I love Halloween. I love all the spooky stuff. Always have. I loved going trick or treating as a kid and coming home to watch Frankenstein or whatever scary old movie was on TV while my dad raided my candy. I loved opening the door and reacting to little kids in their costumes and handing out the best candy. Where we live now, our house doesn't see many trick or treaters. It's a pretty steep hill and the end of the trail so most stick to the flatter, more populated area. A couple of blocks over, there are hundreds and hundreds of trick or treaters and I'm always a little jealous. So, instead of prepping for lots of scary little guests, I usually spend Halloween day and evening sewing, preferably on something spooky.
Enter 2020 and things are a little weird. The remnants of Hurricane Zeta decided to crash the party and Thursday morning it was lights out. This tree down the street took a tumble and took a power pole and transformer down. I heard there were lots of live wires and a little fire but I was inside trying to decide what to do now that I couldn't quilt.
Usually, our power doesn't stay off for long. It's a little benefit of living in the path of two large hospitals. They are usually pretty quick to get us back on line so that the traffic signals are online for emergency vehicles. In 21 years of living here, I don't remember but one other time that we had no power overnight. Well, we were out of luck this time because that transformer only fed our little block so we were low on the priority list. When we did finally get an estimated time for power restoration, it was Sunday at 11:45pm. Sigh...so much for my work schedule. In the back of my mind, I kept hearing "I plan, God laughs."
So, I decided to take a break. I have this great little lithium battery that I bought to power my booth at shows so I put it to work. It charged my phone, my tablet and ran a lamp. Shelby and I hunkered down on the couch with an audio book and started binding quilts. I got into a habit when I was doing shows of basting the binding down so I could quickly hang the quilt in the booth...thinking I would bind them for real later. I have 21 quilts to bind.
I got three quilts bound before the power came back on Saturday late afternoon and was a little sad my mini vacation was over.
But, it was Halloween and Halloween means I work on something spooky.
A few weeks ago, my Sew Original friends got me hooked on machine embroidery. When I saw the Kimberbell Boo-levard bench pillow, I had to do it. By the end of the class, I was trying to figure out how to rearrange my sewing area so I could leave my embroidery unit hooked up all the time.
I think it's appropriate that I finished my Boo-levard on Halloween night. I even tug out some old ghost buttons that I think moved here from Raleigh with me almost 24 years ago.
Now all I need is a bench.
