Progress on Three Projects

Good morning my friends. As I considered the title for this post, I thought I might be able to put my high school French classes to work and come up with a new word...something like "troisgress" or "troisjects." But, yeah. It doesn't really work. I give myself an "A" for effort though. 

It's a pretty morning here. I'm going to get out for a walk today. I'll head down to the lowlands where I'm unlikely to slip on ice. I need to head into town to get some mushrooms for tonight's dinner. With such a nice day ahead, I'm going to walk the main street of our town. It's an old town, and there is always something interesting to see there. Heck, I might even find an open bakery or something. If memory serves, there's also a chocolate shop. Why, the mind reels with possibilities!

Backing up to yesterday, I started my day with Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage: the project I love to hate. As if I needed yet another reason to hate it, I realized yesterday that it was developing some puckers in the embroidery.

I believe this happened because the muslin backing was stretched tighter than the quilt top as I was stitching the first sections. Adding more embroidery to sections that are already pieced and stitched is probably generally a bad idea. So, what to do? What to do? 

As I was taking my shower, I realized I could probably snip the muslin on the back to release the tension there. Once the quilt has been sandwiched for quilting, that won't show. Heck, it might not show at all, at any time. So when I was finished getting dressed, I carefully...oh, so carefully...snipped a tiny hole in the muslin and then slipped the blade of the scissors between the two fabrics. Then, I snipped a line between all the troublesome stitching.

And that fixed it! Yay!

Phew! Close call. It seemed like a good time to head down to the sewing room to make a little more progress on my challenge quilt. Here's your peek.

Again yesterday, I set a timer for a one-hour minimum amount of time to work on it. I like that method for things that are causing me to procrastinate and gnash my teeth. Today, I believe I'll be adding enough that it will capture me under its spell. They're hard to work on until they start to look like something that makes sense. Then, they're hard to walk away from.

Finally, I finished quilting the middle section of the Trashy Triangles quilt. The motif I'm using quilts two vertical rows of HST's at the same time. Unfortunately, there is an odd number of vertical rows, and so I had one row on the far side where my chosen motif wouldn't work.

For that, I decided to do dot-to-dot quilting to finish off that far edge. Then, I took it downstairs and laid it in front of the living room window for its picture. The borders still need quilting, but here's how it looks so far. It's pretty hard to see the quilting, but I'll show it to you anyway.

Same goes for the back. I do love that fabric, though. I'm so happy to find a way to use it.

It was getting late in the day by then, and so I barely started the inner border of quilting. Here, I'm using a motif that Lori Kennedy calls "Paperclip." I like this motif. It looks good on the quilt, especially with variegated thread, and it's one that I can do easily...always a good feature in a quilting motif.

I left it needle down when I stopped for the day.

Sadie likes this quilt. She's thinking it would make an excellent spot for a morning nap.

So today will look much like yesterday, making "troisgress," but I'll head out fairly early for my walk. I'm hoping to finish the borders on the Trashy Triangles today and then it will be ready for binding. 

Oh yes, and I almost forgot to update you on the basement situation. Sigh. The only work that needs to be done is to finish re-installing the baseboards. Most are already finished and installed, but there were a few pieces that were broken when they were removed, and those need to be replaced. It was supposed to be finished two weeks ago, but then the new baseboards did not arrive at Lowe's. Now they're in, but they aren't the right ones to match the existing ones. So, the workers were here for a few minutes yesterday, then gone. They're taking a sample to someone who does woodworking and can create some that will match. It means our job will probably stretch into January now. Keep in mind, we discovered the leak in April. By now, I could have conceived and birthed a child. It might have been less painful.