WIP Wednesday; State of the Yarn

It's been an exciting week.  School is now out (yay!), I finished Orca Bay:

...and a massive swarm of bees paid a 24-hour visit to our sycamore tree:

Those things are all blogged about in their place.  On what is actually progressing on the quilting and knitting fronts, I have a little less to say.  I haven't gotten into the swing of the summer schedule yet (at all?) and am dabbling.  Not cranking out impressive projects yet, but certainly thinking that I would like to.

My design wall has increased a bit since Monday.  I am working on a quilt inspired by a quilt at a shop in Lake Oswego about 5 years ago, trying to recreate the feel that I liked without going too far into the Civil War era.  The 2 yards of Judie Rothermel's Sturbridge Village Scarlet that I have will not be enough for the setting triangles, cross country inner border blocks, and wide outer border strips.  I will have to investigate finding more of that fabric, substituting a similar fabric, or going half and half.  I know I like that exact shade of red, though.  I bought fabric on Saturday for backing my Farmer's Wife quilt top; I also need to find the appropriate thread for machine quilting it.  I am giving myself permission to do a bit more shopping in the next week or so.  That should be fun.

 For the yarn-along, here's about an inch of progress made on my perpetual Farmer McGregor socks since last week, and three nonfiction books I'm dabbling in.  Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars - definitely counts as history.  Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible - kind of counts as history.  I've learned fascinating things about the changing roles of the T-shirt.  The Plan - this is a healthy eating for weight loss kind of book, and I sincerely doubt I will be hard-core enough to go on an elimination diet of flax seeds and kale.  But I did buy a digital scale and I am trying to drink half my body weight, in ounces, of water every day.  That's the main thing I've appreciated from it so far. 

The socks are not moving very fast.  Quarta organized the winter woolies drawer and gave me these mittens, which are now too small for her.  Now, that was a knitting project I really loved.  It seemed to fly by.

One of the thumbs needs some repair before another child tries to wear them.  I also darned a couple of pairs of Daniel's homemade socks this week.  Hoping to get more actual knitting done this week.