Creating Comfort, Comfort Creating

Followers of this blog may have realized that I'm immersed in two fabric projects.  Lately, the one with small scraps has captured most of my sewing attention.  This picture is just a small sample of what I've done since Thanksgiving (most of it done after Christmas):

I'm usually creating a small square for the center, and then working my way out with a log cabin pattern.  Note the very center, where I'm using VERY small scraps:

But I'm also leaving myself freedom to experiment, as the mood strikes me or as my square turns into a rectangle.

All of this sewing still leaves me some small scraps that I can't use, along with lots of threads.  I haven't been sure what to do with them, and then, one day this week, I noticed a bird nest that had scraps of plastic woven into the nest and dangling down.  

I thought about leaving my materials out for the birds.

Yesterday I went for a walk and took my baggie of scraps with me.  I wanted to find a vacant lot instead of a neighbor's yard where I could scatter the scraps.  But as I walked past the seminary's president's house, I had a different idea.

Let me make clear:  no one is living at the president's house; in fact, the back windows are boarded up, and the whole building is slated for demolition.  I went to the back of the house, where I thought my distributing scraps wouldn't attract attention.

But once I was there, looking down at the stump of a removed tree, I had a different idea:

I put the remaining scraps and threads in other trees on the property.  

It delighted me, for reasons that I tried to capture in this Facebook post:  "One quilting project uses small scraps, but some scraps are just too thin/narrow for me to use. I have a vision of leaving them out for birds and other creatures to use in their nests. Today, I decided to be artful with the scraps I'm leaving for the creatures. I arranged them on the trunk of a tree that was cut down, and in the holes in the trunks of living trees. It feels sort of like littering, sort of like installation art, sort of like a different kind of comfort creating."

This morning, I'm doing a different kind of comfort creating: homemade bread!

Yesterday I went shopping for yeast, which I couldn't find in jars, only in packets. But I did find a tube of almond paste, which costs less in 2023 than it did when I first started baking holiday breads, back in 1980. So I bought that tube of almond paste, and in an hour or two, I'll have some beautiful bread for breakfast. One last holiday hurrah!