What to do when it's 104 degrees F???

Well.........stay inside if at all possible. While inside, there are lots of things to do! 

1. I finished spinning the Candy Corn and Licorice with the lace-weight fuschia I obtained at knit night......Love it. Fingering weight at 900 yards. (The mosaic is free from Bighugelabs.com)

2. Diving through the stash to see what I have and determining whether I'll truly ever knit with the stuff. I de-stashed some yarn into a bag for charity knitting. Sometimes we just have to be realistic, right? I'll probably make some type of log cabin blanket or a striped one.  I have more de-stashing to do, but it's a good start. 

3.  Worked on our office some more and hung up the curtain between the office and the kitchen. I blogged about this before. We also moved the packed up book boxes back into the office so we could unpack them and moved the bookcases into their final locations. The office is probably 75% complete. This has been a 2+ year project, but I see light at the end of the tunnel.

4.  In my stash diving in number 2 above, I came across some other things that have hibernated awhile.  Prior to my knitting addiction that started approximately 6.5 years ago, I had several hobbies. One was sewing, some quilting, paper crafting, the list is infinite. Since I picked up knitting again, most everything else has gone to the wayside.  I have been getting the urge to do a little sewing again, so I've been working on the hobby room to get better access to my sewing machine, etc. So....back to what I came across that has been in hibernation awhile is a paper-pieced tumbling blocks quilt top.  This project is in its infancy, but it's fun and totally portable. So portable in fact, that I made its own carrying case.  It's made from a cloth placemat and I placed different sized ziploc bags in it and then sewed a ribbon down the middle. This covers the bottom ends of the ziplocs but leaves the zip end available for use.  Then on to the tumbling blocks pattern. It is paper pieced so you start out by making paper diamonds in the size that you want. I made lots of them so that when I had a few minutes, I could baste the material to the paper.  Once you have a bunch (or just several) made, you can start piecing the block together. The key is to have a light, medium and dark variation in each block. Once you decide which side (left, right, top) each one goes in, you just keep with that. The idea is that you are looking at "blocks" with the light coming from a certain direction. So in my example, the light is coming from the right.  So, I'll be working on this from time to time.

There are many more things to do inside, but that's all I got done over my 4 day holiday weekend.