Call Waiting

We called the insurance company first thing in the morning yesterday about our water claim. Mike spoke with a young man who took down all the information and then assured us a "claims specialist" would be calling us "soon." It's been a full 24 hours now, and we're still waiting for that call. Mike called again after lunch, but received only voice mail in response. It seems the guy has been gone for a few days, and he's answering calls in the order received. 

Now, I don't know about you, but in my way of thinking, the statute of limitations on something happening "soon" expired many hours ago. After all my talk about being more patient yesterday, I'll admit I'm losing my patience. All I can say is we better hear from him today...or else. Smitty is putting on his scary face to bring the point home.

While we've been waiting, Mike has been applying a kind of putty sealant to the leaky pipe. Waiting an hour between each application, he applied three coatings. At the end of the day, he said he thought it might work so that we can use the kitchen and bathroom sinks and the dishwasher while we wait for a legitimate and (hopefully) permanent plumbing repair. We've been using the sink in the laundry room in the meantime. It's inconvenient, to say the least, but workable. All I can say is I'm glad we don't have actual running water flooding the basement while we wait for our "claims specialist" to call.

I spent the day sewing together the Catnip quilt top. I had just one row to sew to the bottom, and then I could sew the top and bottom halves together.

I added a border, and the quilt top was finished. It ended up at 67 x 67 inches. It's large enough that it was hard to get a good picture.

Here's a close-up of that border fabric. 

I didn't have enough fabric for the back without piecing it together. It took me a while to work out how to do this with the scraps I had left, but it looks something like the image below. It's a very large top, and so I could only partially fit it into the picture. I think you get the idea.

Originally, I'd planned to use a different fabric for the binding, but I decided a black and white stripe would be more fun. 

Now it's waiting it's turn in the quilts-to-be-sandwiched pile, and it'll probably have a long wait before it gets its turn under my quilting needle.

While we watched the news last night, I stitched up the next section of the Heartland Barns piece.

I'm about 2/3 of the way across now.

I've been a good sport about stitching all those leaves, but I'm getting ready to be finished with them now. There are still many to do. In the meantime, I need to get going tracing out the next block for Pieces of the Past. I'll be doing the very large section inside the aqua border below:

Today's to-do's include a trip to the grocery store. We'll try to get that finished early, and then I'll get back to my sewing. I've reorganized all my black and white scraps and sifted through my cat fabric yardage to come up with some inspiration for a donation quilt for Quilts for Kids. There are 9 cats left from the Catnip panel, and I have some ideas about how to use them. I just need to put rotary cutter to fabric and have my way with it. Fingers crossed we'll hear something from our "claims specialist" today, and we'll be on our way to a plumbing repair. In the meantime, all my fingers are crossed that Mike's patch job will hold water.