Three Corner Cats

It was an early start to the day. I was awake somewhere in the 3:00 a.m. range, and couldn't get back to sleep. It seems I have about one day out of the week like this. There's usually something to blame. For now, I'm blaming our dark days. The sky is only just now becoming light and it's nearly 8:00 a.m. We're fairly high up on the planet, latitude-wise, and since we're still on daylight saving time, our mornings are dark. I pulled this chart off the internet just now showing our sunrise and sunset hours at this time of year.

You can see that we're getting less than 10 1/2 hours of daylight right now, and it will be down to 10 hours in about a week. That means we spend nearly 14 hours in darkness. Then, by day, we're shrouded in thick cloud cover, and so there is never much light. It might be time to break out the light therapy box. It will help when we go back to standard time, but that won't improve the cloud cover. These early starts usually mean a morning nap, and I think Sadie has the right idea.

Like all the cats I've ever known, she loves the quilts. She's looking pretty cozy there. I'll probably join her in a few minutes.

But let's back up to yesterday, shall we? Right after writing to you, I was excited to do the next part on the Sunflower Sampler that I'm stitching along with Lori Kennedy. The second part was to add the petals around the flower center.

Maybe I shouldn't have stitched it so fast because now I have to wait a whole week for the next part. Presumably, we'll start filling in the empty sections around the flower.

After that, I finished off the fourth corner of the 88 nine-patch blocks. (This seems to be my week for corners.)

And then, I was ready to start sewing the quilt top together. Here's the first block.

It didn't take long before I had the top row finished.

Hopefully, I'll finish the second and third rows today. When those are done, the rows will be sewn together with a horizontal strip of  13 nine-patches each...one between each row and another at the top and bottom. After that, it'll just be borders. It's getting close.

So what did I do in those predawn hours this morning? I stitched and stitched and stitched around the third corner of the binding for the cats. I'm a little more than halfway around, but I'd like to point out that 75% of the corners are finished.

And there you have it. (Yawn.) Think I'll join Sadie on the couch now for an epilogue to last night's sleep.