Last Item, Last Day

"Last" is the word of the day. It's the last day of January, and I just crossed off the last item of my month's to-dos. Ta-Da!

My goal today was to at least get a start on the fourth section of the Wind in the Whiskers quilt. The fourth section is this one, called "The Local Branch".

You can rejoice in the fact that the placement guide was all on one side of one sheet this time, so you don't have to listen to me whine as I did when I worked on the last section.

The first task when I start one of these sections is to sort through the fabric and figure out what goes with which. It arrives unceremoniously stacked together in a plastic sheet protector.

I rely on the key provided by the quilt shop to help me figure it out. Sometimes it's easier than other times.

This section didn't have too many pieces, and not too many fabrics, so that didn't take long. The next (and scariest) part is cutting the background piece, which I did without too much nail-biting this time around. There was plenty of background fabric if I messed up.

It's a good thing this isn't a sewing day because my sewing chair was occupied.

The first thing I did was to make all the flowers.

Next, I made the cat. This one had enough little eensy weensy pieces that I thought a wax paper template was a good idea. I made that to help me with placement.

And then I pieced together the cat, fusing all his little bits onto his body. The eyes were such eensy weensy pieces that I was handling them with my finest point tweezers.

The cat had 16 pieces versus the 8 pieces for the chipmunk. Interesting, there was no fabric provided for the nose, right ear and tummy of the chipmunk. I dug through my scraps from the first three sections to find something appropriate.

I still had two leaf sections to make before I could be finished with this, but then I realized that I really couldn't fuse anything to the background. Look again at the image of the whole section:

The instructions state that if you are making the whole quilt (as I am), you are not supposed to make any of the three branches, nor cut three out of the five leaf sections until you are ready to sew all of the sections together. The branches and leaves will overlap other sections, and so there are replacement pieces for those. And since I wasn't making all the leaves nor any of the branches, I couldn't really fuse anything to the background.

With that in mind, I just laid out the pieces sort of where they'll go on the background, and then packed them away in envelopes and sandwich bags until I'm ready to use them.

I've done this with 3 out of the 4 sections I've done, and I've been careful about my organization and labeling of things. Hopefully, it will all go together in the end, although I'm not optimistic. I've been disappointed with the instructions for the individual sections and appalled at the number of errors I've found in the pattern. When I found so many errors in the last section, I wrote an email to McKenna Ryan in which I praised her beautiful designs, and then enumerated the errors I'd found. I was even nice, despite my serious level of frustration. There was no response. Last I checked (just now), these errors were not listed on her website. Go figure. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that.

Anyhow, below is the fifth section, and the one I'll tackle when I work on this again. This one is called "Best of Show".

When that one is finished, I'll have all of the top portion of the quilt finished, and I'll be able to start sewing it together.

And that is that. January's list. The end.