Powerless

Good morning, my friends. A big storm blew through last night with high winds. We had a momentary power outage. Sadly, the internet outage has extended into this morning. It seems our internet service provider had a longer power outage, and it will take them longer to get us back online. Not to worry. I'm using the internet hotspot on my cell phone, and I think we can get this done. Today's typing will be from my laptop computer...and out of curiosity...does this laptop make my typing look fat?😕

So let's just back up to yesterday, shall we? Mike and I have been really good about establishing a new workout routine for ourselves. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we gave ourselves a Bowflex for Christmas, and we've been walking on the treadmill as a way to stay active this winter. He works out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I take the other days of the week. That way, we're not running into each other on the way to our newly set up chamber of horrors. We both like the Bowflex, even if our workouts are rather grudging. (Honestly, can't sitting at the sewing machine suffice? Life is so unfair!) And all of that to say that he was downstairs with music blaring away, so I decided to work on the quilting first. Smitty was my helper...temporarily, at least.

He helped me get the machine set up, but then his automatic treat dispenser dumped out a serving of treats, and that was the end of our time together. You just can't get good kitty help these days.

I needed to finish quilting the horizontal lines on the straight-line grid I was doing. When it was finished, it looked like this:

From there, I started a motif new to me. I saw this on Pinterest, and it comes from Esther, who blogs at ipatchandquilt. Esther calls this motif "Hairpin." These "trashy" quilts are good ones for experimentation and learning, and so I'm trying out some new motifs on them. This one was pretty easy. It's a series of "humps" wide and narrow. When the first round is complete, the motif is turned upside down for a second pass. Here's how it looks on the Chicken Feed quilt.

I never know how to negotiate the corners with something like this, and so I broke the pattern and did a little dot-to-dot motif at each corner.

Doing the corners in that way allowed me to make the two rounds on this border without cutting thread. It's almost impossible to see the quilting on the back, but here's a picture anyway.

By then, it was lunch and nap time. When I was ready to start sewing again, I went to work on my challenge piece. I've finally finished with the largest of the red parts, and moved to the secondary subject of the image. I'll start adding a few more colors here. My piece is about 2/3 finished now. Here's your peek.

Now that I've moved to a less monotonous section, I'm kind of excited to get back to it. 

Today is my day to work out, and so I'll spend some time on the treadmill this morning. There are a couple of small housekeeping chores, and then, I'll be starting dinner fairly early. It's another one of those dishes that takes some time to pull together. Oh yes, and I have just the outer border to quilt on Chicken Feed, so I expect to finish the quilting today. There's plenty to keep me busy today. Now seems like a good time to get to it.