Did you eat pancakes?

I've finally joined the Farmer's Wife Quilt bandwagon … er … hay ride?

I've been enjoying watching other people show off the blocks they've been making since last fall and this felt like a good time to join in. My first few days of work on it were spent putting all the templates together into fewer pages in Photoshop Elements and then cutting them out. I'm not quite sure what the publisher was thinking but the disk you get with the book has all the templates as PDFs … with one template per page … even number 85 which is too small for them to put the word "template" on it. Consolidating everything was a bit mind numbing but I was able to print off everything on 14 pages instead of 131.

I'd been thinking of doing a colour scheme for my quilt - red and neutral or all blues or something like that - but in the end decided it would be easiest and most practical to just make it scrappy. I have lots of scraps and many of the templates require very small amounts of fabric. I made two blocks on the weekend: #2 "Autumn Tints" and #109 "Windows". I sewed them together by hand. The squares are pretty small, so it wasn't a lot of work, and it's nice to work without the machine sometimes. Of course I also ended up with some guilty feelings about another hand sewn project lurking in my sewing room; I pulled out the quilt I started when Rob and I moved in together seven years ago and worked five squares.

I've started Rob's new sweater. The yarn arrived last week and I dug out my needles. It turns out the only 5 mm circular I have is 16" long so I'm starting with the sleeves and have ordered a longer needle for doing the front and back. I'm working at 4 stitches per inch (8 stitches per 5 cm) and the resulting fabric has a nice, dense, hard wearing feel to it. I imagine this being a sweater that is worn frequently and for many years. I'm thinking of ordering a lighter weight yarn in the same colour for doing the seaming; partially because I think it will make for less bulk at the seams and partially because I have exactly as much yarn as the pattern says I'll need and that makes me nervous. Does anyone have experience doing this?