Post Christmas post

We’ve heard from the body shop, and given good (ie, warm) weather, the truck may be ready to go as early as Thursday. If it is too cold for the paint to cure properly overnight, the mechanic is willing to come in on Saturday so we can get the truck then. Either way, it looks like we are a go for the Keys, whether on time for our reservation or just for the fishing trip. This is very good news; there for a while it looked like we’d be scrubbing the Keys trip altogether. That said, I was not prepared to see that this leaves us three days to get ready to go (where did the time go?!?)

Today is dedicated to doing stuff around the house; I am taking down the tree and finishing up kitchen cleaning, looking at our route to the Keys and making tentative hotel plans. With the tighter schedule, MIL and I will drive down together in her van and make our overnight stops at hotels. J will take the trailer and the cats and overnight at rest stops. MIL and I may arrive at the Keys a day before the trailer, so that she can have a non-driving day to rest up before the fishing trip.

Tomorrow and Wednesday will be schlepping stuff out to the trailer and packing, checking everything out so that we’re all set to go whenever we get the green light. I will be very happy once we’re actually in Florida. Sometime in all this I need to look at places to stay after the stay on Kings Key, but we should have 8 to 10 days down there and that can be done once we are on site if need be.

Christmas was actually very nice indeed; we exchanged small gifts, talked to relatives on the phone, and generally relaxed. I let the mail pile up at the forwarding service so we got nearly all our cards at once, and spent a pleasant lunchtime going through them. It was like opening presents. A lot of people commented on our change of address, so clearly I owe some followup correspondence.

Now we start ramping up; the lists have come out and been revised. It will all work out!

Fussy Cutting Acorns

Posting weekly has really helped with making progress on this block. The inner motif is finished but for embroidery: the birds’ beaks, eyes and legs will be embroidered, and perhaps the “moss” on the moss rose buds. I’m of two minds on that; I like the way it looks plain, and I don’t know if the embroidered moss would be additive. On the other hand it would be a way to hide the overlarge stitches (ok, perhaps only large to an appliqué-er) on the one bud. The acorns are all attached, and they are getting their caps. I am still pondering the green of the oak leaves for the outer wreath; it may come down to cutting mock-ups and laying them out all around the wreath before making the final decision. Part of the problem is that acorns are Fall, which leans to making the oak leaves brown/gold, but the center branch is Spring or at latest Summer, which means the oak leaves ought to be green. Plus the earlier thinking that the oak wreath should be the dark frame to the light center branch… Clearly more pondering is needed.

In the meantime I can sew on acorn caps, using the perfect fabric from a color/pattern perspective. Unfortunately it’s also somewhat thick, at least when working at this scale, and prone to fraying, so the seam allowances are actually stuffing the caps somewhat. It’s a neat effect but a PITA to stitch.

The acorn fabrics worked out just right; the ginko leaf pattern works splendidly for the glossy nut and the dark brown tapestry fabric adds texture to the cap. I fussy-cut both; pretty much everything I do any more is fussy-cut, sometimes even pieced blocks The moth-eaten fabric that results always makes me laugh. Our quilt guild had a speaker who was a piecer, and she was talking about using fabric wisely with minimal waste. She said: “Applique-ers! Now they’re just crazy! They’ll take a perfectly good piece of fabric and cut a hole right in the middle!” I laughed so hard at that, it’s so true!