Progress

Hi Everyone,

It has been a fairly quiet week here.  The weather took a turn towards "cold," giving us below zero temps and lots of snow.  School delays and closing abounded, so it ended up that my niece spent the day with me yesterday when her school was called off.  It seems that the record amount of snow days that last year's terrible winter produced inspired the school to adapt e-learning, so instead of building a snow fort, baking cookies, etc., she spent most of the day on my laptop, doing school work.

I have made progress on my latest, Big, Complicated (BC) project.  So far, so good.  I needed 65 cream courthouse steps blocks.

I got them done easily enough.  I felt for a while like I was a modern quilter, making a "low volume" quilt.  

Also, while I was sorting out all of the pieces for this quilt, I had come across a pile of 3.5" navy squares.  My list of pieces didn't show any needed, so I thought I might have mixed up something and I set them aside.  It turned out that I did need them, so I got them back out.

I also made 104 of the flying geese from these pieces.

However, I realized I didn't get a picture of the completed geese.


As I work on a project, I like to make extra pieces along the way--just in case I miscounted, or I would like another option when laying out the final quilt.  What isn't used gets tucked away for later use.  It seems to me that I would much rather make a few more as I'm assembly sewing vs. wanting one later in the process and having to start all over.  Do you ever make extra?

On a completely different topic:   I'm afraid I have a bit of a rant to share.  Now that we have our own house, my husband decided that he would like to have a rain shower head for the shower in our bathroom.  I thought our current one was fine, but since I'm sure he thinks I have plenty of fabric but never says anything when I get more, I decided not to say anything and so we went shower head shopping.

We found one which proudly stated on the packaging that it would not only provide a rain shower experience with multiple settings, but also "boost" the water flow.  We took it home and my husband installed it.  Do any of you have one of these things?  The first issue is that having showered with a normal shower head that shoots the water at a slant for around 40 years, it is quite different to shower with water coming straight down from above.  The second issue is that there was NO WAY that it was "boosting" the water flow.  It seemed like just the opposite!

The result was that I became convinced that there is some sort of "regulatory" office somewhere in the depths of our beaurocracy and that this office gets heaps of money to determine the amount of water that should flow out of a shower head.  I'm sure that they are granted the money on the basis that it is noble to conserve water.  I'm equally sure that every member of that group is bald, or nearly so, and bitter about it, and so have conspired to find the exact rate of water flow that will rinse shampoo out of the normal head of hair, and then they lowered the shower head flow to just below that rate.  (Incidently, they are in the neighboring office of the regalatory goup who governs the temperature of all irons produced, and have determined that pressing fine fabrics is more important than pressing cotton, and have lowered the allowed temperture of irons so that they don't get "too hot.")

After my first shower with the new head (in which I froze because the hot water didn't seem to hit any part of me and I couldn't get the shampoo and conditioner out of my hair), I told my husband that it was going to take some getting used to.  After the second, (when I turned on the shower and had to let it run while I made the bed and sorted laundry--it took that long for the hot water to make it to the shower, thus conserving no water at all,)  I said I was having a difficult time determining which setting was the best.  After the third, I dropped all pretense of being a good sport, and begged him for the old one back.  Luckily, he wasn't enjoying it either, and was so willing to accomodate me, that he changed it right then.  My shower yesterday was bliss!  (Just in case you have had a similiar experience, he did check for the gizmo inside the shower head that could be removed to increase the rate of flow--and it didn't help at all.)

Have a great day!
JoAnne