Joe P, Linda's quilt done, puffy things!

I found out on Saturday that our neighbor had died, so Sunday morning (10/22) I spent several hours writing a sympathy note, and going through my old blog for pictures of him to include in the notes for his sons. One of the best (I think) was taken at our New Year’s Day open house this year:

Joe was a wonderful neighbor and friend and he will be missed.

Then it was another hour spent trying to balance our checkbook….I’m sure the youngsters these days don’t do something as old school as that (and actually, I'm pretty sure some of my friends don't bother with it either), but I can’t help it….I still do it. The bad news is that our checkbook hasn’t balanced in MONTHS…and that drives me crazy!! Anyway, once again it didn’t balance, but this time the difference was $135.56….a really familiar number, but I couldn’t remember why. So, I did a search of my bank account for the last 18 months for that amount, and it was a payment for my secondary medical insurance at the end of last year!!! YAY AND HOORAY….success…and I finally got to draw that double line under my total, telling me that as of that point, the checkbook balanced!

Finally I got to do something fun and finished loading up Linda’s second quilt:

I set up the program, wound bobbins and kicked off the quilting. While it was stitching out, I started to work on new directions. BG is coming for a visit in April, and we have figured out what quilt pattern we are going to work on. I started to sketch out the block and write up directions (YUCK - quilt math....and high level quilt math at that!!):

And then I worked up a sample out of scraps, which showed me just how wrong my quilt math was!!! As well as showing that our darkest color shouldn'd be too dark, or it will blend in with the black (make a note BG!):

I sent the picture to BG and we both agreed that the strips (definitely the first, lightest one at least) were too wide.....so now we need to come up with plan "B"!!! PLUS...and this is the totally yucky part....these blocks need to be on point to work.....so now I have no idea how many to make for a king sized quilt...yet another thing to figure out :~(.

I worked on that until 3 PM when Pam stopped by:

She mentioned she might drop in on Sunday (that's for you Arizona Mary :~) since she left her shawl here during the Fiber Nutz meeting AND she absconded with one of my napkins! We sat and talked for 2-1/2 hours!!!!

Michael left for rehearsal at 3:30, and I finally made it to ALDI’s before 6 PM and did a massive shop and still made it home in the golf cart while it was light outside :~).

I continued to work on Linda’s quilt, and got it all done:

before Michael came home at 8 PM. He ate a good meal before he left….but I knew he’d need a little nosh once he came home again….so it was crab dip wrapped in crescent rolls for a little snack:

And 10 years ago…here’s what I was doing: https://foodandfiberfloozie.blogspot.com/2013/10/craft-fair.html

*** Whenever I have to make a choice between buns of steel or buns of cinnamon, I always choose the latter. ***