"Q" is for Qfinished!

It was kind of a busy day yesterday, but the afternoon was mine for quilting. We headed out early in the morning on a seek and destroy mission to find kennels for the kitties to travel in the camper. We headed to one of the big box pet stores, used our Amazon app to scan the barcodes, and then made our purchase from Amazon right there in the store. I know...we're putting those big box stores out of business in favor of the virtual store. Bad Consumers!

While we were there, we perused the kitty fashions. (Some people think these are for dogs.) Anyway...I think Sadie would make a real fashion statement dressed in either of these.

And don't you know Smitty would just *love* wearing one of these numbers.

When we got home, we had some lunch, and then I got back to my quilting. First, I switched to a variegated green thread for quilting grass into the grass.

After looking at a lot of examples, I decided on something simple and funky.

In a few random places, I stitched a weed.

It didn't take long to finish all eight blocks, and then I moved on to my camper border. First, I experimented on paper with sizes and shapes. Also, I experimented with the wheel. I wanted to end up at the bottom "road," and so I first drew the left half of the outer circle, then the camper, then a loop for the inner circle, then the right half of the outer circle, which put me back at the bottom.

Geez, Mom. Those are the worst looking campers I've ever seen. Do I have to do everything around here?

So then I was ready to mark some lines on my quilt. I wanted the campers to be approximately the same size and distance apart. I've experimented with all different kinds of markers, and I've not really found one I like for marking across a whole row of quilting. When I was at the fabric store on my lunch break from jury duty (never a minute wasted, you know), I checked the markers available. Of course I've heard of the Chaco marker before, but never tried it. I picked one up and gave it a whirl (pun intended).

Basically it's a pen with a powdered chalk container. I tried to take a picture of the tip so you could see it, but my camera simply refused to focus on the little "gear" at the tip. If you want to see it, there's a pretty good image here at The Daily Sew. It works by laying down a little dotted line of powdered chalk. It was first tested on the fabric to make sure it was removable, and it was. It's important to hold the pen vertical for best results. It laid down some nice easily-seen lines.

You can see a demonstration on YouTube:

If you can't see the video, then click right here.

So then, I was ready to quilt the campers.

Let's just say I'm keeping the "free" in free motion quilting.

The side borders are narrower than the top and bottom borders. Recall that I was trying to fit this into a small space on a wall before I gave up on that and decided it was better as a snuggle quilt.

And after rounding all four corners...

the quilting was finished!

Here's a view from the back.

I thought I might get some quilt inspectors, but in fairness, it was after 5:00 p.m. by this time, and they'd all gone home for the day.

Well, so then I went out to the greenhouse to see if I could find any tomatoes. One. I found one.

And that was very disappointing, if I wasn't already disappointed enough in the tomatoes. With this being July 18th, we're turning off their water. We'll be gone in just a little over a month, so clearly, this year's tomato harvest is a bust. Don't know why. This is the same variety I planted last year. It's okay. We can get all the tomatoes we need from our farmers, but this was such a waste of time, potting soil, and effort.

When I came out of the greenhouse, I noticed this deer in the field. She was clearly not happy with the bitter dandelions she was eating.

I heard there was echinacea in this field. Dandelions. Pittooey!

Speaking of echinacea...the pink ones are just at the edge of fully opened.

Oh! There it is!!

So, yeah. That's probably the last you'll see of those.

It's a short list of to-do's on today's calendar, and it's a CSA pick-up day. Other than that, it's an NBS (nothing but sewing) day. I'll get the binding sewn onto the Wheel Estate quilt, and then I'm going to try to get caught up on some other projects.