Orange you glad to see me?

Progress, we're making progress. We've made an offer on a house here, and had it accepted. We had an inspection yesterday, and found that there are issues. Sigh. The next step will be to go back to the owners to see if they will work with us on the problems.

I must say, though, walking through the house with the inspector, I kept thinking about our Saginaw house and imagining what would be said about our lovely antique. Yikes.

We're living in an Extended Stay hotel. It is not a Residence Inn. We have two rooms for less than sixty dollars a night. (Hey, we're working with engineers here, it's all about billable hours.) As I continually relocate stuff so I can cook (on two burners and a toaster oven that we finally broke down and bought two weeks ago), I keep reminding myself that this is a First World Problem, and that I am blessed that I will have somewhere else to go in just a few weeks.

Mostly I'm writing to let you know that Step Three will be delayed until next week, hopefully by Tuesday. I have worked through the block to make sure the numbers work. I still have diagrams to make and words to write.

The upside is that you'll have a bit more time to catch up on any missed steps before the cost goes up. Just click on the link to my Craftsy store in the side bar to get the pattern downloads.

Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite tips for saving time while piecing.

I am sure that I'm not the only one who has carried a neatly organized stack of units to the sewing machine, somehow twisting them when setting them down. Unfailingly I don't even notice the mistake until I've sewn all the repeats.

What I do to help avoid this (my engineer hubby says "idiot proof" is impossible, the best we can hope for is "idiot resistance"), is sort out my units onto a ruler. If it's tough to tell right from wrong side, I take a moment to make sure all of the pieces are right sides up.

I use assembly line sewing to keep my units organized. By not cutting the thread between the units I can carry the lot over to the ironing board and back without losing any pieces, and everything stays in order.

When it comes time to sew the cross seams, the connecting stitches act as my pins to help get those perfect intersections. I think you can see that there is hardly any thread, maybe one or two stitches between the pieces,

For many years, all of my adult life really, I have hated orange. I was scarred by an early burnt orange and brown quilt incident, a story for another day. Now I love it. It's so cheerful!

But brown, still not so much. And yet practically every house we've looked at in Green Bay is decorated in brown. The house we are buying is painted deep, dark browns, even black, inside. I wonder if there was an ordinance or something. The Green Bay Packers' colors are green and gold, so I suppose it could be worse. Still, the paint mixer at my local hardware store is about to become my new best friend.