Write-Fast Friday

It's a walking day today, thus the title to "write fast." I think the Universe might have blessed us with a dry morning for our walk. We've decided to try walking from the other end of the Fanno Creek Trail today to see if we can avoid some of the flooding that will undoubtedly have occurred after the week's heavy rains. The temperatures were warm...what we call a Pineapple Express in these parts...but a lot of the wet stuff fell as well. We're expecting more. For today, at least, the forecast is for only a 10% chance of rain.

The alley cats are coming along. Yesterday I first fused down the stars and hearts. I'm afraid my fabrics are a little too busy for them to stand out very well, but I still like the fabrics I chose.

Experimenting with just one cat, I decided to top-stitch it using all black thread. There are three different stitches in this top-stitching. Around the edges of the appliques, I used a buttonhole stitch (or blanket stitch, if you like that better). Then I used a combination of regular straight stitch and triple stitch for the details. It made for a lengthy process of changing stitches and changing directions to stitch up this first guy.

While I was doing that, I got kind of curious about how the hearts and stars were going to look, and so I experimented with a double blanket stitch there and I used gold thread. I think that will help show them off a little better.

And then I switched back to the black thread and started stitching all around on the cats. Here's how the first corner looks.

After taking that picture, I decided to lay out the buttons to see how the whole thing will look.

One of you asked if Sadie would be miffed because I didn't include any cats with black noses. What do you think?

By day's end, I had all but one cat stitched.

Each cat took much longer than expected. I don't know about you, but I can't seem to keep from hunching my shoulders up when I'm doing something like this. By the end of the day, my shoulders and neck were screaming in agony. I feel fine today, but geez. I kept telling myself to bring in my elbows and relax my shoulders, but I could only seem to do that for about 30 seconds before I was all hunched up again. I have a Posture Pleaser by Bodyrite apparatus (for lack of a better word) Leah Day was touting a while back that's supposed to act as a reminder to keep one's shoulders down. It wasn't that helpful when I tried it before, but maybe I'll give it another try today.

But first...walking. Fingers crossed the forecast is correct and we don't get rained on.