The Annual Cabin Fever Post

Tomorrow is the first of March. In my head, I know that it’s going to be a while before I can work in the garden—this is Montana, after all, where 3” of snow in June is not unheard of—but I equate March with spring and I am starting to get a bad case of cabin fever. In years past, I have taken a trip somewhere. Even just going to Portland or Seattle in February reminds me that winter doesn’t last forever. I wasn’t able to do that this year. The husband and I watched videos on YouTube last night that someone had taken at the summit of Snoqualmie Pass over the past couple of days. Despite being a major east-west highway (I-90), the pass has been closed almost as much as it has been open recently. This isn’t the snowiest season on record for that area, but it’s in the top 10. The Cascades have been getting hammered with snowstorms.

[I went over Snoqualmie in a snowstorm during the second week of April, which is why I don’t take the snow tires off my car until May.]

In any case, I am getting twitchy. I want to clean the house (the dust! the dog hair!) and take a few loads of stuff to the thrift store, but there is no point in doing that until I can clean out the storage container and load the car on a driveway that isn’t a skating rink.

I shouldn’t be designing new quilts, either—I have patterns to work on and already-pieced tops to finish. And Tuesday marks a year since my MIL died. We all miss her and feel her absence keenly.

I did make a quilt block yesterday. I couldn’t help myself.

PurpleGreenStar.jpg

EQ8 calls this block Four Crowns, for what that’s worth; quilt block names are fluid and this block has a number of variations. These are my thoughts about it. If you have some, drop them in the comments.

  • I like this color/fabric combination. Do I like it enough to make a quilt out of it? Are three colors enough? I spent some time making little HSTs in pink and also in yellow to see how they looked in the corners instead of the green flower print. In the end, I kept coming back to the green. (There was a dark purple in the fabric pull, but the design I am contemplating has alternating “chain” blocks and I was going to use the dark purple in those blocks.)

  • I am not crazy about quilts with white backgrounds. We have too much dirt and dust here for quilts with white backgrounds.

  • The block is not hard to piece, for all that it has a lot of units. I could probably stand to make a couple dozen of them.

  • I am not much for matchy-matchy quilts, and this has that feel to me. The block would lend itself well to scrappiness, I think, with a few rules governing color placement so that it doesn’t end up looking like an incoherent free-for-all.

So we’ll see. I may have scratched this itch sufficiently with one block. After I finished the block, I cleaned my sewing area. I put everything away except what I need to quilt the tops and finish the Sandhill Sling. I am trying to keep myself from getting distracted by new projects. Discipline.

I’ve been working on my Urban Chicken embroidery project in the evenings, alternating with a prayer shawl. As soon as I get about 8” of the shawl done, I’ll put it in a tote bag and leave it at church as the new emergency knitting project.