A Close Call

We finished our grocery shopping yesterday, and let me tell you...it was a long list. No buttermilk though, and we need buttermilk for our Sunday morning blueberry oatmeal pancakes. Oh, the humanity! One of us will no doubt make another trip into town in the meantime, and we can look for it again. 

When the groceries were all put away, and we'd swallowed our liquid caffeine supplements, I got to work on my slow-stitching. My goal for the day was to sew the chicken and egg buttons on the little Rise & Shine wall-hanging. As I've mentioned, I wanted to do the sewing through the quilt sandwich so that the buttons would act as little ties. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm a messy embroiderer. My backs are atrocious, but since I'm making quilt blocks, I'm not too worried about how the back is going to look. For this, I wanted the back to look neat and tidy, so here's what I did.

Okay, so I apologize for the poor quality of this image. The autofocus focused on the background instead of the floss. In explanation, I cut a generous length of floss, and then put the two cut ends together to thread through the eye of the needle. So the cut ends are through the needle, and the opposite end is a loop.

So then, bring your needle up through the hole in your button (with great difficulty finding the hole, I might add), but don't pull it all the way. You want to leave the loop on the back .

Then, stitch down through all three layers...

and then run your needle through the loop on the back.

My background fabric makes it a little hard to see what's going on here, but when you pull the loop tight, you have a nice tidy "knot" for your back with no tails.

Then, just take as many loops around your button as you think will hold it fast. When you bring your needle to the back for the last time, run the loose ends of thread a distance between the layers of the sandwich to bury them.

Clip the excess, and you have a nice little tidy knot on the back.

On the front...one button, sewn on.

When I finished sewing on all the buttons, it looked like this.

Okay, so here's where the close call comes in. I briefly took leave of my senses and thought about hand quilting this. I'm still not ready to stitch the Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs block, and so I figured hand quilting this would give me some time to make up that block. Then I considered the needs of my thumb, not to mention my sanity, and decided instead to stitch another small piece I made up when we left on our trip. I'll put the Rise and Shine quilt away for the moment, and machine quilt it in the next month or so. In the meantime, I'll stitch this little "Bee Brave" block.

It was created by Gail Pan for a Facebook group known as Love & Hugs from Australia. It's a private group, and so you'd have to "join" to participate. All the files for the whole quilt can be found there. I didn't save all the blocks for the quilt, but there were a few that were very appealing.

After nearly making a terrible mistake by taking up a hand quilting project, I decided I should go do something for the birds. I filled their feeders and hung up the shiny new baffle we got to protect the seed feeder from the rain. The blue jays were ecstatic.

And then as a huge safety precaution, I decided I'd better get that next Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs block made up before I engaged in some catastrophic decision-making. The 10th block is this one: A Chat with the Cat. Seems completely appropriate, doesn't it? Cats to the rescue.

By the time I finished sewing for the day, I had all the applique fused and the embroidery traced out.

When I head into the sewing room today, it'll be to do the top-stitching. After that, it will be ready for hand-stitching. And, phew! That was a very close call.

When I went back upstairs, I found my little cat Sadie soaking up the afternoon sunshine coming in through the sliding glass doors. Sadie is a flopping cat. The happier she is, the more she flops, which makes it hard to get a good picture of her...one without any blur.

So I'm going to attempt some housework today for the first time since I broke my shoulder. The place sure needs a good cleaning, but I'm starting small. No doubt, one task will wear me out, and then I'll get busy sewing. But first, I'm going to get started on that Bee Brave block. Maybe it'll shore up the courage of my shoulder and thumb for the housekeeping chore I'm going to attempt.

When it comes to hand-quilting...stay safe, my friends. And Happy St. Patrick's Day!