Cooking Quilt Blocks

It was a pretty low-key day yesterday. The weather was gray and wet, as expected. It's the same this morning, and it probably will be for the rest of the day. But (here, she bursts into song) the sun will come out tomorrow! If the forecast is accurate, we should be seeing some nice summer weather, and we are so ready for it! Watch out, weeds!

Ahem...okay, well back to the gray day stuff. I spent a little extra time on my embroidery and filled in my hoop.

Now all that's left is what you see here, although there are a few little bits I couldn't fit in the hoop. I'll start at the bottom, and then slide the hoop up a little bit. It aggravates my OCD parts when there are little bits outside the hoop.

For a day or two, I've been dragging my feet about the quilt block I made yesterday. The blocks for the New Mexico Kitchen quilt are challenging for several reasons. Fabrics were already selected, which is part of the challenge.

The first step is to make the background, which involves templates, and curved seams. And, honestly, I don't know why I was looking forward with such trepidation about this. It isn't hard, and I didn't even have to clip the curve to make it lie flat. 

The next step was to put on the name of the dish I was making. This took a bit of trial and error. The letters needed to be 3/4 of an inch away from all the edges, which meant several adjustments to fit them all in.

The rest went pretty easily.

Now, all the fusing is finished. It still needs top-stitching, and then I'll do a combination of machine and hand embroidery to fill in all the details. I'm hoping to have that part finished by this afternoon. I'll have to add fringe to the tablecloth, which is a bit tedious. I'm thankful I wrote on a previous post how I did it last time, so I won't have to reinvent the wheel. This time, I think I'll cut the fringe bits a little longer and then trim them off when I'm finished.

Yesterday's sewing was all accomplished under the watchful eye of Sadie, my snoopervisor.

She was settling in for a nap, and so she was kind of surprised when we finished up earlier than expected. 

It turned out okay since someone flashed the bat signal later in the evening. Both kitties thought this might mean an open door policy, but no. Catham City will have to do without the Batcat for today. Catrona virus, you know.

We were up early this morning because it's a grocery shopping day. I'm trying to get all my little morning things done before it's time to go. Our list is long for this trip. With Mike along to tend the cart, we can get it done pretty fast, and then the rest of our day is our own. I'll get back to the New Mexico Kitchen block later this afternoon. This morning, I'll do a little slow stitching. It helps me to steel myself for the grocery shopping trip ahead.