If there were characters named Whiny and Coughy, I'd be channeling them too, but not wine-y OR coffee. This nasty cold, that has had me mostly couch-bound since the end of February, makes coffee taste bitter, and the wine hurts my mouth. Even chocolate holds no interest right now. Of all the times to be completely disinterested in the things that comfort me!
My
robe quilt has been my constant companion, and Wraith will even snuggle with me on the couch while I'm under it. Normally he doesn't cuddle, so that was a nice treat. Of course, he's probably just waiting for me to be done with it so he can go back to claiming it as his own.
He's been putting in squatter's time to claim this new one as his own as well. Does he realize there's another QI staking the same claim?
Today I felt energetic enough to finish the quilting of the outer border of this bowtie snowball quilt. I really wanted to get that out of the way so I could sew on the binding and trim the extra batting off. It's been pilling and shedding all over the body of the quilt due to the pushing, pulling, rolling, piling, wadding, and general shoving about it gets on the quilting table, so I wanted it gone. With the outer border quilted and the edges secured, I have something to grab hold of while I continue quilting the body. I used a simple twisted ribbon in the piano key border, which helped "quilt out" the areas that ended up, due to imprecise piecing, a bit wavy.
Last week when I was well, I poked around in my baggie of 1-3/4" binding scraps, thinking at first that I'd probably piece a scrappy binding. In with the random pieces of varying lengths, I found a long pieced length of royal blue binding, as well as a long section of red, and an even longer bit of speckled gray. I decided I'd rather have a single-colored binding for this busy, scrappy quilt so... eenie, meenie, miney... neutral gray it is!
Today, ignoring the dopey way my plugged ears made me feel, I cut more bias strips of the gray to extend the existing piece to the length needed to bind this, adding a few inches for turning corners, seaming seams, and so forth. I really wanted to use this long piece up! But, as I kept sewing on the binding, and the pile of binding on the floor steadfastly refused to shrink, I began to wonder if my ears had nothing to do with things and I was more than just "feeling" dopey. I don't know what I did or didn't do, but the binding is on the quilt and I now have an even longer piece of gray remaining!
I'd measure it to see how much I "missed" by, but there doesn't seem to be much point. Numbers don't want to play by the usual rules tonight.
I pieced the back with a yard of some fabric that "spoke" to me every time I went into JoAnn's (and to which I finally listened), another wine-related piece I've had for years ("A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou beside me singing in the Wilderness"), and two other pieces that complemented the wine/bread fabric. This one I'm keeping for the bed, and the "Coffee, Work, Wine, Repeat" certainly has reflected my weekdays for the past 10 months!
By sheer good luck, I bought myself another tablet a day or two before I got sick, and had installed my favorite-ever word game: Word Bubbles. I got hooked on this a few years ago and advanced into the games in the 500 level when my last tablet died. Since I hated that thing almost from the minute I first turned it on, I didn't miss the tablet itself, but I surely missed that word game! So this time around, I looked for the simplest, cheapest tablet I could find (if I couldn't find anything under $30, I was going to give up on the idea), uninstalled or disconnected everything I could except Google Play, and installed that game. This is the only thing for which I want/use it. And it has saved me from going absolutely batshit stir-crazy while too sick to move from the couch for 3 days.
It's like a word-search puzzle, but you don't have a list of words to look for. All you get are the lengths of words you're to find. And there are several possibilities, but only the correct words will clear the screen of bubbles and advance you to the next game.
Here's the fun part. Once "codfish" is found and selected (you just trace your finger over the path of the bubbles that are contiguous and spell the word you think is correct), that leaves a 3-letter word and a 4-letter word to find. Obviously "orb" fills the 3-letter word requirement, but "dern", "nred", and "denr" aren't words. So, back to the drawing board to find a different way of arranging the letters in "codfish". Sure enough, there IS another path that can be drawn, leaving a much better chance of connecting "rend" or "nerd".
Hints can be collected--a new one can be added to your stash by solving a daily (simple) puzzle, and by completing each level of play. Every time the "use hint" button is hit, a gray dot is filled with the letter that must fill it. One night I dozed off and when I woke, I discovered my hand had rested on the screen and used up 16 of the 19 hint opportunities I had collected! Argh!!
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