A weekend of C's - cats, cleaning and crochet

Now that my mask making marathon is over I can get around to doing some of the things that normal people are doing during the quarantine...cleaning. I don't have closets that need cleaning because I keep up with that pretty well but there are things that need periodic cleaning and now is a great time to get them all done. Plus there are some other chores around outside that I can get started on. My goal is one thing each day.

Saturday it was to vacuum and clean the laundry closet. The laundry closet is basically a double wide closet off the upstairs hall and it just big enough for the washer, dryer and laundry baskets in between. About once a year the lint and dust behind the machines and on the shelf finally gets on my nerves. So that was Saturday's task and it only took about an hour. I keep the light bulbs in there too and discovered that we have lightbulbs for about 3 lifetimes. After quarantine is over I'll donate a bunch to the local food pantry. They take all kinds of household items for their clients.

Yesterday's goal was to start tackling some of the weeds outside but first I got sidetracked by deep cleaning the stove and stove vent. That is such a dirty job but it's done for another few months. Then I sprayed weeds for about an hour. There are several more session of weed control in my future.

Soon I hope to grout the last mosaic section (once I can have the windows open for several days) and then the biggest annual chore of cleaning the basement will commence. 

It does feel good to get some of these things done. If all goes well I'll have a summer of absolutely no chores to do.

It wasn't all cleaning this weekend! I also got 4 more cats done and have another 4 cut out and ready to sew. These are so much fun. I'm almost sorry that I only need 20 of them. I call these crazy, mad, tiger and techno.

Speaking of cleaning, there's going to be quite a mess to clean up when these are done. The only way I can work on my symmetry projects is to have ALL of the fabric spread out in the floor. The ones over by the design wall are the ones that I've used already. I may use some of them again but I'm trying to get a very wide variety of fabrics in the mix.

Many of the fabrics look like this! These are shapes used in previous projects but this is still a perfectly good piece of fabric with lots of repeats remaining to use. Folding these fabrics can be a real challenge.

I work on them here. You can see the white cardboard that I use to stage the pieces. I usually start by finding the eyes and then pull fabrics from the floor that I think might work with the eyes and then  audition the eye pieces with the fabrics to find the head, jaw and ear pieces. Sometimes I find the adjacent pieces really quickly and sometimes it takes a half hour to find the piece that will work. I love it, it's very zen. I'm sure that my blood pressure drops when I work on these.

In the evenings there's time for some crochet and I've gotten the white border added to the granny square. I left some white for a final edge so I only have 1 skein of the purple before all of this yarn is finally gone! These granny square blankets go really quickly.

This week I'm mostly working on the cats but,weather permitting, I may grout the mosaic for a quick April finish.