Time Flies

Good morning, my friends, and Happy President's Day. It's another wet morning here at the Three Cats Ranch. We've been promised some drier, warmer weather later in the week. I sure hope so. It would be good to get out and pull some weeds before we take off on our trip. 

Yesterday morning, I spent quite some time trying to generate an image I could use for Project Quilting's fourth challenge: "Hourglass." We could go off in any direction with this, but we were required to use the hourglass shape in our quilt. I had an idea, but I wasn't able to put it into action. My idea was to create a traditional hourglass with sand flowing through. Taking it a step further, I was going to put my age, 69, flowing through the center.

I've never actually tried this before, but I searched for a free AI image generator to create an image I could work with. I can't draw worth beans, and as it turns out, AI couldn't make it work either. Here's a typical snip of the kinds of images I was getting with my prompt:

AI grasped the sand flowing through the hourglass part of my request, but I couldn't make it do the 69 part. Maybe I'm just too much of a luddite to figure it out. Since I'm approaching my 70th birthday in May, it would have been a good theme for my quilt.

Also, thinking it through, I worried I'd be opening myself up to ridicule by using "69" in my quilt. If you know the reason I might be concerned about that, then shame on you! Get that thought out of your head right now! You might want to take some time here to go wash your brain out with soap. My goodness. What is this world coming to?

In any case, I ended up going with a variation of the traditional hourglass quilt block, adding in some bird fabric to create my quilt, "Time Flies." I wanted a lot of contrast for the hourglass part of the block, and so I used a pretty green. Here's the quilt top:

From there, I quilted it using some of the new dot-to-dot quilting in the center square. I wanted feathers in the corners...birds, you know. 

Here's how that looks from the back. I'm going to wish I'd purchased more of that feather fabric...and the bird fabric too.

When I unfolded the green fat quarter-sized piece, I found a scrap of binding inside, and so I added another strip and used that.

The only thing left to do then was to hand-sew the binding, and my little quilt was finished. It ends up at 12 x 12 inches.

Here's how it looks from the back.

Earlier, I'd made good on my threat to make the Candy Apple Mini Muffins. In yesterday's post, I mentioned the recipe had been taken off the internet when Cooking Light magazine ceased publication. My friend, "abelian," cleverly put quotation marks on either side of the name and was able to find the recipe at that link I've given you. (As always, if you have trouble opening it, just email me, and I'll be happy to send it to you.) You should know that the recipe link makes double the number of muffins I made. The recipe I was working from made only a dozen, which was plenty for the two of us. Here's how they looked straight from the oven.

They're made with Red Hots candies, which gives them the nicest little crunch and color. They were well worth making just because they allowed me to use these sweet little mini muffin cups.

And look at how cute they are! Each one is about two bites...or one bite, if you're in a hurry.

So they were quite tasty. We still have some left, but they won't be around for long.

In other sewing news, my day started by stitching Day 18's Tiny Heart. This one has chain stitch, double lazy-daisy, stem stitch, and back stitch. Day 19 is probably posted by now, but I haven't looked yet.

Also, I spent a little extra time on the Joyful Journey block, filling my hoop.

Now I've hooped the last of it. There's just a smidge outside the lower right-hand side of my hoop. I'll capture it after I've stitched the green leaf at the upper left.

And how could I not spend extra time when I had this pile of feline on my lap.

Okay, so we're kind of in a holding pattern here. We leave on our trip next week. It's too soon to start packing, and too wet to do much outside. It means there's plenty of time to sew. Today I'll get back to my quilting. I'd like to finish the final side of the Dot-to-Dot panel so it'll stop following me around the house. If there's still time in the day, I'll get busy with the little Christmas Lights quilt, and try to finish that off.

I should really be getting in a Bow-Flex workout, but I'll probably hold off on that until I've finished the quilting. Priorities, people. The treadmill will have to do until I'm finished with the quilting. My wrist feels pretty much back to normal, but I don't want to get it flared up again. Until I know for sure what's causing the pain, I'll be extra careful.

How are you spending your Monday? And you folks in California...get this "atmospheric river" business out of your system. We want clear blue skies when we come your way.