Hotel Catifornia

There was a lot to do yesterday with watering, bird feeding, laundry, and housekeeping chores, but it didn't stop me from my morning stitching routine or other sewing. Today will be different. Sue and I are getting together for our final walk until next Spring. She has a birthday coming up in a week or so, and that means we're meeting for breakfast too. After breakfast, we'll take a walk that will be new to her. After that, I need to pick up tomatoes from the farmers. This weekend...tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, and more tomatoes. By this time tomorrow, I'll be up to my elbows in tomatoes.

As for yesterday's sewing, I spent about twice as long as usual on my morning slow stitching. This one is about 60% finished now.

Time is running short if I'm going to finish it by the end of the month, but I'm still thinking I can do it.

When I made my way into the sewing room, my first order of business was to make this week's Monday Mini.

Not one of my better efforts with the points on that shoofly, but oh well. These are practice and learning, and, obviously, I need more practice and more learning.

Then I got to work on the 7th block for It's Raining Cats and Dogs. The first step with these is to make the background. This is a large block at 17.5 x 20.5 inches.

Next, I fused all the pieces for the Kitty Hotel.

Each section of the block has some embroidery and embellishing to complete. I'll get to work on that later this afternoon.

Sitting to the right of the hotel is this sad little dog. It makes me wonder if dogs should be a protected category of citizens.

On the other hand, Smitty asks if there are any off-leash cat parks in existence.

Smitty is a liberal democat, and so he has very strong feelings on this topic. He has a point. He might take to Twitter to lodge a protest...if he had a Twitter account...and thumbs.

Then I added the kitty flourish at the top.

I might decide to change the cat on the right. The color barely shows against the light background. A darker green might be in order. If I can pull it up easily, I will. If not, I'll just top-stitch it in a bright green thread to bring it out a little more. The green cats both have an embroidered collar, and all of them will have hot fix nailheads added for eyes.

When that was complete, all the fusing was finished.

By that time, I was ready to quit for the day. When I get home today, I'll try to finish off the embellishing, embroidery, and top-stitching. If I can finish off this block, I'll move along to another row of blocks on the Mulligan Stew quilt.