Good Week

 This has been a good week. Nothing tremendous happened, but no disasters either. I got a little sewing done, but not a ton. I got to see grandkids twice this week, and that was great. One day I was babysitting five of the grandkids, and it was the easiest babysitting gig ever! All the kids were fantastic! 

Yesterday I got to hang out with my sister, we went shopping and out to lunch just like in the pre-Covid days. We even had the adventure of driving to multiple stores looking for the starch I needed, and the wool roving she needed. I bought eight cans of starch once we found it, so I should be good for a while. She found the roving at Michael's. Joann's doesn't sell it, at least the one near us doesn't, we tried there first. 

Father's Day was ridiculously hot, so hot I didn't want to heat up the house cooking, and DH didn't want to grill. One of the local chains has really good pizza, and we found out that some of locations have giant pizzas. The location near us doesn't offer that, so we didn't know. They have some of the best GF pizza around, so DH got his own (much smaller) pizza. We decided to see what the grandkids thought of family sized pizzas.

Their reactions were funny. The three year old insisted she couldn't eat that much. The eleven year old took that as a challenge and ate three giant pieces. The six year old said she likes medium pizzas better. The eight year old just took pictures with the old camera I had given him. 

We made homemade peanut butter ice cream for dessert. The paddle to our ice cream freezer broke shortly after we turned it on, and I had to send DH out hunting down another one. He couldn't find another 6 qt freezer like we had, so now we have two 4 qt freezers. I had made enough ice cream base for 6 qts, so one 4 qt freezer wasn't going to do it. That's OK, we used to have two ice cream freezers anyway, so we could make two flavors at once for get togethers, and now we'll be able to make two flavors next time. I have really good recipes for vanilla, coffee, and peanut butter ice cream. I hate chocolate ice cream, and some of my kids don't like fruit ice creams, so we don't make either of those. I'm looking for a good butter pecan or pistachio ice cream recipe, so if you've got one, please share.

So what sewing did I do in the past week?

All of the stripsets I made a while back are cut down and re-sewn into blocks now. If you cut the stripsets with one ruler you get the block on the left, use a different ruler and you get the block on the right. My main project was the blocks on the right, but I can usually get one or two cuts for the other block from each stripset. I had a set amount of strips I wanted to use up, and I didn't count anything along the way. Now that I have blocks, I can figure out what I want to do with them. I ended up with 49 of the smaller blocks, and 98 of the larger ones. I'm thinking I may end up cutting more fabric and making more blocks, but I don't have to decide now, as there's no deadline for these. They are being set aside for now. I'm debating several layout options for the smaller blocks.

I got several more blocks done for the king sized wedding quilt, and that will be my main focus today. I also started sewing up some more non-deadline blocks. I'm keeping all my deadline projects in the sewing room, and playing with some non-deadline stuff in the living room. Most of my efforts are aimed at the deadline stuff, but a bit of sewing for play helps keep me happy, so I allow the time for that. 

The decluttering continues. It's getting harder now that the numbers of the date are higher.  For today's declutter I got rid of more than 24 things for the 24th. I went through all my hair stuff, barrettes, combs, hair ties etc... and got rid of what I never use, including the tin I stored it all in. Now I'm down to one small bin in a drawer of my nightstand of just my favorites. When June is over, we'll donate the pile I've accumulated over the last month of donate-able stuff, other declutter items were either given away, or went into trash or recycling. In July I'll just enjoy my less cluttered house!