Snow Sewing

It was delightful to receive our first significant snowfall in three winters here on the hill yesterday. It was raining in the valley when we trekked down later in the day, but there is still snow here on high. The temperatures are warming, and so it's wet and slushy at this point, but there's still enough accumulation to make it nice to look out.

Keeping in mind that most of my sewing is done in a windowless basement sewing room, how much fun is this?

Eliza is set up in my upstairs office, right next to the window. When Eliza came home with us, I had a choice of putting her either place, and so I opted to put her right next to this window. The extra light and the view are great. This is what I saw when I looked out yesterday...big fat flakes fell most of the day.

It was this youngster's first snowfall. He'd been downstairs sleeping, but we woke him up to give him a look. Whoa...what's that?

He took exactly two steps out before heading back into the warmth of indoors.

In general, cats are not fond of snow, although one of our cats from the past absolutely loved it.

So what was I sewing? It was a perfect day to be quilting the Icy Blues table runner. I stuck with this swirly loopy design for all of the trees.

These table runners are functional, but they're also good pieces for practicing. I took the opportunity to try quilting straight lines with this new ruler template. My first lines weren't as evenly spaced as I would have liked, and so I tried marking each end with a hash mark where I could line up my ruler. They were slightly better, but I need more practice before trying this on my Quilting Snowladies.

I tried quilting some snowdrifts below the trees, but I think they need to be a bit lumpier and less level.

For the area below the smaller trees, I did some pebbling and I gave their trunks a little squarely-que...that's different from a curly-que, don't you know.

The little trees were quilted like the larger ones.

Also, I quilted some snowflakes along their sides and also into the outer border.

After quilting most of the day, I was getting tired, but I wanted to finish up with the white thread on top so that I could switch to this blue Glitter thread and quilt snowflakes next to the larger trees.

It seemed like a good time to give this blue Glitter thread a try.

And there it is...so pretty!

There will be 12 snowflakes quilted before I'm finished, but I was tired of sewing by the time I did this first one. I'll pick it up there today.

It was another early morning wake-up followed by a morning nap after Mike left for work. It's time to get going on some other things if I'm to get any time for sewing today.

The countdown to the end of the year is coming. If I can finish up the Icy Blues by New Year's Eve, it will be my 30th finished quilt in 2015.