A Sewing Day

It was nice to have a day at home with nothing on the agenda except to sew. For now, my morning slow-stitching consists of the quilt binding for Appalachian Memories. I turned the third corner yesterday.

I don't know if I can finish this today since I'm taking off relatively early. Probably it will take another day. Still, it's important to be prepared. I don't want a stitching emergency, and so I traced and colored the 9th of nine plates for the Pieces of the Past quilt.

In a stitching emergency, there should be no delays, and so I have it hooped up and ready to receive it's first poke of the needle.

From there, it was time to finish the quilt top for An Irish Blessing. I finished the embroidery for this some time ago. This is one of the projects I'm going to take with me when we head south. So, here's where I started.

It still needed a flange...

and then it needed an outer border. This took longer than expected, but not because I didn't have excellent snoopervision.

I needed to make 18 of these little nine-patches. These are 2-inches square.

Those were sewn into borders using some "spacers."

And then, I added them to the quilt top, and it was finished.

I'll be taking this one along for free motion quilting on the road. It's a small quilt at 15 x 19 inches. This next fabric will be my quilt back.

It's sandwiched for quilting now.

The binding strips are cut...there, on the right.

And now it's packed up with two more of its fellow small quilts to head south for quilting. I'm also taking the Rise & Shine quilt:

and the Never Enough Cats quilt.

These are all small quilts, and so Pfelicity, my travel machine, should be able to handle them with ease.

I was getting tired of sewing by then, and so I decided to pack up one more quilt to be finished on the road. I'm taking several projects where all the blocks are complete, and they just need to be sewn into a finished quilt top. City Bank is one of those. This one doesn't have any borders or anything else fancy. While we're on the road, I'll sew the blocks together and then quilt it when we return home.

Some other projects will be cut ahead and then sewn into quilt tops on the road. Under my rotary cutter blade yesterday was Grandma's Thimbles. I needed to trim the blocks to size.

Sadie helped me calculate how much to cut off each edge. She's very purrcise in her measurements.

It needed borders, sashings, and cornerstones...all cut now.

And then it was packed into one of those pouches that new sheets come in. (Those pouches are great for take-along projects.)

There are still two more quilts for cutting and packing. I'll be taking along Posies to be sewn into a finished quilt top. It needs sashings and borders cut.

And I'll take along the finished Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs blocks. These will be sewn together and an outer border added. I still need to cut the outer border, and then it can be packed up too.

I'll probably pull some fabrics to make a mini quilt too, but I haven't decided on that yet. In any case, I should have plenty to keep me busy while we're traveling this winter.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned there were a couple of projects I wanted to finish before we leave. The Irish Blessing was one of them. The other is to quilt and bind the Tiny Tuesday quilt. Interestingly, I sewed this into a quilt top while we were traveling last winter.

It's second only to Appalachian Memories as my oldest UFO, and so it'll be good to finish it and get it off my list of to-do's. As I'm writing this, it's relaxing on my sewing chair, ridding itself of wrinkles. If only I could do that with my skin.

I'm leaning toward an all over design with this one, but I haven't made up my mind for sure yet. There probably won't be much time for sewing today. I'm meeting Sue for breakfast, and then getting my hair cut and permed. Yes...a yucky perm day, but my hair will thank me for it.

Right now, it's time to get some more sewing done on that quilt binding. What's going on at your end?