Sidetracked

Blissful four day weekend. Don't you just love holidays?? Ohh...
Making slow headway on the Double Four-patch, having backtracked as I told you. Now that I knew what to look for in the DFP block assembly, I don't want to TELL you how many times I almost put them together wrong again. What is the matter with me?! It occured to me that if I was hand piecing this quilt I'd have lots of time to discover I was sewing them together backwards. Handsewing takes time and that has it's avantages. Once during mini-group a friend of mine appliqued her block to her skirt. (!) But she didn't get very far before she discovered her mistake.

Meanwhile DH is off as well, working on a project of his own. He asked me if I had any heavy fabric, like canvas, that he could use for his lounge repair. I have very little fabric in my baskets and bins that doesn't qualify as quilting fabric, but I do have some. So I went into the old storage dresser in the garage to look. This dresser stores a variety of velvets for the day when my desire to make a crazy quilt strikes , a LARGE chunk of teal chamois fabric for a shirtdress I was going to make about a bizillion years ago, and my vintage muslins. This is what I found when I opened one of the drawers.
Now this isn't the first time that mouskiwitz has made a home in this drawer, but since we got a cat seven years ago, the drawer hasn't seen many mousy visitors of late. I couldn't remember the last time I was in this dresser, so he (or she?) had had a good long time to shred all that yummy vintage cotton and make a nest. And the bird seed? I'd wondered why the two bags of seed I'd bought last summer had emptied so fast.

So instead of being able to work on the DFP quilt blocks, I cleaned out the mess. It was vile. The best cottons were full of holes and soaked with urine, there were droppings throughout and the whole thing smelled like a hamster cage. I considered throwing the entire mess away but I just couldn't bring myself to toss those vintage fabrics.

This piece is a fun print circa 1950 that has small black and red and gray polka dots all over it. It's a perfectly good four yard chunk of 36 inch wide fabric; expect for the regular holes chewed in the fold!




Over an hour later they were all on the line blowing in the breeze. Maybe I'll permanently install a mousetrap in that dresser.