A new year, and--hopefully--a new habit

Hello, everyone.

Today it was cold again--as in, when we got up and made coffee, it was 42F or so outside. We walked! True, it was only a mile round trip to the corner and back, but we walked. It felt great. And I busted out the Buff that my sweetie got for me in Estella (?) and put it on over my ears so there wouldn't be any earache. (This is a Buff with a map of the Camino on it. It replaced a neato one with a pattern reminiscent of a trout's speckles, that fell off my head while walking.)

And I'm working seriously now on Peanut Solares's quilt. The squares have been cut out--actually cut out just for this quilt!--and laid on the floor in the piano room, where no one walks much, to work on layout.

Next step for this quilt is to pin on the coordinate slips and start sewing the squares together in pairs, and then blocks, and then rows of blocks, and eventually into a whole top. Then the assembly of the quilt "sandwich" and pinning for stability and quilting--this part always means moving the sewing machine to the dining room for the greater space for the quilt to move around. And at the end, the attachement of the binding on the edges, partly by machine and partly by hand. Closing out with a final washing to take off random bits of dirt and chalk marks.

Initial selection of fabrics for Peanut Quilt (some newly bought, some from stash)

Layout plan for quilt. the blue X marks are squares that aren't part of the overall pattern, rather like the black spots on a crossword puzzle.

 I was going to put pieced squares with boats or tulips or fish where the blue X marks are, but the assortment of fabrics and the overall business of the tesselated design has persuaded me that pieced accent squares would be just too much. I'm going with plain squares instead, chosen from extras of the squares cut from the chosen fabrics.