Last One

Today I completed the embroidery on the last of the Promises & Borders blocks.  Next week, I can sew the whole thing together.

The blue wording doesn't show up very well in this image, but it looks fine in the flesh.  I'm kind of glad to have these finished because I was getting tired of working on them.  Tomorrow morning, I'll make up the next block for the Love Me, Love My Cat quilt.

The past two days have felt fairly unproductive, but they've been good days nonetheless.  Yesterday I met Erik for breakfast at our favorite breakfast destination, The Original Pancake House in Portland.  They make the yummiest breakfasts.

Erik had the Tahitian Maiden's Dream, which is a sort of banana crepe.

I had my favorite, the cherry crepes.  

They aren't as gorpy as they look because the cherries are tart.  Yum.

So, an unproductive day with a great start.  It's always fun to get together with my son for breakfast goodies and see what's up in his world.  

Today I finished my embroidery block, but otherwise did no sewing.  On the other hand, I was able to get things gathered up for the project that will follow this one.  Next I'm going to start on Anni Downs' A Gardener's Journal.

I'm behind the times, I realize since most everybody has already made this one, but now it's on my radar screen.  I have eight embroidery projects I want to make, and I'm having a hard time choosing between them.  Finally, I did it "giveaway style" and wrote them all on a list and then generated a number at random.  Anni Downs came up first.  So I selected fabrics from my stash.  I've seen this one done in the colors pictured on the cover of the book, but I'm going to do mine in blues and aquas.  I think it will be pretty.  Then Mike and I headed into town to run some errands, and I stopped off at JoAnn to pick up the embroidery floss colors I needed. 

Oh yes, and I almost forgot.  I never posted the doll quilt I made for my partner.  I'm calling this quilt "Turkey in the Straw".  The theme for the November swap was to "use one solid" and I used a solid brown for the body of the turkey.

The veins and stems on the leaves are machine embroidered, and I quilted feathers onto the turkey.  I used hot fix nailheads for the turkey's eyes.  I quilted around the bales of straw to give them some texture.

And I'm really hoping you can see this...I quilted turkey tracks into the border.

And because my partner, Sharon, always makes the most adorable dolls to go with her quilts, I decided to try my hand at this little cloth cat doll.  Not bad for a first try.  He's very small at about three inches tall.

Tomorrow I absolutely must clean my kitchen, but I'm hoping to get to do some sewing.  No treks into town for me tomorrow.

How's your weekend going?

Foto Finish: Time

This week's optional theme for Foto Finish is "Time"  I had to dig into the archives for this one.  Here's my entry:

When I was in Rome several years ago, I shelled out some bucks to have an individualized guided tour of Rome.  I only had a few days there, and with so much to see, I asked an American expatriot guide to take me around.  There was a significant language barrier in Italy, with few people speaking English, and so I was glad to have someone who could show me around in my native tongue.  One of the places he showed me was the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs where I saw this, The Meridian of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri.  It's a sort of year-long sundial.  There is a tiny hole located on the side of the basilica that allows a beam of sunlight to penetrate the cathedral walls casting a lighted point onto the Meridian.  Why?  Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Pope Clement XI commissioned the astronomer, mathematician, archaeologist, historian and philosopher Francesco Bianchini to build a meridian line, a sort of sundial, within the basilica. Completed in 1702, the object had a threefold purpose: the pope wanted to check the accuracy of the Gregorian reformation of the calendar, to produce a tool to predict Easter exactly, and, not least, to give Rome a meridian line as important as the one Giovanni Domenico Cassini had recently built in Bologna's cathedral, San Petronio. This church was chosen for several reasons: (1) Like other baths in Rome, the building was already naturally southerly oriented, so as to receive unobstructed exposure to the sun; (2) the height of the walls allowed for a long line to measure the sun's progress through the year more precisely; (3) the ancient walls had long since stopped settling into the ground, ensuring that carefully calibrated observational instruments set in them would not move out of place; and (4) because it was set in the former baths of Diocletian, it would symbolically represent a victory of the Christian calendar over the earlier pagan calendar.

Interesting, huh?  To read more about how it works, you can click on this link for an explanation.  These sorts of things are very interesting to me.

For next week's theme, I think I'll go with "Look Down".  What do you see?

Now it's *time* (ha!) to show me your images.  Here's Mr. Linky:

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