Reaching for the Stars

Yesterday's effort made up for my day of sloth on Friday. Quite a bit was accomplished on the sewing front. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I had nothing to stitch, and only typing my blog post to keep my fingers occupied. Well...and petting kitties, of course. There are always kitties demanding their lap time.

Stitching Cat was very worried about the no-stitching-project state of things yesterday, and so it was impurrtant to get to work tracing out my next project.

This is the first plate for the Pieces of the Past quilt. This will be a long, long, long term project, I'm afraid. There are nine plates, 16 crazy quilt blocks (each with hand embroidery), and two large center panels. There is a whole lot of hand work on this quilt, but I think it will be pretty when it's finished.

It was a little difficult seeing the lines to trace on the fairy frost fabric. When it was finished, there was also some coloring to do.

I realized later, I added the yellow around the edge of the plate to the wrong area. It was supposed to go inside that squiggly line, but no matter. I like it as it is. From there, it was ready for stitching.

I stitched enough to see all the colors that will be used for this plate. It's looking pretty so far.

I have an idea this one will stitch up pretty quickly.

From there, I moved into the sewing room and added three more borders to the Semper Fidelis quilt.

This was done under the watchful eye of Sadie. As I've mentioned before, she likes to do her quilt inspection from afar. She gets a better purrspective that way.

Smitty, on the other paw, likes to be closer to the action. He helped me make decisions about the colors to use in the borders, and then he helped me recheck my calculations about substituting friendship stars for tulips in this pattern.

And then he helped hold the fabric in place so I could get accurate cuts.

With his help, I cut all the squares I'll need for 92 friendship stars.

These seemed entirely too vulnerable to prying paws...

and so I left them under a protective dome when I left the sewing room for the day.

Yesterday, the backing fabric for this quilt was delivered. I really like this fabric for the quilt back, and it gave me the idea to use some gray borders on the front as well. It was out of stock when I first looked at it, but more came in and I claimed my share of it.

Today I'll get started on the friendship stars. I decided to break it into smaller bites by doing enough stars for a side at a time. For example, the two side borders each have nine stars, and so I'll make just nine to start, then nine more. The top and bottom borders each have eight stars, and so I'll do those eight at a time. And that is just the first pieced border. There is another one as I continue adding more borders. Trimming all those half square triangles can give me an aching hand, and so it seems prudent (make that "purrudent") to do them in small doses.

Also, Matthew is coming by today. He wants to use our garage to do some work on his van, and so I expect my sewing day will be interrupted to spend some time with him. I invited him to stay and have dinner with us. Things could definitely be worse. Maybe I'll do one small housekeeping chore, but mostly, it's going to be another sewing day. I love a leisurely weekend, don't you?