Thursday, July 11, 2019

Catchin Up

Just before the July 4th holiday, I was in Florida, Cape Canaveral/Cocoa Beach area for a meeting with my business coach.

Direct flights to anywhere are an unusual thing out of the Syracuse airport, so when I saw one, Syracuse to Orlando, I grabbed it. No matter that I had to get up around 4 am to catch the early flight.

That also means I got in to Florida early enough to do a short tour of the Kennedy Space Center.

I have never been there before, and wow! I highly recommend visiting there if you're in the area, especially if you have kids in your party.

It's all the thrill of Disney World, without the rides and the fairy tales!



Real-life heroes are available to meet-and-greet. And the exhibits pull you into the awesomeness of space exploration. This is the main entrance to see the space shuttle Atlantis. Holy cow! Amazing stuff!

Even though I was there on business, you can't go to the 'beach' without actually going to the beach!

As always, early morning is my favorite time before the heat and crowds.

This is just after sunrise. The storm off in the distance kept out of the way on this particular morning, but we did have our fair share of tropical (rainy) weather as the weekend went on.



No trip to the beach is complete without some local flora and fauna. . . this great blue heron was keeping an eye on a beach fisherman just a few feet away. I think he was hoping for [a part of] the day's catch. I'm not sure the fisherman had the same idea. Empty lures, at least while I was watching, disappointed both hopefuls.



Cocoa Beach is very much a vacation spot, even though we were there 'working hard!' We gotta eat, and we managed to find some pretty good grub along the space coast.

This is Carton Brown, of Occasional Occasions Catering by Carlton (Atlanta GA), one of my colleagues in attendance at the meeting. I hear he makes a mad savory cheesecake, but right now he's more intent on that stack of savory ribs for lunch!



Back at home, I was back at making these stitchery blocks for this crazy bordering process I'm developing.

I've talked about this project before and it's progressing nicely, but there are 24 blocks! I'm working on #12!

I started on this pattern series from Erica Michaels, and created this border treatment as an experiment.



As I was working my way through the alphabet blocks, (J is shown, K is finished), I realized that if I want this to be a cohesive quilt eventually, I'd better start planning a bit.

So I grabbed all the blocks that are finished, and headed to the Ford Underground to have easy access to my fabric stash.

I then laid out A-K, some blocks still in progress.



Then envisioned the rest of the quilt block colors, taking into consideration the block subject matter (A=acorn, B=butterfly, C=castle, etc - I didn't want to have a purple acorn, for example) and the eventual 24-block quilt layout.

And selected fat quarters for the remainder of the blocks.



Then, since this might take a while, and I don't want my fabric selections to get scrambled into another project, I labeled each block by letter with a piece of paper pinned to the fat quarter or scrap fabric.



Which left me with a pretty weird arrangement of colors for the blocks-to-be-made.

They don't look like they'll go together in this stack, and I may change some out as I go.

But I now have a clearer picture of where I'm going. Perhaps 'clear' isn't the right word, but I have a plan.

And I think the weird combination will work out fine!



Now that each block has a fabric 'theme,' as I pull out the next one to work on, L in this case, I can choose the floss colors that pull in the stitching and the fat quarter color.

And I have a bit of confidence that all the purple blocks won't be stuffed into one corner of the quilt.

Sometimes I can't get away from the tidy-butt in me!


Happy Stitching!
Joan

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