A terrific Saturday

It's now 10:01 and I need to head to bed, but I wanted to write another post first. What a wonderful Saturday I had! Didn't get to sleep in much as Fred was up a wee bit after 6:00 a.m. getting ready to head to the golf course. Usually he's very quiet but between him and the dog and the lights in the hall I was awake by 6:15. I'd really had enough sleep so I got up then. Caught up on a lot of blog reading, had hot tea with milk and breakfast, then headed to the sewing room.

I looked at the It's a Wonderful Life quilt and realized I didn't like the fall border all that much either. I decided immediately that ideas needed some time to appear, so I folded it all up and put it on the shelf to "age" for a week or two while I decide what I want to do. The August installments of the Jan Patek mystery and Lori Smith's Heirloom Stitches arrived on Friday Thursday, so I've decided to skip August and call these the September installments. That way I won't feel behind. I set them at the end of the cutting table to work on either later this weekend or in the next week or two. I realized what I really wanted to do was take care of all my new fabric. But first I wanted to move my new featherweight cabinet into the room.

In the first picture you can see I put the cabinet against the wall just where my old one was. It was great - much smaller than the old table. But my chair didn't fit under it - the seat was too wide, so it pretty much blocked the "aisle" on that side of the cutting table. So I brought a chair down from the small oak table in the family room. That worked but had no support for my back. So I hemmed and hawed a bit, wondered what to do, and suddenly thought about turning it sideways. I couldn't do that with the other table because it was much too large. You can see in the second picture that this was a perfect solution. I have lots of room to move on that side of the cutting table, and lots of room behind my chair. No more backing into all the cubes in the middle of the room! And the chair actually faces the TV I have in the room! What a novel concept. That TV has no antenna and I've not connected it to cable, but it has a built in DVD player so I watch a lot of movies while I sew. The third picture shows the cabinet from the other side. See how convenient it's now going to be to reach stuff like my boxes of thread that I keep in the cubes. I love this new set up - I can hardly wait to try sewing with it!

Now it was about 10:00 a.m., and my daughter arrived for our "Starbucks Date". We went from there across the street to Costco so I could get some food and leave some class pictures from work for developing. I got a couple new DVD's that I hope to watch this weekend. Akeelah and the Bee - I'm really looking forward to seeing this as I missed it in the theatre. The other is a two part HBO presentation called Elizabeth I starring Helen Murren and Jeremy Irons - two of my favorite actors. I love all books and movies about the Henry VIII-Elizabeth I period of English history.

We came home, I got the food put away, and started separating all the new fabric into color piles for prewashing. Two loads of browns, three loads of creams and lights, and two loads of reds. I've got all the browns and most of the creams ironed and put away. The reds are still on the floor for pressing in the morning. I still have the blue, pink and green piles to wash. I love pressing the fabric when it comes damp out of the dryer. It allows me to become intimately acquainted with the color and pattern of each one, and starts my mind spinning with ideas. I'm putting all the new Mistletoe Manor fabric into a big basket as I press it - I can hardly wait to start cutting out my Christmas quilt! While pressing I listened to a Tony Hillerman Jim Chee-Joe Leaphorn audio book. I was going to listen to the Mariner game also, but it wasn't on due to Washington State Cougar football on the radio. So I kept listening to the mystery - I have only one disk left for tomorrow morning.

Had a great dinner of spinach salad and chicken enchiladas both from Costco - a perfect easy dinner - with a glass of white zinfandel. Then back to pressing, fitting in more blog reading in between pressing stints. I'm hoping to get all the rest of the fabric pressed and put away tomorrow so I can actually start sewing. But first I'll go upstairs in the morning while it's still cool and quilt some on Broken Dishes. I'd like to get the quilting finished by Monday evening.

A wonderful, perfect, mostly quilty today is my gratitude for this evening.