Taking a Quilting Breather

Well, it seems I've gone and done it...quilted beyond my physical limits. When I went to bed last night, my hands and wrists were hurting so much I could barely move them. I slept with splints on both wrists. This morning, my right hand feels pretty much back to normal, but the left is still too painful to use. Clearly, I'm going to have to take a break from quilting today, and maybe from sewing altogether. I'll give a try to sewing with the splint on, but wearing it is awkward. As with so many things, it will be an experiment.

I took a walk outside yesterday morning. We had to set a squirrel trap in the greenhouse. The squirrels have been in there again, and they ate three of the six cucumber plants I had in there. They also ate every single one of my sunflowers, which was disappointing. When I checked the trap yesterday morning, I found this guy:

He's been relocated to a different zip code now, and the trap is reset. Possibly, he's the only intruder, but we'll keep the trap set up just in case.

I checked on the cruel peony yesterday. These next pictures are three different buds.

I told myself I thought they'd progressed further toward opening than in previous years.

They're still not looking very promising.

Then, in my Facebook memories this morning, this collage popped up from last year.

It looks just the same to me. I don't think it's going to bloom this year either. And that will be the end of it. I'm not moving it and trying again somewhere else. I'm replacing it. I might start shopping for a new one right after I finish here. 

After that, I got busy on my quilting. The first of yesterday's blocks was done with dot-to-dot quilting.

To its right, the bird house was mostly stippled, but I did some more dot-to-dot quilting in the corner triangles, and made some shape lines on the flower petals.

I quilted some meandering bird feet on the sides of the bird house. Birds defy gravity all the time. Why not have them walking on the sides of structures?

I treated the last two blocks as one, with some loopy meandering in the background, veins in the leaves, and more shape lines in the other flowers and in the pumpkin.

With that, I've completed four of five rows. I'd dearly love to get back to it again today and finish off all the quilt blocks, but really, if I'm being smart, I'll take a day off and give my wrists a rest. 

In the sewing room, Smitty was Johnny-on-the-spot to assist me with my quilt block sewing.

I'm having a hard time coming up with enough contrast in my off-white fabrics for these blocks. I resorted to using the wrong side of one of the fabrics in the pinwheel below. I'll probably do that with some of the blocks I make today.

I needed another variation on a 9-patch. 

And I needed a bow tie.

I started sewing the blocks together at that point, but then realized I still needed one more nine-patch.

And then I had them all. I sewed the entirety of Section 7 together.

Before I can do any tracing of the embroidery motif, I'll need to make Section 8. There aren't so many blocks for this one.

When I have it finished and sewn to Section 7, I'll be finished with the background, and I'll be ready to trace the embroidery design. It was tempting to keep going, but I was getting tired of sewing, and my left wrist was starting to scream.

In other non-quilting news, a guy from the construction company came by for a few minutes yesterday. Sometimes I think these little check-in visits are mainly to appease us. He explained the carpet situation, which is that he took a sample of our carpet that will be analyzed for quality, and that will give us our cost allowance when we choose the new stuff. He recommended renting a POD for moving all our furniture into during the installation process. Apparently this is covered by insurance. And then he took some measurements and left. Now, we're waiting for the carpet analysis, but otherwise, nothing is scheduled. I sincerely hope it isn't another week before someone does something. This process has been slow as molasses from the get-go. It would be nice to have things put back in order...soon. But I think we're past any possibility of "soon" at this point.

From here, I'll start working on my slow-stitching. It might be all slow, all the time for me today. I believe I can hold my embroidery hoop, but I haven't actually tried. It's a bummer having my hands hurt like this, and I know the only thing that will help is rest. So off I go to rest my wrist. Stitching will be optional, and as tolerated.