Plans, slightly disrupted

Monochrome teaser... ready for basting:

Returned from errands the other day with over 5 yards of unbleached organic cotton batting, so no excuses for not finishing up a few projects now! Cut and prewashed batting  (soak in the sink, spin in the machine, through the dryer on medium heat) for the monochrome wall-hanging, and wow, was it soft and light and scrumptious when it came out of the dryer!

Laid it all out on the hall floor yesterday afternoon during a brief window of opportunity (one cat asleep, the other outside), to start basting. Got up to the pin stage before the one cat woke up and the other came in and both plopped themselves down on the quilt sandwich and stuck their paws and noses in the pin bowl. No real mess done, although there are a couple small claw holes in one spot... nothing that won't disappear during quilting.

Had hoped to start quilting this morning, but we had some distractions overnight, in the form of the civil defense sirens going off every hour until after 3 am... hard to get a good night's sleep while under a tsunami warning! The best part was the 4.5 earthquake here while we were glued to the tube at 11pm hoping for updates! That's big enough to give the house a good shake, but nothing too serious. We get a lot of smallish rattles here, so no biggie, especially compared to what happened in Japan. Fortunately the high water has not had much affect in Hilo, although downtown is still closed. Once again I am so glad we moved up out of the tsunami zone two years ago (and this is one reason we moved!).

Anyway, all is well in my little corner of Hawaii, but I do not function well without sleep. Still feeling groggy and mentally not very sharp halfway through the larger-than-usual pot of coffee brewed up this morning. So, instead of embarking on quilting with a batting I haven't used before, which is likely to mean at least some testing and tension adjustments, I think I'll go do something mindless like sew up more bits from the scrap drawer, like these:

My "very small" scraps drawer has a lot of bits in it that are 2.5" wide but less than square. A couple days ago I used some extra minutes in the sewing room to put these strips together. No specific use in mind yet, but they will come in handy one of these days for a pillow border, or block sashing on a scrap project, or something else fun. 

Haven't started 'palooza Block 14 yet, so I might feel inspired to pick fabrics for that and get the cutting done today, too. I doubt I'll have the brainpower for much desk work today, so that means lots of time in the sewing room. (Time I really should use to clean up the kitchen, vaccuum the house, or do laundry... it could happen.)