Holding my Breath and Making Progress

Today was devoted to moving along with the Wind in the Whiskers quilt.

When I left it a few days ago, I was fusing together the 14 pieces required to make the two furrows above and behind the clothesline.

After that, my quest to take this project one step at a time was thwarted since the next step was a doozy. The next step included cutting the grassy hillsides in the background, the three thin trees in the center, the bushes in the middle and the left and the right and left sides of the house, the two very large pieces of grass in the foreground, and the very large patch of dark shade at the bottom. Then, I was to fuse them together. This was not easily accomplished for a couple of reasons. First, my ironing board wasn't wide enough to accommodate all of it at once, and yet, it all kind of needed to be done at the same time. It's hard to explain, and so you'll just have to take my word for it. Secondly, my pressing sheet isn't large enough to accommodate the whole thing, and yet, it all needed to be done at the same time like before. Nevertheless, I managed to get it all done, and now the background of this block is all fused together.

Now, I could sit here and write down all the reasons why this isn't done exactly right, but I'm not going to. I'm going to adhere to my standard goal of having it be "good enough". And, frankly, it's not bad. It could be much worse. I still need to make the clothes for the clothes line. Those won't be fused to anything, although there are some pieces fused to one another. They will be added to the whole quilt much later. Also, I need to make the kittens in the basket and the large tree trunk on the right. 

While this isn't exactly clear to me, the branches, leaves, and flowers at the top of the block will be added when I complete the fourth block for the quilt, and so I'm advised not to work on that beyond making the branch with the chickadee and some of the flowers. That was completed at the beginning of the week.

So, it's moving along, raising my blood pressure, and generally putting me in a bad mood. I'm stopping for the day. I'm going to go ahead and finish all the pieces that remain simply because it's hard to set it aside and then return later. I want to have this part all finished before I move on to something else, and honestly, I just want to be done with it for a while.

I'm telling myself that this is probably the most difficult block of the whole quilt, if for no other reason than it is much larger than any of the others. It should be all down hill from here, right?

The other thing I did today was to finish the embroidery for the 4th block of the Quilting Snowladies. When I started on it this morning, I did not expect to finish the whole thing. I kept telling Mike I was going to do just this little bit more, but then I found myself cutting another length of floss and threading my needle. A couple of hours later, it was all finished. 

I find embroidery to be very relaxing, and perhaps I wanted the relaxation before going down to the sewing room to continue on with the Wind in the Whiskers block. Besides, it was an excellent way to procrastinate.

So that's it for me today. I'm considering my goals for December and will blog about them tomorrow. With this being the last day of November, I'm thinking it's been a pretty productive month.

Tomorrow I'll be linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy's Quilts.

Monday, I'll be linking up to BOM's Away:

I hope your sewing projects were kinder to you today.