First Finish of 2022

 The baby quilt is a finish!

The minky backing looks good with the front I think. I have enough of all the fabrics except the border fabric and the purple to make another baby quilt. I have a little bit of the border fabric left, just not enough to play a major role in making another quilt. The purple I only started with a fat quarter, so anything left from that is already in the scrap user system. 

I should be working on the other deadline quilt, but I needed a break. DH's work travel plans were cancelled at the last minute, but we did get to do his birthday dinner with some of our kids and their families, so that's good. 

I finished the blocks for clue one of the Ruby Jubilee mystery in Quiltmaker magazine. I just received the magazine with clue two in it, so I'll have to get those blocks cut out. Since I'm using men's shirts, there are a lot of stripes and plaids. I'm not usually a fan of sampler style quilts, but the limited color palette and an overabundance of blue men's shirts made me want to try this one. I easily have more than twice the number of blue shirts than any other color. I only buy blue shirts at the pay by the pound Goodwill stores, if I'm choosing shirts at a regular thrift store I avoid blue since I have so many, but I hunt for pink, yellow, orange and purple especially. I'll grab other colors that are marked down too, but I am pretty cheap when it comes to buying men's shirts for quilting, and $2 is my upper limit per shirt. Even at thrift stores it's hard to get shirts for that price anymore, everything has gotten so expensive! 

I've been cutting up my stash of shirts that don't read as one color. I've worked on them and put them away multiple times already. In fact, I put them away today, because I'm watching three of the grandkids tomorrow, and I don't need rotary cutters out and tempting them. I try to put away everything sharp and close the door to the sewing room when my grandkids are here. I'll get back to cutting them soon, and happily I've got almost half the shirts I want to cut up cut into at least strips. I have several patterns in mind for those shirts, so I'm cutting strips in the sizes that will work with those quilts. I can always supplement shirts that do read as one color, which I'm not working with right now, aside from the blue and neutral shirts for the Ruby Jubilee mystery. For the most part I am just cutting the largest strips I need first, then figuring out which other sizes I can get from from what's left. My stash of shirt strings is growing quickly, so I'll have to work on a string quilt or two later this year. Since I stopped saving 1.5" strips, I'm considering anything between 3/4" wide and not wide enough to get a 2" strip from a string. 

Today I dug into my 2.5" strips and cut more for a leader/ender project. I realized the project was looking very blue, and I needed some other colors since it's supposed to be a very scrappy quilt. I did get one row of my next deadline quilt together today, but I was more into cutting than sewing today. 

If any of you have any good ideas on how to discourage cats from hanging out on your yard let me know. I have a pretty serious cat allergy, and it seems like two cats have moved into our yard. The larger one has a collar, the smaller one doesn't, but because of my allergy I can't exactly go catch the bigger one and see if there's an address on the collar. The smaller one I think is feral. They look just alike, so the smaller one could be offspring of the bigger one, but it's not a tiny kitten, more adolescent sized. I keep trying to talk DH into getting a couple dogs, but he's not in favor of that right now. They have been spending all day in our yard for the last couple weeks,  so I don't think the bigger cat belongs to one of the neighbors. We don't have any food out there for them, and we don't even have bird feeders , so that's not attracting them. We do live in the desert, so I'm sure there's plenty of rodents out there for them. If we have to we'll go the live trap route, but I was kind of hoping there was an easy deterrent I'm not aware of.