I’m through with plain grey stockinette for a while so I had a poke through the stash to see what I had that was most unlike a sweater. This is another Victorian Christmas stocking on the left and another Ophidian on the right. I was hunting for the red beads when I found a full packet of brown ones so it seemed a good idea to look in the sock drawer to see if I had yarn to match. This is all from stash, the red beads came from a ripped project but I have no idea what I originally bought the brown ones for. Yarn selection had to wait until I was finished with this week’s big event, the one that had been derailed by my unplanned sweater finishing on Tuesday.

I’ve come clean before about my boxes full of quilt tops and at the time I did say that I thought that there were more of them somewhere. Whatever number I have, I now have one less. These are four inch paper pieced log cabin blocks made from the scrap boxes. I have two plastic boxes that live near the sewing machine that collect all the leftovers, edges trimmed off quilt backing and odd shapes straightened off yardage. I usually have to add some lights to the mix because there’s never enough of those in the boxes. You can add the theme from Jaws yourself, the shadow at the top left tells you that Something Is Coming (da dum, da dum, da dumdumdum)

It was a small quilt top so I was finished before the approaching menace inched close enough to drop his toy on it. On Monday I got about half of it quilted and on Wednesday I finished the quilting and sewed the binding on. I took the time to clean the machine properly, taking the bobbin race out and chasing out the fluff mice and it was time well spent. It’s needed cleaning for a while but because I sew for ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there it never seems worth the effort. Sewing is more of a pleasure when you’re not having to ignore the noises that the machine is making, the ones that shouldn’t be there that you don’t want to hear. Quilting this was a trip down memory lane because I kept seeing fabrics that I recognised, spotting the little pieces of fabric reminded me of the original project. That’s probably why it seemed to take no time at all, that and the fact that it was less than a quarter of the size of a full size quilt.

My last job on Wednesday night was to make two batches of muffins and then I could think about playing in the yarn drawers. It may not be a croquembouche but in some respects it is better because it will freeze and so you don’t need to eat it all at once.

.