Garden Party

This morning I finished the last of the stitcheries for the Gardener's Journal quilt. These little ladies are attending the Annual Garden Party.

With that one finished, I'm ready to piece the whole quilt top together. Six of the nine sections have been pieced, and three sets of stitcheries still need piecing together. When I worked on this quilt top last time, it looked like this.

Now that the last of the stitcheries are finished, I'm excited to finish piecing the whole quilt top. I started this project in December of 2012, and so I've been working on it for a long time. I probably won't get to work on this until August since my sewing time is going to be devoted to quilting the quilts-to-be-quilted pile that continues to grow in depth. Unfinished projects don't bother me, but a pile of quilts that need quilting will start making me weird, nervous, and thirsty. Having Big Bertha out of commission for so long didn't help.

With the Annual Garden Party finished, I was ready to put a new project into my rotating group of three. I'm still working on the Vintage Tin quilt for Erik and I'm still working on the Quilting Snowladies. My list of embroidery projects numbers 30 now. Since I want to work on all of them, I have a hard time choosing the next one. I've resorted to numbering them and then using the random number generator to help me pick my next project. Recently, I divided my projects into long-term and short, and I decided that one of my three rotating projects should be a short one. Since the other two are long-term projects, that made room in my rotation for a short project. When I generated the number for my next project, I was only looking at the short ones. 

So what did I come up with?  "An Embroider's Blessing" from Meg Hawley at Crabapple Hill Studios. Here's the image from the front of the pattern.

I love her stuff, and I have a ton of it on my list of projects. In fact, the Vintage Tin project I'm working on now is one of hers. An Embroider's Blessing will finish at 10 x 14 inches. It isn't really intended to be a quilt, but that doesn't mean I can't sandwich, quilt, and bind it when I'm finished. I plan to hang it somewhere in my sewing room if I can find an empty place on the walls that are already fairly well covered with doll quilts.

So this morning I made up the stitchery so that I can get to work on it tomorrow.

Today, I'm linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy's Quilts.

It's a beautiful day out, and so I'll probably go out and pull some weeds. My back usually gives out before the weeds do, and so it's a never-ending task...at least until the rain starts up in the fall. I have a few house-keeping tasks to take care of, and then I'm going to get back to work quilting We are the World. It's beginning to feel like The Endless Project. Don't you think that would make a good title for a horror flick? Definitely the stuff nightmares are made of. Maybe I'll give Martin Scorsese a call later on today.