A Day in the Life of Sadie

It was Sadie's turn to have a bad day yesterday. She needed her annual physical and her vaccines. We loaded her up fairly early for a trip to the vet, and she was not happy about it.

Everything was fine with her at the vet, but she will have to go back next month for a teeth cleaning. Sadly, she'll probably lose another one of her remaining teeth. We've been told that some cats are especially prone to periodontal problems, and she seems to be one of them. She's already lost three of her teeth, and so I hate to see her lose another. Hopefully, it won't come to that, but we won't know until she sees the kitty dentist.

She consented to help me with my quilting yesterday, but not before giving me an earful about her treatment up to that point.

Eventually, she helped me to control the speed with which I move the quilt under my needle. Kitties are excellent at this kind of help.

Where Smitty brings the paws that refresh, Sadie brings the claws.

For good measure, she gave it a prequalifying snuggleability test.

I've finished all the small quilt blocks, and I'll be moving to the larger panels at the top and bottom of the quilt. Here's a picture for reference.

You can see there are five rows of small quilt blocks in the middle. Still left to be done are the large panels at the top and bottom of the quilt. When those are finished, I'll move on to the borders. It was hard to decide how to quilt the middle portion. I can't say I'm thrilled with my choices, but it's good enough. The thread gave me nothing but trouble yesterday, or I might have made more progress. I used the last of the recalcitrant spool I was working with. I have two small spools and two larger spools left.

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to use one of the smaller spools. The smaller spool on the left gave me so many problems with breakage and tension. After fussing with it for at least an hour, it occurred to me that these small spools are wound more tightly than the larger spools, and therefore, the metallic thread is more tightly coiled. When I switched to the larger spool, my problems disappeared. 

I should have plenty of thread left to finish this project, but I'll save those smaller spools for my domestic machine. I like my Babylock Tiara II sit-down machine, but it is very picky when it comes to tension. Think of it as a prima donna of thread tension, and then just get over yourself when trying to get it adjusted properly.

Okay, so when I reached my frustration tolerance limit, I decided to enjoy one of the final nice days of fall by getting out and taking a little walk around. The only blooming things remaining are a few bedraggled echinacea.

In the greenhouse, there are lots of tiny pickling cucumbers and plenty of flowers. Looking at the plants as a whole, however, their foliage isn't looking very good. The leaves are still green, but have a crispy feel to them. I'm afraid it's getting too cold at night for them to survive. We'll persist, however. Maybe we'll get something.

There are lots of cherry tomatoes too. Most of them are green.

A few are starting to ripen, but the squirrels will probably steal them before they're ready for eating.

Back inside, I did some work on my slow-stitching piece, filling my hoop.

Then I moved it to this last position. I'll probably finish this up today.

Since all my projects are still buried in the garage, I might move on to the next one of these. I'm hoping the sewing room will be back in order before I can finish another.

Speaking of thread, my quilting fairy godmother, Ila, came through with another fun package of thread. Look at all these pretty variegated threads. I can't remember if I've ever said this before, but I love variegated threads. The ones still in little plastic bags below are Valdani threads. I've never seen them before, although I have used Valdani floss for embroidery. They're in plastic because it includes the all the information about the thread, including color and weight. They are such beautiful colors!

So thank you, Ila. It's always a pleasure receiving one of your gift boxes. These will be treasured and used.

We're whittling away our necessary appointments little by little. Today we need to make a quick trip into town to run some errands, and I have a few housekeeping chores on my calendar. I'm hoping to get the top and bottom panels quilted on the I Believe in Snowmen quilt. If there's time, I might get started on the borders. Fortunately, I know how I'm quilting the remainder, and so it should go faster, thread gods willing.