That weekend it rained

 Not much to talk about today.  Rob is still working to get the house ready for the work being done.  I'm spending as much time in the garden as I can.  But, it's been so dang hot.  It just saps the energy out of us, so I'm catching up on my quilting inside and we're watching a lot of afternoon TV.  

This weekend, I worked on quilting all those small spaces I had skipped around when quilting the echoing lines in the center of the arc quilt.  They're small, they take a lot of time, and leave a half dozen knots to bury in each one.  They were a good thing to skip and I'm glad I was able to knock them all out in one weekend.  You'll have to look past that stray gray thread.  There's a lot of that happening, but I'm trying not to use the lint brush on it yet, but there are random wool fibers everywhere and every piece of thread that I've dropped in the studio gets stuck to that piece of black fabric....like it's threadnetic or something.    

There are sections like the one above where the larger echo work fills part of the space.  And, there are sections like below where all three segments had to be filled the same way.  

You may not see this quilt for a while because the next step is to add 3/8" circles all the way around the outside of the arcs.  That's going to take a while.  A long, long, long while.  They go so slow.

Here's another of my quilting tips that I learned somewhere along the way.  When I'm doing dense quilting like this, I don't stop to fix every mistake or all I'll do is fix mistakes.  I move forward, unless it's a really bad mistake.  I'll pick out a really bad mistake and do it again, but the little errors, I just move on by.  If I can find it at the end, when the other quilting is done, then I'll fix it.  Most of the time, the additional quilting will cover the mistake.  Out of the hundreds of little errors made in a large quilt, I generally only need to fix a dozen or so of the most obvious ones at the end.

There is not much happening in the garden.  It's too hot and dry.  All I can do is keep it watered, but Mother Nature gave me Saturday off by bringing us a heavy rain shower that lasted about an hour, early on Saturday morning.  It surely did more than my little sprinklers could have done.  But, there's not much in bloom out there.  So, I'm focused on cleaning up some of the spots that got some work in the spring but not much.  This is an area in transition (you can tell by the random bricks still sitting around).  I've tried so many things in this spot, next to the greenhouse.  This went from a shade garden, when it turned out not to be a shady spot, and now it's a succulent garden, full of small pots of succulents that enjoy the morning sun and can take the shade in the afternoon heat.  The impatiens were supposed to go somewhere else, but it turned out to be too shady and they wouldn't bloom, so for now, here they sit, in front of my bench.  

   

Sadly enough, that's about all that's going on...well, except we picked new light fixtures for outside the house.  We really like these and spent a lot of time making sure we were getting exactly what we wanted.  The gray paint under it is the chosen color.  We had chosen a paint chip from the Behr line and this weekend, we needed to transfer that to the Sherwin-Williams line color palette.  The first SW paint chip we found was called Pussy Willow.  We both agreed that we were not asking our painter to paint our house pussy willow gray.  But, that is a new name and fortunately, we found the same color in an older color wheel for them and it's called Dorian Gray.  That's much better.  The white on the door frame is not a true white.  It's a slightly purple white and it goes great with the gray.     

One day, we'll get this project finished, but we're on hold right now as the company that makes the windows has been hacked by ransomware and they're not able to fill our order right now, so we're waiting for the windows.  We don't know how long that will take.  But, we're not deterred.  We are looking forward to the day this work is done and the only drawback to the delay is that our house is currently painted about 7 colors.  The neighbors will just have to get over it.  

-------------

The republican convention is going to happen this week.  The republican platform is one item.  Support trump.  That's it.  He's going to speak all four nights.  The only other speakers they could get are his family and paid staffers and Nikki Haley, who may have sold her soul to trump for far less than it was worth.  Tiffany trump, who has kept her head out of the light for so long beat out Moscow mitch for a speaking spot.  Even the ever supportive lady g isn't getting to speak.

Imagine people continuing to support the republican party when the only thing they're voting for is to prop up the dictator wannabe so he can continue his campaign of hate and corruption and the destruction of our whole way of life.  I can't account for the evangelicals who are happy every time he takes the name of the lord in vain.    

It's going to be a stark contrast with the DNC last week, where there are lofty goals of equality and all of us taking care of one another and rebuilding our damaged nation.  

Oh, and bye-bye Kellyanne.  We will not miss you.  

Everybody have a good week.

Lane