Stringing along!

I have a new camera - yahoo! Thursday we stopped at Staples and I found a small pocket camera that was in my very limited price range. Tonight is the first time I've used it. I think it will do just fine.

Well, the weekend is about over and I didn't leave the house. Actually, I haven't been out since Friday morning when I surprised myself by being able to go to Aqua Fit. But, by lunch time the old brain disorders decided to rear their ugly heads and that was that. Hubby hates the cold weather and he didn't want to go anywhere anyway. However, I did get a lot accomplished in spite of the pain, or actually, I guess it was because of the pain. I absolutely refuse to take strong pain killers to cope with the pain. Two Tylenol 3 only takes the edge off the pain for a couple of hours and it's right back and those things upset my digestive system - to put it politely - so I haven't had one of those in over 10 years. I would have to take narcotics to actually get rid of the pain and A) I'm very likely allergic to them as I am to most things and B) I've seen people on these and they are in a complete fog and then addicted to them. No thank you.  If the pain is just moderate like it was this weekend I find the best way to cope with it is to keep busy - with easy tasks that are not noisy, in even temperature and not complicated. I usually hide when I'm like this in my "lower studio" (aka the basement) because I can make cards or scrapbook and if I make a mistake I just toss it into the recycle bin and move on - no picking out stitches. It was too cold in my "lower studio" because of the very cold cold snap we are having (yesterday was the coldest day ever recorded for March 26th - Brrrrr), so, anyway, I decided to quilt. Sometimes I don't even like the noise from the sewing machine so I just cut out fabric so this time I did both off and on.

First thing I did was dig into a bag of Christmas fabric from a friend's stash. She wants me to cut out pieces to make a scrap quilt to be auctioned off at our Christmas dinner meeting in November. I have lots of time but why wait til the last minute? I found enough to get the pieces I need for the pattern I picked out and cut out some more strips for another project.

Then I worked on some of my own stuff. I decided to put the small strips to use that I've been saving. These are leftovers from trimming other strips to size. 

This is one of the blocks I made.

Ignore the little white patch on the dark blue strip. It's just a piece of fluff that I didn't see when I took the picture. This is a 6-1/2" square and it they strips are sewn onto a light coloured fabric square - called the foundation. I cut the foundation piece about 7" square, sewed the strips on, pressing each one after sewing it, and then trimmed the blocks down to 6-1/2" I have 40 of them completed and about 60 more partly done. What am I going to do with these you non-quilters might be asking.  Well, picture four of them together, like this:

This makes a 12-1/2" square and I will then sew them in rows to complete the quilt. No picture for the completed quilt yet. I haven't got that far so stay tuned!