Beans, Binding, And Birds

I am still working my way through that bounty of dried beans from Cathy; I think we’ve eaten about half of them. I canned another 14 pints of red beans yesterday:

I also cooked a pork roast in the crock pot and shredded it. The pork and some of the beans—along with rice, chiles, and enchilada sauce—will be the filling for some tortillas for dinner tonight. Yum.

[You would think that that amount of food would be enough to feed two people for several days. You would be wrong. We might get one meal and enough for lunch the next day out of it. Feeding the husband is the equivalent of feeding three teenage boys.]

I made and attached binding to the Scrapper’s Delight quilt and started sewing it down last night:

The original quilt has black binding. I used royal blue on this one. I may have to move over to the couch to sew this down, however, because this quilt is too big to hold comfortably on my lap. I also spent an inordinate amount of time last evening trying to locate my favorite binding needle. It is thin and very sharp and just the right length. I need to go through my needle collection to see if I can find a few more like it.

I prepped a square in the Urban Chickens pattern. This is a lovely comb-bound book (25 pages) with nine different chickens. I decided to start with the one named Charm.

Each chicken is about 8” x 8”, which will provide a nice canvas for playing with lots of different stitches. The pattern includes lots of suggestions and illustrations. And yes, my chickens will be made out of wild, retina-burning colors.

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My lettuce-growing operation is now back on track thanks to the husband, who took apart a shelving unit and put it back together in such a way that I have room for two shelves of lettuce. He also assembled and hung the lights. Now I can seed the lettuce in the plugs and get it growing. I also got an e-mail from the farm store yesterday about the upcoming chick delivery schedule, which means deciding on what breed we want to get this spring. I am leaning toward White Orpingtons again. We usually get chicks mid- to late-March, which isn’t all that far away.

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I know I said I wanted to have the Noon and Night pattern ready to release in January. It is close. It will probably be another week or two. I would rather delay a few days than rush it out incomplete, and I’m still tweaking bits of it. Cobbles and Pebbles hopefully won’t be too far behind. I look around and see all the tasks competing for my attention and try not to get paralyzed. I’ve got a quilt design in my head that is screaming to come out, but devoting several hours to cutting and sewing to see if it will even work means that something else—LIKE THE TAXES—isn’t getting done. My schedule involves a lot of juggling. I wish I could focus on one thing at a time until it’s finished, but that’s not the way things work around here.