Catching my breath... and slowing down

I made two new blocks for my Traditional Tuesday Sampler.  I am so glad I did that, and not just because of my perfectionist tendencies.  Using five browns and five pinks adds a textural quality to the log cabin blocks that was missing in my first attempts.  And I made sure to square the blocks after each go-round.  Click on the pics to enlarge them for a better view of the fabrics.  I used a couple of faves in them.  The brown with the criss-cross pattern?  That's a fabric from a Basic Grey collection, I bought in a layer cake pre-cut.  I loved that fabric so much, I went back and bought yardage. The other is the outside row of pink - it reminds me of fresh berries for some reason - it's a Thimbleberries tonal.

All my blocks to date.  Don't they look great?

On the radio today they mentioned the s-word.  Snow.  Not that they are forcasting snow - they're forcasting rain, but it is going to be so cold that the rain might just come down in flake form.  I know it's inevitable and it's even overdue (and it won't stay on the ground this time), but it felt like the proverbial second shoe dropping to the floor.  The almost manic and mysterious sense of speed that has been driving me for weeks now came to a screeching halt.

I think the rush to do a million things is a left-over from growing up on a farm.  September brought that sense of hurry to get everything done or lose it all.  Harvesting grain and picking up all the vegetables for canning from the family garden before the first hard frost - we none of us had time to rest much at this time of year.  It is so ingrained that I don't notice I'm doing it until it snows and then I stop and take a big breath.  So now I'm slowing down a little, forcing myself to slow down just a tiny bit, and breathe.

Now I know why I've been making so many strange mistakes these days. What's the old saying - haste makes waste.  I discovered that the two fabrics I pulled from the fling-it bag because I thought they were cotton... were in fact not cotton... which is likely why they were in the fling-it bag to begin with.  All it took was a hot iron to figure that out again - the unmistakable scent of polyester is still in my nose an hour later - yuck.  Back into the fling-it bag.

I dug out my box of four patches and sixteen patches, then sat down to leisurely think about what quilt patterns I would like to use them in.

And I'm going to put some time in hand stitching binding, again in a leisurely manner.