artisan rye, butterflies, Pat's medallion quilt

Happy Pi Day People!!  Janice and I SKYPE’d for just over 1-1/2 hours on Wednesday (3/14); it was WONDERFUL!!  Now, Janice and I talk about hundreds of things during our conversations, but I want to tell you about just one of them.  Janice & Dennis became empty nesters about 1-1/2 weeks ago.  Janice tells me that Michelle moved out a week ago Sunday, but after a week has already come back home to live.  Then she tells me it is because one of Michelle’s roommates called her at work to tell her that there was a SNAKE curled up in the bathroom window, sunning itself!!!!!!!!  Janice (who is a friend to snakes) is talking to Michelle to try to calm her down.  Meanwhile I am screaming at the SKYPE screen ‘YOU ARE CRAZY….MICHELLE IS 100% CORRECT TO NEVER WANT TO GO BACK THERE!!!”  Michelle finally forwards the picture of the snake to Janice…..Janice goes HOLY COW!!!  It is a 6 foot long boa constrictor!!!!!!!  Maybe 3 – 4 inches in diameter!!!!!!  Come to find out the previous tenants had 2 snakes as pets…now the landlord is trying to ascertain whether they left one or both snakes behind….SHEESH!!!!  Michelle is not going back until it/they are gone.  What a story!!!  Gave me the creeps even while Janice was telling me about it.  Gives me the creeps even now while I am typing it!!!!!!  Janice keeps wanting to forward the picture to me!!!   ME!!!!  I kept yelling at her that I did NOT want to see it……YIKES!!!!!!!

After that my honey decided to try his hand at artisan rye bread…here he is, mixing it up:  

After helping him just a little, I headed back to my studio to continue quilting on patriotic #2, and working with butterflies.  You know I finished the background on my convergence quilt, and now need to figure out how big and where to place my appliqué.  I’ve decided to add butterflies as appliqué (they are part of my focus fabric), hence we got copies of a butterfly outline that Michael drew and re-tweaked and re-tweaked and re-tweaked to get it exactly as I wanted it.  We got the drawing sized at 150%, 125%, 75% and 50% and I think we have settled on the 125-100-75 ratio:  

Now to pick out colors for the wings….it took me several hours to pull all of my note cards with colors I thought might work.  Michael took the smallest copies, along with the fabric samples, and did several drawings to see what we might like.  

I also spent time looking for a dog/cat sitter for our vacation at the end of July.  Our regular gal is booked, but she recommended 2 others.  Well, I can’t get one of them to call me back, and the second one I have enough info on that – especially after our phone conversation – I totally don’t trust to keep my pet safe!!  I LOVE having pets, but that means getting someone we feel totally comfortable with when we go away  :~(.  So, if you're nearby and want to suggest someone....especially someone that would live in our house, please let me know!  Anyway, Michael finished up his drawings (8 different color combos, one on each wing):

and we had leftover pizza for dinner, then Michael baked his rye bread:  

He loved it and said it was excellent (BG - it's the boule you recommended from ABi5).  Once the oven cooled down a bit, I finally got the meyer lemon bars baked that I took on retreat.

Pat did a lot of embroidery on retreat, and since it was rainy and cold the last few days she wasn’t golfing.  So she had time to put all of those embroideries on as the next border of her medallion quilt:

Isn't it stunning!?