the quilt, though the colors...for a few days there, I wasn't so fond of them (we had an extended period of grey days, and while that normally doesn't get to me, it did this year - and there seemed to be so much grey and so much pale in the quilt).

I also finished sewing all the "Jelly Filled" blocks out of the bright pastels, but didn't have the energy to try laying out the quilt.

And I started cutting on a new quilt. The pattern is a modification of the nine-patch (I've seen this particular modification called "Puss in the Corner). I'm using (mostly) fabrics from the Backyard Baby line - cute bug-oriented fabrics in leaf green, light orange, grey, and a very soothing aqua blue. I bought some fat quarters of these on my last trip to Quilt Asylum - what grabbed me and got me wanting to make a quilt using the fabrics was this one. It's a fabric printed with maple samaras! As a botanist, I can't help but love that.

The pattern I'm basing it on uses 8 fat quarters; I have 12 - I'm going to make half again as many blocks (I think the original pattern said you got 32 blocks, which would mean I'd get 48). I added in a couple prints in the same color but not out of that line in order to add a little sparkle. (The two "extra" prints have a bright magenta-y pink in them as well as most of the other colors in the Backyard Baby fabrics).

***

My birthday is next Monday. I don't really have any plans for it. Saturday is the "Crafty Ladies" day, so I can't really go and do anything that day. I'm contemplating going out the NEXT weekend - the third of March - and going to McKinney or something. (Then again, I don't NEED anything...and I actually have a good quilt shop here in town (if one that doesn't do fat quarters - which is why I love Quilt Asylum so much; nearly everything they have in stock, they have fat quarters already cut of). And I actually now have more yarn choices right in town than I would have by going to McKinney. So I don't know. I might just stay in town and shop here and go out to lunch next Saturday. It would certainly save gas money...

I'm toying with the idea of picking a short lab for my soils class on Monday and making one of those "dirt cakes" (that sort of pudding dessert where you crumble up Oreos into it so it looks like topsoil, and you put gummi worms in the Oreo crumbs). Because the idea of bringing a dirt cake to soils class amuses me. We'd have to have it out in the student lounge (which is just outside the lab room) because of my strict no-food-in-lab rule. But I think I could work it out.

Other than that, I don't know: I teach a full day on Monday (my actual birthday) and I wouldn't even have time to go out to lunch. And I'm usually too tired in the evenings to contemplate going out for dinner.

Birthdays are a big deal when you're a kid, but in some ways they're kind of a cheat when you're an adult.