Happy June! (or Good Lord I'm Sick Of Politics!)

 

After You-Know-Who's inauguration in January sh*t started happening.  Every morning I was glued to the news sites, my jaw dropped, often in shock saying "honey - did you see this???".  I kept thinking that once Trump got that (whatever executive order he'd just signed) out of his system things would quiet down and politics would go back to normal.  But no!  There was more!  Every single day!  

After four+ solid months of this I've decided to give it a rest.  The USA is not my country, and I cannot do anything to effect any kind of change down there.  I made a committment to myself back in 2016 when he was elected the first time that I would not travel there, and that still stands.  My two personal biggest issues are their free-for-all gun laws, and the steady withdrawal of women's rights.  But there are so many more drastic changes in progress that I can't even keep track any more.

I'm still planning to read the news over my coffee & breakfast in the mornings, but no more wasting my life until noon - which is what I have been doing.  Stupid, giving up my time to keep track of him and his antics.  WE'RE DONE, DONALD.  I'M DIVORCING YOU.  YOU'RE FIRED! 😆

The quilt above was a challenge for TWO guilds.  The Binbrook Guild had a President's Challenge to work with circles.  Any kind of circles.  Circle quilt, circle fabric, appliqued circles, pieced circles, quilted circles, whatever.  Maker's choice.  The Caledonia Guild let us buy a 5" strip of fabric for $2 that had to be used in any quilt with a max perimeter of 80" (I think 80"??).  80" would be too small for my intended space, so I played along anyways and simply disregarded that rule. 😯  The fabric is the mottled turquoise/green used for the appliqued leaves.  

The design was copied from a Dover copyright-free book on Art Deco designs.  I'm pretty happy with it, it looks nice hanging on the wall.  I didn't win the challenge in Caledonia, since I admittedly did NOT adhere to the rules but that's ok - I wanted to play anyways.

That was finished in February.  Next up are the March finishes:

These are the two small leader/ender quilts I've been working on for several (!) years,

Cute labels:  

Here's a Disappearing 9-Patch that took me several years to get around to finishing.  I don't like anything about this quilt except maybe the border. 🙈

The Super Bowl Sunday quilt is finished. I always like the way these turn out.

In April I made a big bag to carry a Tupperware Cake Carrier, as a birthday gift...both the Cake Carrier and the bag.

I also made a BARN QUILT.  Diane (beach girl, you know) made arrangements for us to have an early Beach Day at her place.  We took a class with KADI BARN QUILTS (check 'em out on facebook).  I still have to hang mine - I think it's going on the wall of the front porch.  Maybe this coming week.

In May I managed to get this little quilt pieced.  It's mostly from fabric donated by a customer and will end up going to the women's shelter with my other donation quilts later this year.  The pigs-on-motorcycles border fabric is from my stash. Cute.

There's also been a lot of this in May...

I'll close out this post with two of my favorite memes this year.

Super Bowl Sunday!

 First - the January completion.  This is the top I pieced in the fall up in Tobermory.  It's ready for a label & the washing machine.

I'm very happy with the way it turned out.  And I used a new-to-me panto which I'm also pretty happy with.

This month I'm working on this.  There will actually be TWO of these.  It's a leader/ender project that I've been poking away at for a couple of years, and I finally finished all the blocks.  98 of them.  Those half-square centers are cutoffs from a baby quilt I made for my friend's daughter.  Setting is 7 x 7 blocks, and they're 7" each, so both of the finished quilts will be approx 48 x 48.

Now for today...I wait ALL YEAR for this.  The lasagne is in the oven and the salad is made (no thanks to me - DH made that).

Here's my setup:

DH will be sitting on the couch, watching the game.  I'll be stitching during the game, and watching the commercials and the half-time show.  The noise of the sewing machine makes him turn the volume up on the tv, so the workaround is a little sound barrier (which is normally my small design wall). Here's a closeup with a couple of descriptors:

Not shown - the martinis.  It's still a bit early for that but don't worry - my setup is within arms-reach of the bar. 😁  Apparently the (ahem, cough cough) leader of the free world will be at the game.  If I have to look at him very much I may end up a little drunker than I originally planned.  I've been so angry at the United States since January 20th that for a few days I couldn't even think straight.  Anyhow - no more air time for him here...going to find my shot glass.

December sewing & today's pop-quiz

 I was asked to make a Christmas table runner.  This was pretty easy to do, using my 60 degree ruler and 1.5m of border print fabric.

I cut two 10" swaths along the length - if you look you'll see there is waste fabric * in between and along the top because the swaths need to be identical sections of the print.  Using the 60 degree ruler, cut triangles.  This makes an 'uppy' and a 'downy' set of triangles.  You can see from the finished piece above how to put them together. 

* we all know there's no such thing as waste fabric, ha ha ha

I also finally made myself a new purse.  The old one was at the point of being embarassing, it was so worn.

Pockets ring the inside of the bag.  I've stitched these into the appropriate size to accommodate all the junk that we think we need to carry around every day.  Like:  who would dare to go out without their emergency binder clip?  weirdo

TODAY'S POP QUIZ

Today's pop quiz is brought to you by the Canadian government.  What follows are the comments made by some of our political well-knowns (aka political leaders) in regards to Justin Trudeau's resignation.

The game is to figure out who said what.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

My personal opinion on these comments is:

1 & 2 - mean-spirited

3 - a neutral remark but at least it's polite

4 - apparently responding to a different question.  Hellooo...?

5 - what you should say to someone (and I mean any politician) who has spent the last ____ (insert some length of time) in government

Whatever.  No one cares what I think.  Here is the newspaper article with the pop-quiz answers, from today's Hamilton Spectator.

More of my opinion (that no one actually cares about)...Pierre Poilievre is the worst.  Right up there with Donald Trump.  P.P. wants us to think we're living in a dystopian nightmare ("dark chapter", "break the country").  DJT wants to suck us into his realm of gun violence and everybody working their way towards the bottom, except for his mega-billion dollar buddies.  See the disgusting comment that P.P. made when Charles Angus annouced that he would be leaving Ontario politics (Hamilton Spectator 4/17/24):

As far as Jagmeet Singh's comment, also being mean-spirited: IMO he took excellent advantage of the collaboration between the Liberal party and the NDP and got some very well-received legislation passed.  But now, does he think that if he acts like a prick too maybe he'll gain more popularity?

And Doug Ford's comment?  I guess there were none of his cronies involved, so he didn't know what was going on.

I have to confess here - I DO like Chrystia Freeland.  (Not as much as I love Elizabeth May, but still.)  Yes, I find her a little tedious, but she's one smart cookie.  I was glad to see that Chrystia's comment was polite and expressed gratitude - which is what a 'normal' person would do when their remarks are going to be preserved for a very long time.