Happy First Day of Spring!

Good morning, and welcome to Spring, 2022, my friends! We're looking for our weather to warm up significantly over the next week, but we still have a few more days of cold and wet to get through. We had a nice sunny afternoon yesterday, although it was a little too cold to be outside much. This guy was happy for the sunshine.

My day got started with the usual slow-stitching. I've stitched all the way across the bottom of the latest Calendula Patterdrip block.

There's still a long way to go on this one.

I'll be making my way back across now, from right to left, and I'll just keep going...back and forth until it's finished.

With Spring here, it seems like a good time to be making blocks for the French Roses quilt. I wasn't sure how many of these I wanted to make when I started. They're a little tedious, and so I decided to stop with my original goal of five per go-round.  Here are the five I made yesterday:

Fabrics are chosen randomly, and only for their size and how they contrast with the fabric that came before.

As I dig through my scraps, I'm looking for ones I haven't yet used, and I'm still finding some new ones.

Sadie was encouraged to help from a distance.

Smitty was there, offering up his guidance too.

When I was far enough along, Sadie thought it was safe to leave me on my own, and she settled down for a nap.

There were still two more to make.

And here's the last one of the day.

There will be 5 rows of 5 blocks when they're all finished. Here are the 20 blocks I have for this quilt so far.

With another row finished, I'm ready to move on to the last project on my list of WIPs...the Ties & Tails quilt. Today I'll get started making another "fat cat." Here's the picture from the pattern cover. 

If you've been following for a long time, you might recognize this as a George cat, aka Captain Cat-tastic.

We're going to do our best to honor his memory with this quilt block.

The Ties & Tails blocks usually take a day or two to make. When I've finished with this one, I'll be ready to start on my next art quilt for The Endeavourers. I spent a little time in preparation yesterday, pulling fabrics from my stash. (I have some good ones for this project.) There is no prompt for this quilt, and so we've been left on our own, trying to sort through bazillions of possibilities. Also, we don't have to wait for the reveal to talk about it. And I don't know about you, but the more choices I have, the harder it is to make up my mind. I finally settled on doing a less familiar technique of thread painting, or thread sketching. I'm not exactly sure which one I'm doing, but I'll be using a lot of thread. Let's just stick with that for now. 

A long time ago, my friend, Kathy, gave me permission to render into fabric one of her watercolor paintings. Kathy and her husband are missionaries with their church and spent some time in Peru a few years ago. This is one of her paintings from that time.

It's good subject matter for the technique I want to use, but I'll also be making it in support of Ukraine, which is what helped me get over the line in my decision-making process. It won't help the people of Ukraine at all, but it will help me channel some of my feelings about it. That's probably enough said until I actually start working on it.

Okay, so I'm the only one out of bed at this early hour. Time to work on my slow-stitching while the house is still quiet. Kitties await the formation of my lap.