I Like Thursday: Nearly Six Pounds

I have SO MUCH TO DO.  Simply not enough time.  My long Thanksgiving weekend flew by before I knew what hit me.

On the other hand - I liked a lot!

I like the fabric I bought Sunday.  The bag felt heavy - I threw it on the scale when I got home:  five pounds ten ounces.  Excellent.

I like the backing I got for my Mom's quilt.  It's extra wide, so there will be no seams in the back.  Woot!

I also like that I finished the border for Mom's quilt.  I had to redo part of it because it didn't look right when I sewed it together.  But I'm happy with it now!  It just needs to be attached.

And I like the quilt I have on the drawing board.   I can't wait to start working on it.

Past Pignics: Pigs and People

The Boston Pignic existed years before I started blogging.  I recently dredged up a bunch of old photos and thought they'd be fun to share.  This is the third post in the series (you can view the other posts at Several Pretty Pigs and Pig Piles).

Guinea pigs are so photogenic - but I like the photos of pigs with people, too.  Many of these are from the 2008 spring and fall pignics.  Evidently that was a great year for people and pigs.

Guinea pigs spend much of the pignic eating grass, but we always find reasons to pick them up.  Whether it's for inspections, bringing them to and from the common pens, to show off or simply to snuggle them.

I Like Thursday: Thanksgiving

It's easy to like Thursday when it's Thanksgiving!  I have a lot to be thankful for - comfort, love, health, family, friends, laughter, creativity.  I truly have a charmed life.  (And although I have lots to be thankful for, I have no accompanying photographs.)

I like Thanksgiving.  It's often my favorite holiday:  a day of food and family.  This year, we're laying low and not visiting with anyone.  Not my usual way of celebrating - but I'm really happy to have a day to ourselves, with no pressure to be anywhere or do anything.

I am amused that every guinea pig person correctly guessed the number of poos.  I should have posted the original uncropped photo, which had a few more hard-to-find ones.

The Celtic Solstice top is done.  I like that it's done, I like how it looks.  Wouldn't it be neat if I got it completed by the winter solstice?  We'll see....

I like baking.  This is a good thing, since I plan on spending part of the day cooking up toffee and Christmas cookies.  Have you ever heard of Berger Cookies?  A coworker used to send some every Christmas.  They're addictive.  I found a recipe for them.

May you enjoy the holiday.  If you're not in the US, then happy Thursday!  Be sure to see what others are thankful for over at I Like Thursday at Not Afraid of Color.

Celtic Solstice Top

The top is done!  Look at it!  I'm thrilled.  It's flat.  The squares are all 9".  That never happens - my blocks always shrink.

The photo doesn't show it, but there's tons of loose threads all over.  I need to take some time to clean this up before moving on.

Self Cleaning Fleece and Giveaway

Around April Fool's day I often see posts on guinea pig forums about miraculous self-cleaning fleece.  Any guinea pig owner will tell you they are constantly sweeping hay and guinea pig poo out of the cage.  If someone ever invented fleece that could self-clean, they'd be rich!

I don't have magical poo-eating fleece, but the gecko fleece I have is amazing at camouflaging it.  The fleece doesn't hide the hay so much, but overall it looks cleaner than it actually is.  Can you find all the poos in the picture?

How about a contest?

I Like Thursday: Shiny

The week just flew by.  Maybe it was from all the dancing last week.  Perhaps the flurry of craziness at work (I solved a big problem with a fix that should. not. work.  But it does!  Go me!).  Regardless, it's Thursday - and I've liked a variety of things this week.

I like and am amused that my Christmas cactus has started to bloom, but only the ends that are under the lampshade (its hard to see there's five buds and a bloom under the lamp and not one bud elsewhere).  I'm not sure if it's the light they get every night, or because it shades the light on them during the day.  Maybe the combination?  So weird. 

I'm liking Cold Cereal, even though I've only finished the first chapter.  I'm reading it for ideas for this year's ornament for my nephew (I make him storybook characters).  Oh, I suspect I'm going to have fun with this.

Point. Set. Match... Maybe.

I should have realized when I picked this pattern that it has so many bulky points!  Added bonus - anything I did wrong with the small pieces is compounded as I use them in the larger blocks I've created.  I can see I improved as I went along; the chevron pieces are giving me the most problems.  On the plus side - the X blocks went together quite nicely.

The second block in Celtic Solstice is supposed to be diamond-shape. I've seen several quilts where chevrons were pointed in, so the blocks appeared star-shaped.  There's a part of me that wanted to follow the pattern like I'm supposed to, but Mom likes the stars with these colors.  I have to agree.  So star-shaped it is!  As it turns out, I accidentally ironed the seams on the pinwheel block backwards, but since my chevrons are going the other way all the seams line up nicely.  Whew! 

Trying Something New

We all are adjusting to a single pig household.

I hung the hammock in the cage last week, even though I have never seen Wedgwood use it.  When I placed her into it she immediately jumped out.  But look what I saw a day later - a pig in a hammock.  She's tried it out once or twice since then.  I wonder why she never used it while Boadicea was around.  I figured she was afraid or didn't know how to jump in.  Obviously she can!

The other new thing is learning to speak up.  Breakfast is pretty regular and she's good at demanding morning pepper.  But she hasn't quite got the hang of reminding us about dinner.  Boadicea would be sure to tell us it was dinner time if someone was in the kitchen after 5pm.  I didn't realize how much I keyed into that reminder.  Without it, Wedgwood sometimes doesn't get dinner until 8pm.  Speak up, pig!

I Like Thursday: Tea and Treats

It's Thursday - time to like some stuff!

I like that I got together with some crafting friends on Sunday.  We drank tea, gabbed and showed off our latest creations.  There was so many good things.

I loved the purple and teal carpenter blocks.  And isn't that sashiko (the navy blue with white stitching) pretty?  One friend brought a black, white and red quilt top.  She'll be quilting it soon.  It will look fantastic when it's finished!  And so many delicious treats.  I had lovely leftovers for two days.  Yum.

Birds of the Air

Well, these were more of an adventure than I anticipated.  First was the fun of trimming 124 HST down to 2".  I am so sick of trimming!!

These guys had another set of interesting instructions that assembled two blocks at once.  I had to read through it a few times before I got the hang of what I needed to do.  (Apple Pie Patchwork had the easier-to-understand of the instructions I found.)

I completed the first four Birds of the Air blocks with no problem, so I went into mass production.  Out of the next 28 I sewed together, 15 of them would not square to 3½".  Serious unhappiness.  I salvaged some of them by restitching the final diagonal seam a little narrower, but I wasn't thrilled with the results.  I had already cut the seams to ¼".  Hmph.

At least I discovered this before I sewed up the 124 pieces I need.  I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I was far more careful assembling the rest.  Which took time.  But my next batch of 32 came out with only one that needed to be restitched.  Yay!

I Like Thursday: Some Silliness

It's Thursday!  Time to share things I like with Not Afraid of Color's I Like Thursday.

I like Game Day - friends, food and games for an afternoon.  One of the games I really enjoyed is called Wild Man.  For some reason I remembered the name as Crazy Brother (because that's the way my brain works).  No one knew what I was asking to play at first!  It's a bidding game, taking tricks with a trump, like playing Hearts or Spades - but you don't play with a full deck.  That makes bidding a little tricky, and hilarity ensued.

The weather was so nice, the group decided to go on an extended hike first.  There was this rotted tree that fell across the path and I liked how the branch had rotted out.  My friend wanted me to take a photo of my boot in it (which was difficult to do - balanced on one foot while taking a picture of my other foot).  She decided she needed to take a photograph, so I shot a picture of her taking a picture of my boot.  I think I got the more entertaining photo.

Remebering Boadicea

Boadicea (originally named Goldie) was our Boxing Day gift for 2014.  It was one of the more entertaining meet-and-greets as I was closed in a kennel with Cannoli and Boadicea.  Boadi had been in the system for months; I had seen her pop up on Petfinder in at least two different shelters while pondering a friend for Cannoli.  I was rather excited to adopt her after falling in love with her photo.

The many loaves of Boadicea

She came with a bad habit of biting.  I discovered a cage-mate of hers (they'd been split up in another shelter) had the same issue.  But Boadi soon learned biting wasn't necessary here.  I've never had a guinea pig make herself at home as fast as Boadi did.  Within a week she was far more relaxed than Cannoli was.  She quickly took advantage of her new digs and established herself as the head pig.