Chicken Quilting

It was a day to relax here at the Traveling Three Cats Ranch. It was the first day since arriving in Pahrump that there was nothing on our agenda. I spent part of my day quilting the Rise & Shine quilt. I should have known better than to sew on the buttons before it was quilted. They got in my way a little bit. It was possible to raise the presser foot over the top of them and quilt where I wanted to, but the job would have gone faster and easier if I'd heeded my own simple rules. Oh well...live and learn...and then do whatever you feel like doing, even if you've learned you shouldn't.

This is a small quilt, and so there wasn't a lot of room to do very much. I stippled around the words and the little embroidered stitches. I gave the sun some rays between the embroidered ones.

I echoed the embroidery stitching by quilting some little arches there, and then I went around the outside with a wavy line.

The first border is only about an inch wide. I quilted some meandering chicken tracks there.

And some larger ones around the outside border. I was wishing I had a different color of thread here, but I went with what I'd used for the rest...a sort of ecru color.

And it didn't take long before it was finished.

It's hard to see the quilting from the back, but here's how it looks. I like that chicken feed fabric. I have a larger scrap quilt at home for quilting, and I used this for the backing fabric on that quilt.

There is still one more small quilt to quilt, and so I'll hold off switching the foot on the sewing machine until all the quilting is done. When I'm ready to sew on bindings, I'll be using the brown you see on the right of the image below.

Smitty was my sleepy sewing cat yesterday.

And let me just tell you, this is an exhausting job for a cat. He needed a nap after all that.

Even the woofie across the way was exhausted after working so hard. The woofie's name is Reggie. Smitty and Sadie both know he's just a stupid woofie, and they don't care what his name is. He yips and barks and makes all kinds of noise. But then...woofies. What are you going to do?

Okay, so there's still one more quilt for quilting in my bundle of projects. This is the "Never Enough Cats" quilt. It's destined to be hung in the Mewseum back home when it's finished. It's been folded and squashed until it has some deep wrinkles in it. I hung it over the bed yesterday to help the wrinkles to relax out of it. 

Probably I won't get to this until Sunday. And isn't the Super Bowl this Sunday? It'll be a good project for while Mike is watching the game.

It was a lovely afternoon, and so I sat outside to work on the 7th blackwork basket. It's been a couple of days since I did anything with this. I was able to fill in my hoop.

It's about halfway finished now. I'll probably spend some time with it today again.

While I sat outside, a hummingbird visited the feeder. It's not a very good picture of him, but there you go anyway.

As I'm writing this, I have some Baked Apple-Blueberry Oatmeal in the oven. It's a good recipe for when I want to use up some milk. Mike and I don't drink a lot of milk, and so I only buy quart-sized cartons when we do our grocery shopping. Occasionally, I'm forced to buy a half-gallon, and then I worry we can't use it fast enough. Enter this recipe, and it's a tasty way to use up some of that excess milk from the refrigerator.

The day's inchy is probably posted now, and so that's where you'll find me after breakfast. It's going to be another unscheduled day. I expect I'll get out for a walk at some point. The weather has been lovely while we've been here in Pahrump. I hope some of you are enjoying some warmer weather too.