Bits slowly

So with a 1-month-old, he's starting to sleep for some chunks of time at night. Which means I'm still tired during the day, but it's barely manageable: Because I don't do much else besides sit on my behind and nurse him off and on all day. When I can put him down asleep or otherwise, I get about 20 minutes at a time. That means about enough time for me to go potty and do one other thing: quick shower, sandwich, wipe a potty-training four-yr-old's behind, feed the four-yr-old, put older brother on the bus, etc.

I miss my sewing machine.

If I can manage a few minutes to do something quilting-related, it makes me happy.

Cut a few strips for a paper-pieced block..

Prepare a practice sandwich for a new quilting motif I want to try and use.

Trim HSTs from the Swoon to use for the teacher quilt.

Sew one or two seams at a time to finish a block, like the Blazing Star below.

Then Strip-piece and cut diamonds for blocks....now that I've got the Blazing Star done, I can do the one for the baby's star sampler. (I had to size it up from 6" in the book to 12" and I had to experiment how big to cut the strips.)

And my brain started working, after a recent in-the-line-of-duty-death by a local sheriff's deputy. I saw his memorial posts and sheriff's star. Then I've been admiring and wanting to get Jaybird Quilts' "Night-Sky" and other patterns with her new rulers. Then Connecting Threads posted this post about hand-piecing six-pointed stars. Ka-Ching: my brain went off and connected the three ideas. I just created a firefighter motif block, so I should make a quilt with police or sheriff motifs out of 6-pointed stars. That wouldn't be too original, though.

This is a generic picture from a website.