Suddenly September

Good morning, my friends. I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty happy to have reached the month when Fall starts. We've had a good summer here with just a few hot days. We've been delighted by a nice soaking rain from yesterday. It rained most of the day, and by the time we went to bed, we had a half-inch accumulation. Many of you have suffered through brutal heat, and so I feel fairly certain you're going to be happy to see the end of summer. And for those of you in the Carolinas, I hope you've come through the storm okay. We've seen some horrendous video on our national news. Florida, what can I say? I'm sorry you're going through this yet again. So much destruction and heartache.

So, let's turn our eyes in a different direction: construction. Quilt construction, to be precise. I had more help than you can possibly imagine yesterday. There were six more tiny blocks to make for the mini quilt. When they were all finished, I laid them out, readying them to be sewn together.

When I had them arranged the way I wanted them, Sadie came in. She has very firm opinions about how things should be done.

Please purrmit me to make a purrposal about the pawsitioning of your quilt blocks.

Hm. See this is all wrong. You have not used propurr pawsitioning technique.

When laying out quilt blocks for sewing together, it is impurrtant to use the full-body appurroach.

When she was finished...

Well. It's going to make sewing them together more difficult. Her work complete, she decided to take a nap in her bed. 

While she was sleeping, I went to work rearranging things and adding in the setting triangles.

Then, I quickly sewed them together before being subjected to any more helpful suggestions.

From there, it just needed borders, and now it's a finished quilt top. It finished up at 12-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches. I'll use that same fabric from the inner border for the binding.

I was nearing the end of my sewing day, but I took time to paw through my bin of multi-colored scraps and came out with this one. It was used in the very first quilt I ever made back in 2008.

Here's the quilt. I call it "Bubbles."

There's a brief and uninteresting story about this quilt. I learned to quilt at my local community college. It was a series of three or four classes. I was only just returning to sewing after a long absence. Cutting mats and rotary cutters were completely new to me. The only quilting I knew about was hand quilting since the only quilter I'd ever known was my grandmother. When I brought up quilting during the class (which seemed to be limited to cutting and piecing), the instructor said something like, "Oh, well, if you want to quilt it you need one of those big machines." Huh? Well, this completely confused me, and so I folded up my finished quilt top and put it away for about six months. 

Then, one day, I got curious about this "big machine" she was talking about and I discovered a couple of long-arm quilters in the area. The one I selected would even do the machine sewing of my binding if I provided one yard of fabric. So...okay...I'll bite. Oh. My. Gosh. I had no idea what I was starting. When my quilt came back, I was so excited!!! It was much later when I realized I'd discovered my newest passion. And the rest is written in the pages of this blog. I sometimes think it could just as easily have gone the other way. I might have just left the quilt unfinished. And I probably would have given it to Goodwill when we cleaned out our basement last summer. It was one of those times when I came to a fork in the road. Fortunately, I took the correct fork.

Getting back to this current mini...Smitty arrived just about the time I was cleaning up and turning things off.

Purrdon me. There is a purroblem with my dinner bowl. It is not fulfilling its life's purrpose of filling my ample belly.

Okay, Buddy. Let's go take care of that. And that was the end of my sewing day.

So here we are. September 1st. It's time to choose my goal for September's

We're just a few days away from taking off on our trip, and so I'm looking ahead to the sewing I'll be doing on the road. I expect to finish up the current Joyful Journey block before we leave, and that means I'll be starting on the first block for the "Kittens" quilt. My goal is to finish all the embroidery for this block:

I'll head over to the party that starts today and link up when I'm finished here. And I'm leaving my sewing at a good place. I should have no problem finishing off the mini today, including hand-sewing the binding. With that finished, I'll be back at the top of my white board lists: quilting a large quilt. 

Next up (when we get back), I'll be quilting Strips and Stripes. It's been hanging out draped over Eliza, keeping her warm, and allowing its wrinkles to settle out. 

If only it were so easy for humans to allow their wrinkles to settle out. Already, I have the thread figured out, and so it's just a matter of time before I can move this one to the finished pile. A friend has already spoken up for it, and so finishing will also mean saying good-bye and sending it off to its new home in Arizona.

As for today, I'm going to make an Original Plum Torte for Two. (I like having something for dessert on Fridays.) The plums should be ripe enough by now. Sometimes I use them to make Spicy Plum Barbecue Sauce, but this year, the plum torte will be the extent of our plum usage. I'll probably pick some to take along for snacking too. I like the Italian prune plums as much as I like cherries; meaning, I'd happily stand under the tree and eat them one after another until they make me sick. There's just one small housekeeping chore, and then the day is mine for sewing. It's going to be a good day. I hope you have a good day planned for yourself.