Bookends

There is a good reason that I have been so very quiet for a few days. All week we were hoping and praying to be considered as the new adoptive home for a second black labrador. We have filled out paperwork and applications, taken Raven over to the shelter for a "meet & greet" introduction, paid hefty adoption fees (to my budget, $250 is a lot, but I know that some rescue agencies are even more), and spent lots of time being interviewed.

The Concord chapter of the SPCA

Raven in her red bandana during the meet & greet interview.

Hello to "Emma"

At last, the four year old spayed female named, "Emma" came home with us! She is delightful and just as sweet-tempered as Raven. I kept Raven in the red bandana and I put a light blue one on Emma.

The two dogs are getting along very well! I have taken Emma outdoors into the fenced dogyard on a leash only to ensure that she is polite to the 3 kittens. At first, she thought that she was supposed to chase them, so now we are doing some meet & greet with the kitties, too.
Emma must have come from a home that did not allow dogs up on the furniture because she is loathe to get up on the futon with Raven.

For now, I created a new bed for her over by the door that is rarely used and she fell right asleep, exhausted by all the new surroundings.

I love her to pieces already but I'm very careful to give Raven lots of extra pets so she doesn't feel displaced. Now I may need to read the 1815 Jane Austen book, "Emma,"  LOL!

Emma likes to follow me around the house and she can zip up and down the cellar stairs like lightening.
Speaking of going downstairs to my Quilt Cave in the cellar, do you remember that I had managed to misplace about 150 four-patches? I looked everywhere upstairs through all my stacks of rubble and no luck! I looked there because that was where I had last recalled seeing them.

Ahaah! I was too organized. I had placed them all into neat stacks inside plastic ziploc bags and put them into a basket right on the shelves DOWN CELLAR!!!!! Groan. Soon I'll be ready for the home, LOL!
Well, at least I found them, but I sure did feel foolish.

So having found them, I began working with them.

I am assembling them into the rows of a Fons & Porter scrappy throw called "Milky Way" that appeared in their June/July 2012 magazine. The units are very simple; 4 1/2" unfinished four-patches made from 2 1/2" strips or squares, and 4 1/2" HST's and a few plain 4 1/2" squares.

Now, doesn't that sound easy? Making the units was a snap. Ahhhhhhh, but assembling them into a tessellating design is quite tricky!
There are no instructions for assembling other than a referral to the diagram. Sigh. I posted the diagram on the wall in front of my machine and I need to squint at it to see it because it is so tiny and cramped. Ugh!

It goes incredibly slowly to make one 13 unit long row, and there are 17 rows to the center before the scrappy borders. But I'm making some steady progress and so far I'm able to do about 2 rows a day. It is important to join up a newly completed row onto the body of the quilt's center so that it can't get turned around or reversed!
Here are the seven rows that I have so far.

I just hope that my values of lights and darks are far enough apart so that the pattern reads well. I fear that those dreaded mediums will muddy things up!

So I leave you with one last picture of my beloved new "bookends," LOL!

Emma in blue; Raven in red.

 Happy sewing everybody!