End of the Rainbow and a Winner!

It's time to choose a winner for my most recent giveaway of the 20 Little Patchwork Quilts book. Mr. Random was roused from his Sunday morning slumber long enough to announce:

#46--Stitches

Congratulations, Stitches! I've sent you an email, so check your inbox. And thanks to all of you who played along in last week's giveaways. Your kind comments were very much appreciated.

As for yesterday, there was a little more productivity on the sewing front. I even did a little housework. First, I finished stitching all that I could on the Appalachian Memories quilt...

and then I was ready to move the hoop to the left. There was just a little bit of grass to stitch on the lowest part of the piece.

I stitched that first, which allowed me to position my hoop to encompass the last of it.

There's still quite a bit to do on this, and so it's doubtful that I'll finish it today. Sometimes I surprise myself though, so who's to say?

After that I sewed together the strips for the final blocks of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Here are the browns I chose for December.

After they were trimmed up, I laid them out with their black and white corner triangles. If you have sharp eyes, you might notice those two at the top and in the middle are facing the wrong way. I had to sew one of them onto the brown piece before I discovered it. It gave my lazy seam ripper something to do.

When they were finished they looked like this:

And then I was very curious to see the whole thing laid out. It's pretty big now, and hard to get a good picture. Nevertheless, I think you can see how it's going to look when it's all sewn into a flimsy. There are no borders, and so what you see here is what the finished quilt will look like.

I want to rearrange the blocks a little. I had them stacked to try to get a good mix, but you can see that the blues and aquas all ended up in rows together. Also, the light and dark greens are side by side. I'll shuffle them around a little before they're sewn together.

I took a break then and did some housework...anything to avoid the dreaded Wind in the Whiskers quilting. It occurred to me as I contemplated my future that the thing most distressing about this was this section where the iris applique had come all apart. I don't really know why this didn't stick at least as well as its neighbors. I can only guess there was something wrong with the fusible I used here. These pieces were probably all fused at the same time and from the same section of Heat 'n Bond. I've never had such a drastic failure before, but there you go.

It was all pinned together to avoid losing all the pieces, but one was already lost when I discovered this disaster. Enter the product below...606, cousin of 505. This product has saved my bacon more than once. It's a spray on fusing medium. I laid down some large sheets of parchment and then carefully sprayed the pieces that came loose. Also, I remade the center section of the iris that was missing.

And, voila! All better now. With that repaired, I'm feeling much better about this project, although I'm still dreading it...just with a little less misery mixed in.

Also, since my last session with it, I've discovered a smaller needle for my mid-arm machine. I can't remember what had me reading the manual for the machine last time around, but I noticed to my complete surprise that 80/12 size needles were available. And so I checked in with my good friend Amazon and found some there. This will help with the size of the needle holes left behind as I stitch around the edges of those batik applique pieces.

So now I have the new smaller needle loaded onto the machine, threaded, and poised to start quilting this morning. I suppose I could have started right then and there, but why do a dreaded task today when you can put it off for one more day? It's my life's motto, and I've survived since the 14th Century. No reason to change now. Am I right about that?

My cat agrees. We decided to take advantage of the dry weather and fill the bird feeders. He's a willing partner in anything related to birds.

That's a handsome hunka mancat there...a veritable stud muffin...wouldn't you agree?

So no more messing around...it's going to be all quilting all the time today. I'm hoping to be well along finishing up Wind in the Whiskers by day's end. But first, Sunday morning pancakes. If I have my way, it's going to be a good day here at the Three Cats Ranch. Be gone with you, thread tension issues!