Catty

Yesterday I finished making the nine 4-patch blocks for the Mumm's the Word quilt, and that completes section 4 of 6 sections for this quilt. 

The pattern is free on the internet and was created in 2012 to celebrate Debbie Mumm's 25 years of design. When I finish the next section (sometime in the 22nd century, no doubt...if I live that long), all the blocks will be made and I'll move onto finishing it. For now, I'm just happy to be checking this long-time monthly goal off my list for at least a little while.

After that, I got to work on another long-time monthly goal. I finished the little aprons for the Mom Cats doll quilt. This was a quilt I started for the Let's Book It challenge way back in April of 2014 from this book by Janet Kime:

When I worked on this quilt last time, I'd taken it to the finished top, but it still needed to add aprons to the cats. 

These were made from vintage hankies that belonged to my grandmother. I wrote a whole post about her hankies and doilies. If you're interested, you can read about them right here.

The book was colossally unhelpful in giving me instructions for how to accomplish this. In the end, I cut the corners off the hankies, hemmed them, and then used a machine satin stitch to attach them to the quilt top. Then I hand-sewed a little ribbon to each cat to finish them off.

I wonder if I'll be sorry I attached the aprons before quilting, but I didn't see any other way to do it. Certainly, I didn't want that satin stitch showing on the back of my quilt.

The quilt in the book is quilted with a simple diagonal grid that does not include the cats. I'm thinking I'll probably do a small stipple all over and call it good, but I haven't decided for sure. That decision can wait while I consider my options.

With that finished, I started to sew the Vintage Kitchen quilt together, but only got as far as trimming the embroidered blocks. I was getting kind of tired of sewing by that time, and so I stopped for the day.

Tomorrow is this little boy's birthday:

Is he the most precious thing you've ever seen? Somehow between last week and this week, he got this old:

and even older because that picture was taken more than a year ago. And, as you might guess, I'm no longer the main woman in his life. How do these things happen anyway?

So all of that to say that I'm taking him to breakfast for his birthday tomorrow. We're having a family get-together on Sunday to celebrate too. He has tomorrow off from work, however, and so we're going to breakfast. It will give me a chance to deliver his quilt and some other goodies for his birthday. He'll be 36, and that's just way too old, if you ask me. How can I possibly have a child that old?

The day is drawing to a close. This morning I did my grocery shopping, and today I put my housekeeping chore after sewing. I guess I'll do that next. It's been a pretty relaxing day today, which is always nice.