Next Steps

Top of the morning to you, my friends! My morning started early. I woke up early, and my brain went from zero to sixty within a few minutes. I was thinking about the next stages of my challenge project. There's no time for sleeping when my brain is wide awake. I tried to get back to sleep, but gave up after an hour. It's okay. I feel rested, and there will be some time for napping if I want to.

The morning started with the first stitches on Block 5 of the "Domestic Affairs" quilt. Right now, I'm cleaning up some bits of floss left over from the last time I worked on this piece. 

It shouldn't take long to finish it, and I'm already looking ahead at my next stitchery. It will be the "short" project on my dance card. When I let the random number generator choose from my list of short projects, it chose this one of Bernie Sanders. It was a PDF I found after Biden's inauguration. You might remember Bernie Sanders on the dais all bundled up from the cold, and wearing a mask. 

So while I'm stitching on the Domestic Affairs block, I'm looking ahead to my next short project. I have some background fabric, and I'm restocking my black floss. It should all be pulled together when I'm ready for stitching.

There were some housekeeping chores to do, but I made my way into the sewing room after lunch and went to work finishing up the collage portion of my challenge piece. Smitty was astonished that I would even start to work without him.

He likes to think of himself as my mews. He reminded me to blur what was on my lightbox. No peeking until I give you the peek.

Also, he thought there might be spirits in the room. Christmas spirits, maybe? 

After all, we did just stream Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol a few nights ago. It's still my favorite of the Christmas specials. I love the music.

There was just a little left to finish up at the bottom of the challenge piece. Here's your peek.

The most difficult part is finished now. I spent a little time choosing a background for it, and then I fused it to the background fabric. Today I will probably add borders, but then I'll give it a rest for a few days while I work on some other things. Thread painting comes next, and I need to circle it for a bit while I work up my courage.

With that finished, I couldn't wait to clean up my workspace so that I could square up the Chicken Feed quilt for binding. The binding strips were already cut.

And then it took about another hour to stitch the binding strips together and sew it onto the quilt.

Also, I laid out the fabrics I want to use as borders for the Tucson Tabby. These should do nicely.

Sewing on the borders is on today's agenda as well.

I was ready to quit for the day then, but not before clipping and starting the hand sewing on the Chicken Feed binding. When I stopped for the day, I'd rounded the first two corners.

While I was stitching, Sadie got a wild hair and started chasing Smitty around. Sometimes she can't resist kicking the beehive. In his wisdom, Smitty hid from her. She'll never spot him now. He's obviously a master of concealment.

So, I've pretty much given you the rundown of how my day is going to go. There will be lots of slow-stitching and some machine stitching too. It's still too dark to tell, but if the weather cooperates, I might get out for a walk today.