Is it looking like fall in your neighborhood? The leaves are mostly yellow or brown here and lots of them are falling. Facebook kindly showed me memories of canned applesauce and when I checked the local (well, an hour away) orchard, I saw that it was time.
Friday morning we drove over to the apple orchard and purchased our usual combination of Jonagold and Golden Delicious apples. Going on a weekday was a big improvement crowd-wise. We got in and out pretty quickly. They have great light near the building and I always enjoy taking a fall picture while we're there.
Then we went over to Meijer and got groceries. The selection in the produce and meat departments is almost overwhelming compared to the local Kroger. And most things are less expensive too. I thought these donuts were funny.
Since I bought a bunch of apples, I had a lot of work over the weekend to make and can applesauce. I did half each day and ended up with seven quarts, a pint, and two bowls of fresh applesauce to enjoy right away.
It doesn't look like much, but we have gotten quite a bit of clean up done around here over the past week. First, we managed to donate almost all of the old FLL competition mats and spare parts to two separate robotics teams. I've been trying to get this to happen for several years! If I tidy things up a bit more, I will have freed up one of the living room closets. Huzzah! I'm planning to move my holiday decorations into the closet, which will free up a good amount of space in the spare bedroom and hopefully help motivate me to finally finish sorting through the rest of the stuff in there.
Second, my husband took a big load of construction debris to the dump. There's a lot more remaining, but the trailer can only hold so much at one time. He even started cleaning up the inside of the barn.
I didn't get as much quilting or sewing done as I would have liked. I started to work on a quilt but noticed that the backtracking was 1/8" off, which is a lot. I removed all the stitching, which took almost an hour due to the density of the design (my general ratio is 10 minutes of stitching = 60 minutes of removal time), cleaned everything, made sure everything was taut, tried again, and it was still off. That left me the drift test within the Intelliquilter. It wasn't good--1/8" off. I ran it again just in case. It was still off, but in a bit of a different direction. It was looking like my motors needed adjustment. Luckily, my husband was working from home that day since their building was off-limits for a few days due to a chemical spill. He discovered one of my motors had loosened up and tilted a bit. He fixed that and then my drift test was dead on.
Anyway, once I was back in business it took me two days to quilt Shirley's quilt with the Abundant Feathers design and it turned out beautifully.
Sonja selected Mike's Swoosh for her quilt. Love all the blues.
I quilted Amber's memory quilt with Ginger Hearts. This quilt was made with the remaining fabric from the memory quilt she made for her friend using his late mother's clothing and will go to another person who was close to her. Amber has such a big heart.
As far as my own projects, not much has happened. I had set some fabrics aside a while ago with no project in mind. I bought Emily Dennis' newest pattern, Log Cabin Stars, and thought my fabric pull might work. I saw she was having a quilt along, so I signed up, got the first email about fabrics last week and pulled out more fabrics to try to get to the amount required for the pattern. Then I got the second email this week where we are sewing the blocks. Oh my gosh! I haven't even started cutting yet! 
So I started cutting yesterday and I'll be a bit behind, but that's okay. You know that's how I roll. Always behind. I currently have 10/42 sets cut and no stars cut. I'm pretty sure I won't have enough of some of the fabrics to make full sets, so some improvising will be necessary.
I haven't done anything on my Loch Ness cross stitch in a while.
But I have started sewing down the binding on my quilt. I was cold in the evenings and figured I may as well stitch while I was huddled under the quilt. I have almost one long side done so far. Other things going on around here include more robotics, trying to help my son finish up his application for a summer internship, getting appointments and vaccines scheduled, and discussing the school district's secretive plan to change the high school schedules to be the same, which is a change that no one seems to want. We were able to catch part of the school board meeting last night and there were quite a few students speaking against it along with parents. Our superintendent and administration always fail to be transparent and seem to be great at creating problems to "fix" where no problems previously existed. The rumor mill says that the superintendent did an interview with the student newspaper and that's the only way anyone knew about this change prior to the generic emails sent out by both principals Monday night. I like that the kids figured out that under what they think the new schedule will be, they will receive less instructional hours per class than under the current systems. Anyway, this should be interesting to watch. I really hope they listen to the people actually involved--students, teachers, and parents--because the vast majority are in agreement.
Well, I need to get to work and this is all probably way more than anyone wanted to read about. Have a good week and I'll see you Sunday for the October OMG.
