Sewing the Day Away

Good morning, my friends. Yes, I'm afraid it's Monday...or, Moanday, as we call it around here. It's going to be a good day, though. We're expecting the guy to come by and actually finish the basement. Oh my gosh...I thought this day would never come. It means I'll be out of my sewing room another day, though. It hardly matters. I have plenty of hand sewing to keep me busy today.

Yesterday, I finished up the first of two embroidered blocks I'm making for The Story of My Day quilt. It turned out to be prophetic.

I hooped up the second block, and I'll get a start on that today.

Just then, I saw that the second prompt was announced for Project Quilting. The prompt, "Pink Tint," left me a little cold at first. I know a lot of people don't like pink. I actually like it. It's one of my favorite colors, and it's a color I can wear well. In any case, I went rifling through items in my sewing room looking for inspiration. As I paged through a binder of embroidery patterns I've collected over the years, I came across one that was listed on my short project list called "Stitcher Strong." 

I'd completely forgotten about this pattern. I'm not even sure when I acquired it. It might have been a free download at some point. Either way, it's from Bird Brain Designs and sells for $7 on the website. It's intended to be done as redwork. But this gave me an idea because I thought it would be just as "Pretty in Pink," which is the name I've given to my little quilt. Also, I knew I had a spool of pink Perle cotton freeloading in my drawer of embroidery floss. It seemed like a perfect time to use it.

So, I selected a pale pink with white polka dots for the background and went to work tracing it.

I had an idea I could stitch it in a single afternoon, but this would mean some serious dedication from my excellent stitching cat.

The longer I stitched, the more serious her dedication to the goal.

Just in case, Smitty stayed nearby, resting up for his shift as stitching cat. Also, he was keeping the Waste Not Whatnots quilt company while it awaited my return.

After a couple of hours, the stitching was finished. This could not have been accomplished without the help of Ms. Ears.

Okay, but there was still more work to do. I trimmed it and sewed on two borders.

This sewing machine fabric was a perfect backing, and I sewed the borders on quilt-as-you-go.

From there, it was ready for binding, but I still needed to do just a little more stitching. In this case, I finished it off with big stitch hand quilting. I went around with a ruler and placed dots every quarter inch around the inside border to keep my stitches even.

When the hand-quilting was finished, it looked like this.

It was time to stop then, but this morning I finished hand-stitching the binding, and my little quilt was finished in less than 24 hours from when it was started.

Here's how it looks from the back.

Okay, so I know I won't be able to be in my sewing room today. It's okay because I've made no more progress on hand stitching the binding for Waste Not Whatnots since I turned the first corner Saturday afternoon.

That should keep me busy for most of the day. There's probably a housekeeping chore on the calendar for today as well, but I haven't looked yet. 

Today is Martin Luther King day. If you have a day off today, then I suggest sewing the day away in celebration.