Stitchery, Ditchery, Dock

This morning has been devoted to stitching and preparing for stitching. The Gazebo Square block is finished. This is the fifth of nine blocks for the Gingerbread Square quilt.

Cute, huh?

The next time I work on this (probably in December or January), I'll be stitching the Candy Cane Quilt Shop.

With that one finished, I needed something for tomorrow's slow stitching session. It's time to get started on this month's blocks for the Live, Love, Teach quilt. I'll be doing Amber and Zane's block next. 

This one is straight stitching in black floss. Last month's blocks were some of the more challenging in the whole quilt, while this month's blocks are relatively simple. When I started on this, I was shuffling through the many pages of block submissions and choosing the ones I most wanted to do. At some point, I recognized that was a bad idea because I was going to be left with a pile of the ones I least wanted to do. Now I'm just taking the next ones from the top of the stack so that I get a good mix of challenging and simple. 

That won't take more than a day or two, and so I spent some time getting Block #3 for Hocuspocusville ready to go too. The next one is this fly-through witches' brew coffee block. These are so clever and creative.

I started to trace it out in black, and then remembered the problems I'd had on the last block with the ink smearing on this particular fabric for some reason. I've determined through testing that it is the fabric and not the ink, and so now I've switched to brown ink. At least if it smears, it won't be as noticeable on that cream-colored background. I've had to monkey a little with the contrast on this next image to make the tracing show up.

These are all stitched in black floss, but I've been adding orange to all the pumpkins on the previous blocks. I want to add a little orange to each of them, but as you can see, there are no pumpkins on this block. I'll probably do the banner across the top in orange, and while it makes sense to do a black cat, I'm going to stitch this cat in orange as a remembrance of our sweet George.

If you're new to this blog, then you need to know that George was Gracie's litter mate, and one of the original cats of the Three Cats Ranch. Sadly, he had an autoimmune disorder known as Pemphigus that shortened his life. He was much loved while we had him.

George was a mild-mannered cat by day. By night, he was a crime fighter who went by the nom de guerre of "Captain Cat-tastic". He also wrote a blog for a short time, but had to give it up when his crime-fighting adventures kept him too busy to write. You can read Captain Cat-tastic's blog by clicking on his button:

As for Gracie, she survived her trip to the vet yesterday. She just needed her immunizations and so it was a quick trip. This morning, she's firmly ensconced on her throne as she should be.

There are a few housekeeping chores to do today, but otherwise, I'll continue working on the Wind in the Whiskers quilt. I should be able to finish up this section today, and then I'll have to decide if I have enough nerves left to sew all the completed sections together. That will be tomorrow's news.

What's going on at your place today?