Building Muscles--One Brick At A Time

As I started telling about in an earlier post, I've been building a slate walkway from some stones leftover from a construction job site. Well, I've finished! As with so many projects, once you get started, you just have to keep going--in this case until the stones were all used up. And then, the finishing touch was to line the sides with grass sod--and hope for a drenching rain which hasn't come yet.
We have our house up for sale now (great timing, huh?) and have been scurrying around completing projects that should have been finished years ago (Isn't that always the way?). One thing that had been a major eyesore was a stack of bricks--4 feet high and 5 feet deep and wide--and all of it covered with a bright blue tarp. And did I mention that you looked right at it every time you looked out the window at the marsh? Really an enhanced feature to focus on while lauding the wonders of your house on the water.
Anyway, I decided that the time had come to move the stack--brick by brick. But I didn't want it to be a waste of energy while I was doing all that. So I decided to add a brick patio to the walkway I had just built. And here is the finished patio--after 10 days of digging out dirt to form a somewhat smooth surface, moving the brick, placing them and filling in most of the spaces between the bricks. It's not a professional job, but I love it and certainly wish that I had done it years ago. My husband built the adirondack chair years ago and it still sits pretty good so I hauled it over to the new patio and sat myself right down. It's in the shade and I can sit there and look out across the marsh. I'm happy.
What with all of the physical work going on at my house, there hasn't been too much quilting taking place. But I thought I'd share the first three blocks of my t.v./car project for this year. This was a block of the month by Susan Garman for The Quilt Show.com last year called Bouquets For A New Day. I'm doing it with the needleturn applique method and am enjoying it. Hopefully, in the next few days, I'll be doing some actual machine sewing--but first I have to polish all those brass doornobs and vacuum the rugs for the thousandth time. I'm really hoping that someone loves this house really soon!