Productive Day

The weather has been lovely, and I've been blowing my opportunity for yard work by spending my time in the sewing room. But, oh, how I've been itching to get back into the sewing room. The season is young, and so I hope I won't regret this time. We're expecting rain beginning tomorrow and well into the future. Too bad it doesn't knock down those little virus bugs the way it knocks down dust.

So, here's what I did. My goal in 2020 is to finish a quilt top and to quilt one quilt per month. Once those two are finished, I can work on my other WIPs. In March, I'd hoped to quilt Farm Fresh Eggs and to piece together a top from the Stitch Sampler. And, well, mission accomplished. Both were small quilts, and so I was able to get them both done yesterday.

Starting with the Stitch Sampler, I first cut the two pieces to the same size. These patterns can be found on the Crabapple Hill Studios website. They're not meant to be together, but I stitched them as practice on some of the fancier stitches. I wanted to put both together into a wall hanging or a little runner.

I added a pale yellow flange to each piece.

And then I gave them a pink border. It ended up at 16-1/2 inches by 25-1/2 inches...probably a little runner size.

For the binding strips, I had a pink stripe picked out. It was too much pink, and so I decided on this green stripe instead.

Also, I cut and pieced this backing leftover from the cut-off ends from another project.

And then I tossed it onto the quilts to be sandwiched pile. No ceremony was held.

After that, it was time to get to work on the little Farm Fresh Eggs project. This pattern can be found on the Bird Brain Designs website. I saw it on Instagram, and was instantly smitten. I had to buy it and stitch it immediately. Now it's just waiting for its chance to be turned into a wall-hanging. So, I first needed to quilt it, and then trim it. Here's when the help showed up.

It was simply quilted. I put a tightly wound feather around the outside of the stitching.

And then a free-hand diagonal grid around the outer border.

When it was ready for binding, it looked like this.

Sadie helped me work out the math on the binding. I chose a leftover binding from my scrap binding bag.

Little cats love little quilts.

And, to you non-cats out there, Sadie would like to say that any job worth doing is worth doing with claws extended. Consider this your tip for the day.

When the binding was sewn on, it looked like this. Today I'll get to work hand-sewing the binding. It shouldn't take long.

Here's how it looks from the back.

After so much helping, Sadie had a little nip...

and then a little nap.

The whiteboard in my sewing room needed updating. Here's my year laid out with months assigned to various projects.

These are readyfor quilting. You can see that nearly the whole year is mapped out already. Sorry for the blur. I had to shoot without flash in order to avoid a reflection.

These are quilts that need sandwiching, but really...there isn't much point when I have so many in line ahead of them. The smaller ones will probably get done sooner.

And I didn't spend the whole day in the sewing room. I got Handsome out for a walk. He ate grass until I thought he'd start looking like a scarecrow. He really is loving his walks, even if he is on a leash. We tried getting Sadie out, but she won't allow us to put a harness on. Just looking at the harness seems to freak her out. She might have negative associations with it after the debacle in North Dakota a few years back. We'll keep trying, and we might try a different harness. We'd love to get her out, but she's an anxious little girl. It might not work.

While I was out, I got this shot of the flowering plum trees. These are ornamental trees only. The Italian prune plum tree is budded out, but not yet blooming.

Finally, I left the snowflake like this yesterday. Most of the darkest floss is stitched now, and I'll start working with the medium value soon.

With so much embroidery in this post, I'll link it up to

So that was my day yesterday. Today I'll get the hand stitching finished on Farm Fresh Eggs, and then I'll start working on some of the WIPs that were left behind when we started our trip. Probably my first priority is to finish making blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge from last year. I didn't start a new project this year because I want to focus on getting some of the others finished. If things continue as they are for very long, I'll probably have lots of time for sewing.