Well, I’ll never willingly let it go, but perfection surely left me last week as I lost stuff, ripped out, and started over again and again.

I decided to try to get a few summer, outdoor homestead jobs done before September, the biggest of which is painting our little tractor barn.

Mr. SFO and the DD both kindly suggested the mistakes are due to tiredness. Other reasons that occur to me might be– I have too much on my mind, I’m getting old, or maybe I AM JUST LOSING IT. None makes me feel very much better about things like this:

Although I must admit, this arrangement has its own charm. My freshman college design professor would have preferred it!

The offending part was removed, rotated, and returned, but with a lot of resentment for the waste of time. Who has time for this!

Fortunately, I discovered it before it was quilted– I’ve also found a mistake in the ice cream quilt, as well as Charlie’s mushroom quilt that I saw when I was holding him one day.

The problems have also spilled into cross stitch. First, I lost an entire card of colors for my summer sampler. I turned the living room upside down– it never leaves that area– to no avail. Now that I’ve purchased new floss, I’m sure it will turn back up, right?

I showed you my OH OH OH Santa piece last week– the counting errors and mistakes continue on Summer Sampler. I was wondering why there was brown on my flowers. I overthink, so of course I thought the designer was just echoing the painters of the Dutch Golden Age of Realism with a dead petal or two.

Then I found out I was using the wrong color.

The dead petals stay.

This piece is complicated. It’s really helping me to just mark off the stitches one by one on my Procreate app.

My iPad is set up with a keyboard and while I stitch, my cloth dangles over it. So apparently my random movements pressed the exact keyboard command for Delete Layer, a command that I had not been able to discover previously no matter how I tried. All my dots disappeared over the hive area, long before I realized it, but long after the number of possible UNDOs was surpassed. (sigh) Not a game ending mistake, but it’s much harder now to see the leftover hive confetti so I moved on to the Camp motif– very appropriate to where I am in life at this moment.

This is going to be the last area I touch before snoozing this piece over the winter. I can maybe finish the top in the summer of 2027, and the bottom in 2028. So are the best laid cross-stitching plans of mice and men!

Not much else happened in the sewing room, but don’t worry! I am going to take a hit for the team here and keep buying stuff during my convalescence so you will have some entertainment.

To practice my aim on the BUY button, here’s a few things that showed up in my mailbox this week. I bought the finishing kit for the July Sew Sampler box. June and July are both similar quilts– “Whitecaps” was shore themed and this one is flower themed but both feature very bright fabrics. I am hoping to gift one to my daughter and one to my daughter-in-law- they are so similar, neither one of them will complain they got the lesser quilt. ❤️

August’s box is delayed for some reason, which will not help me to get ahead at all. 🤣

I also bought the Purrs and Boos Jolly Bar from Fat Quarter Shop– cute collection, and an even cuter pattern came with it. I still have last year’s Spooky Box kitty quilt waiting to be finished, but that didn’t affect my thinking at all.

Then this came– a major development. I have been toying with the idea of making the “Stars Upon Stars” quilt for quite a while. That’s a part of it on the top of that box– it’s a historic quilt that Editya Sitar of Laundry Basket quilts wrote a pattern for. I made a Virginia Star quilt for my wedding– I’d love to make this for my 50th anniversary in 7 years– don’t you think that would be quite a follow-up?

The box has templates– gulp. The templates are tiny even before you realize they include seam allowances!

I tried to machine piece just one of the smaller stars in the corners of each block a couple of years ago. (There are four in the corners and four half stars as well in each block, and I’m not even talking about the big diamond star yet.) Well, it was impossible to do it on the machine, with tiny Y seams. So, I thought I would try hand piecing one block while I’m supposed to be resting. Even if I only ever finished one block– it would be spectacular– what a find in a thrift store years hence!

Next up, these are two things I bought at the Maine Quilt Show. I really had my spending in control that day– the lines were long– but trust me, I saw a lot!

Horse fabric– I love horses!

I discovered this print is part of an Art Gallery collection called “The Orchard.” See– the horse is looking for apples. Look at this beauty!

I have no potential use for these fabrics besides owning them. 😍

And then I bought this fun rainbow of fat quarters:

I got the prints on sale at Marden’s and I’d love to make Harlow and Charlie both a little quilt with the print squares and then a crayon appliqued on top of them. So the solids would be the crayon part. Cute, huh? Let’s hope this happens before they get to college.

Finally, did anyone grab this magazine?

American Patchwork & Quilting is the only one I subscribe to– and that cover quilt does not disappoint!

I did have a few successes last week, but they were on the homestead front– the blueberries were perfection this year! We will be enjoying this jam over the winter.

And my six baby chicks have successfully integrated into the larger flock– hurray! This is one of the main things I was worried about accomplishing before surgery. I was having to rearrange chickens all day, because the larger ones will bully the new ones if they don’t recognize them– they have to see them for awhile so they get to recognize them. No one else here really has time for that, plus, I like to think of myself as the Mother Clucker. Look at my pretty flock, all getting along nicely!

So that’s my story– Mr. SFO bought two nice chairs for us down at the lake. Every night we go down there to rest and enjoy the view. It is so comforting to think that view is there for us after every day, even the tough ones.

xox
Carol