That's better.

The weekend between my hectic work schedule & the arrival of our guests, I managed to make some time to spend in my sewing room. Boy, did it feel good to sit down in front of my sewing machine! You, my cohort, know how really necessary it is for us to stitch.

Because I was still a bit frayed from work & a bit preoccupied in anticipation of company; I wanted some simple sewing. So I pulled out two long-time standbys: the plus blocks made with my parents' shirts & the flying geese made with Goodwill men's dress shirts.

My plus blocks got set aside in the push to finish the quilts for my brother & nieces. After their quilts were done & my plus fatigue had worn off, I got out the parts for my blocks & have been using them as leaders & enders for about a year now. There weren't many left to finish, so it was an easy push to get this top done. Now I am waiting for a nice weekend day for some outdoor basting. Soon, I, too, will have a Reva + Lee quilt!

Then there are the geese. The 'problem' with them has been that I didn't know how big this quilt was going to be. In the past, when I was working one project or another, Shug would ask me how big it would be. I would answer, "As big as it gets, I guess." I wasn't trying to be difficult, it's just that sometimes a quilt's size has to reveal itself to me. This was the case with the geese. A small wall quilt or something big enough for a queen size bed? I had more than a dozen shirts, so large was very possible. And I so enjoyed making the geese & joining them together. At first, I was putting the geese up on my design door, but when it outgrew the door, I just began sewing & letting chance do the designing. Now it is a finished top, too.

Simple math

1 + 1 + 1 = 3 finished quilts!

Nonplussed

Sorry. This post's title -- Nonplussed -- doesn't really fit. The dictionary says the word means confused or surprised. Although a second, informal North American definition is given as unperturbed, not bothered. (I suspect, by "North American", they do not really mean to include Canadians & Mexicans. It seems a uniquely United States of American thing to do -- take a word & through mass misuse, change it's meaning to nearly the opposite of its definition.)
Anyway, enough semantics.

I just wanted to update you on my Christmas + quilts.

One niece quilt is almost done, quilted & nearly all bound. I'm close to finishing the quilting on the one for my brother & the blocks for the other niece quilt are over half made. My quilt's status remains at the first 4 blocks I made. I suspect it would be a big mistake, but I'm kind of tired of + blocks & am thinking of putting them aside for a while, not finishing it with the group. Historically, this sort of behavior has meant that this is the quilt that does not get finished. So -- big sigh -- I will keep the parts at hand & will continue to plug away at them.

Come to think of it, maybe you are nonplussed -- maybe I am, too!