Two Finishes

Happy Monday morning to you, my friends. Things are looking up here at the Three Cats Ranch. The paper-piecing is finished. And no bloodshed! Thanks to my excellent helper kitties, I can move on to the next project on my list.

First on yesterday's list was to finish the sixth block for the Domestic Affairs quilt.

Here are the six blocks I have for this quilt so far:

From there, we moved into the sewing room. With that one finished, I needed something new for this morning's stitching. As I mentioned, I'm doing this one next:

On one of my internet excursions one evening, I came across this pattern and fell in love with it. That was sometime last year. When I reached the "short" project on my list, I chose this one. Sometimes I need Mr. Random Number Generator to choose my next project, but I wanted to do this one next. You can find the pattern right here. 

I don't know about your quilt tops, but mine get kind of jumpy when they're close to being finished. Knowing there was an impending stitching emergency, Smitty agreed to hold down the Pieces of the Past quilt until I was able to finish tracing the new stitchery. 

When he had the quilt safely under control, he decided to help out while I top-stitched the applique.

Now it's ready for stitching.

The last thing I needed to do was to dig through my leftover floss and choose the colors I wanted to use. The pattern listed color numbers for both DMC and Weeks Dye Works. I've only used Weeks Dye Works floss one other time, and I prefer DMC or Cosmos. In any case, I was substituting my own colors for the ones listed.

With that ready to go, it was time to get back to the final four blocks for Pieces of the Past. Here, Smitty dug in his paw heels.

Sadie, I'm tired and hungry. Can't you take over for a while?

Sure, Smitty. You go take a nap. I'll help Mom.

Wait...you didn't say it was papurr-piecing! Count me out!

I'll just sit over here. You're on your own for this. Expecting a cat to help with papurr piecing is simply purrposterous.

So with no kitty help at all, I soldiered on, finally reaching the 16th and final block. Ta-da!

Here are the final four.

And then I went straight to work, sewing them together, and then to the right side of the quilt. And there you have it: a finished quilt top!

And here's the other thing I hate about paper piecing: the waste! Below you see one pile of scraps generated. These will go into my smallest scrap collection. What you don't see are the approximately three piles this size that went straight into the trash. The pieces were too small or too weirdly shaped to be usable. And let's not even talk about the mess of little bits of paper that were spread from A to Izzard.

Before I finished for the day, I cleaned up the sewing room, and then measured how much fabric I have for the back. I'll be using this piece. 

I bought this quite some time ago...way back in 2014. When I bought it, I said this on my blog: 

It reminded me of a china pattern Mikasa used to make. When Mike and I were engaged, I drooled over this china, but I never bought any of it. I already had my grandmother's French Bavarian antique china, which is lovely, and I really didn't need to be dragging more china around at that point in my life. I really loved this fabric, and so I bought three yards of it. I can see using it as a back or borders.

Finally, after nine years of waiting, it's time has come to be used in a quilt. It's almost like a fabric quinceanera, if you're into that sort of thing. It seems fitting, however, that this fabric that was acquired because it reminded me of china will go on the back of a quilt devoted to china.

So this morning, I'll get started on my next stitchery, and then I'll piece together a back for Pieces of the Past. Usually, I cut the binding strips I'll need at the same time. After that, it will all go into the pile with the rest of the quilt tops that need sandwiching. I think there are about 8 on the list right now. That will probably happen sometime during the month of February. It might even be February's OMG.

If I can finish off the quilt back today, I'll move to the next section of my white board. That will bring me to the "Small Quilts for Quilting" section. Next up is this Broken Hearts quilt. It's another from my trashy series. I believe I sewed this one together while we were in Boulder City last winter.

I didn't have quite enough of those red and white HST's to add another row to the middle of the hearts, and so they look a little more "squished" than they should. Thus, the name: Broken Hearts. Ordinarily, I'd do the quilting on my domestic machine, but Big Bertha is still on vacation. I'll bring this one upstairs and let Eliza get the credit.

There's plenty on the day's agenda. Time to get going.

After reading Karen’s question below, I came back to edit this post to say that Mike is fine. He does not have COVID. Probably the paint fumes from the previous day were a little too much for him. He felt better as the day went on, and he’s fine today..