Something New

Yesterday was a mostly sewing day, and I'm off to a good start on the Marine Corps quilt. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the center panel gave me a little bit of trouble. There were nine small panels and three larger ones that were to be sewn together with sashing. This would have been easier if the pattern had included some cutting dimensions, but it did not. I'm suspicious this part was left out because the panels were already cut into sizes that would not accommodate the necessary measurements. And so this required some (gasp) math to figure out. The kitties helped me check my figuring.

Smitty did the measuring...

while Sadie read the instructions.

When we had it this far, they decided naps were in order, and left me to do the rest of it.

After that, I added another border in order to get it to the 21-1/2 x 40-1/2 inches I needed to make the tulip quilt pattern work out.

From there, I could begin to add borders. There will be 17 borders in all. Two of the borders are pieced rows of Friendship stars, and there will be 92 of those. When I finished for the day, I had the first three borders attached.

Looking ahead, the 6th border is three inches wide, and I hoped I'd have enough of that blue star fabric to use it again. Before leaving the sewing room for the day, I pieced together the 6th border. It might have a few more seams than I'd like ordinarily, but it used what remained of that fabric. The extra seams will disappear once the whole is finished and quilted.

The kitties are calling this the "Purrine Corps" quilt. They think it is for them.

I'm going to name it after the Marine Corps motto, "Semper Fidelis," which translates from Latin into "always faithful."

We had a bit of a disaster yesterday morning. When Mike went to open the garage door, he discovered a spring had broken. Even the two of us working together could not lift the door open. He contacted a company to come fix it, and they were Johnny-on-the-spot getting the job done. He called them around 9:15 a.m., and a guy was here to do the work by 10:00 a.m. It was all finished about an hour and $$$ later.

While I was getting him installed in the garage to fix the door, I took a picture of our red leaf maple tree. The two trees have lost about half their leaves now, but you can see how brilliant red they are.

This morning Sue and I are walking for the first time in many weeks. I'm hoping we'll see more fall leaves along the way. I'll spend the afternoon sewing more borders on the Semper Fidelis quilt. At some point, I'll need to start piecing the 92 Friendship stars together. With none done...not even any cutting...it's sounding a little forbidding.